Mariners ownership officially on notice after 'Sell the Team' message

Every now and then, there's a moment that just kind of sums it up. A moment that takes the energy of a given place and time and distills it down to a simple, easy-to-understand message.

If you missed it — and in all likelihood, you did — such a moment occurred during the Seattle Mariners' 2-1 loss to the Houston Astros at T-Mobile Park on Tuesday night.

The game lasted 12 innings and saw the Mariners muster only five hits, including one in 19 at-bats with men in scoring position to continue a running theme. To boot, both runs the Mariners gave up were unearned. Hence how they ended up in the loss column for the eighth time in their first 12 games of 2025.

It's the kind of loss to which Mariners fans are all too accustomed, so perhaps it was just a matter of time before some adopted a three-word rallying cry used by other MLB fanbases: "Sell the team."

An expression of this exact message occurred as something of a sneak attack on Tuesday. A row of fans with "Go Mariners" spelled out on the front of their shirts appeared on the T-Mobile Park jumbotron, only to turn around to reveal "Sell the Team" across their backs. It wasn't a viral event in the moment, but it has since been picked up by prominent X accounts belonging to Aaron Levine of Fox 13 Seattle, Trident True and Jomboy Media.

There's something about this that feels...well, for lack of a better word, bandwagon-y. And yet, that's not to say these fans are in the wrong.

Mariners fans don't have it bad under the team's current ownership, but they do deserve better

We have Athletics and Pittsburgh Pirates fans to thank for "Sell the team" being the rally cry du jour among jilted fanbases, and it's hard to accuse either one of misusing it.

The damage is done now, but A's fans had every right to be furious with John Fisher as he gave Oakland a figurative middle finger throughout his efforts to move the franchise to Las Vegas. Bucs fans are likewise right to be miffed at Bob Nutting. The Pirates have made the playoffs just three times since 1992, and Nutting is notorious for his cheapness.

As for whether Mariners fans have it as bad under primary owner John Stanton, "it's complicated" is at once an unsatisfactory answer and more or less accurate.

Since Stanton's first full season at the helm in 2017, the Mariners have more wins (619) than losses (587). They're one of a select few teams that has won at least 85 games in each of the past four seasons, with the 2022 campaign serving to end a 21-year absence from the playoffs.

This is as much Jerry Dipoto's track record as it is Stanton's, particularly in the sense that he's overseen a player development machine since he took control of the front office in 2015. The current iteration of the Mariners is the envy of MLB for its dominant (and mostly homegrown) pitching, and there's a next generation of stars standing by in the club's excellent farm system.

There is nonetheless something to be said about ambition, and more specifically the apparent lack of it regarding Stanton's stewardship of the Mariners.

Whereas the team used to threaten top-10 payrolls on a regular basis in the 2010s, it has yet to crack the top half of MLB so far in the 2020s. Per Spotrac, they're only 16th in MLB with a luxury-tax payroll of $175.5 million at the outset of 2025.

It would be one thing if the Mariners were strapped for cash like the A's and Pirates, but this is not the case. According to Forbes, the franchise pulled in $379 million in revenue last year and had an operating income of $43 million. It's doing fine, in other words.

It's tempting to see Dipoto as complicit in all this, particularly given his "54 percent" remark from a couple years ago. Yet it's not his job to set the franchise's budget, and what is by now a lengthy history of cost-cutting trades and free-agent inactivity paints a clear picture.

As Justin Turner put it in the interview with Bob Nightengale of USA Today that got everyone's attention in March: “I think Jerry catches a bad rap for a lot of these trades and how crazy some of these trades have been. But now being a part of it, I kind of understand. He doesn’t have any money to spend, so he’s got to create money. Like, OK, is it really Jerry’s fault?"

If anything, how much Dipoto has done with limited budgets makes one wonder what he could do if he had the backing of a wealthier owner, or at least one with greater aspirations. Take this train of thought to its extreme, and you can imagine a scenario like the one in which Andrew Friedman traded the Tampa Bay Rays and their resources for the Los Angeles Dodgers and theirs. It's, uh, worked out.

Ultimately, two things can be true at once: Mariners fans don't have it that bad in the scheme of things, but they can and should want better.

This is the franchise's 49th year of existence, and it has just five playoff appearances and not one World Series appearance to show for the first 48. Yet Mariners fans keep showing up, to a point where the team is one of the more consistent draws in the American League.

You really can't blame them for getting to be a little impatient. And if Stanton isn't going to meet Mariners fans where they are, he frankly should consider the demand they put to him on Tuesday.