Rays' Adrian Houser picked the worst jersey possible for warmups vs. Mariners

When the Seattle Mariners knocked Adrian Houser around for four runs in a 6-3 win on Sunday, it wasn't merely a case of a hot team overwhelming a hittable pitcher. It was karma.

The 32-year-old right-hander had it coming for what he chose to wear as he was playing catch at T-Mobile Park on Friday, just ahead of the opener of the Mariners' three-game series against the Tampa Bay Rays. We won't show it, and even the following description comes with a bolded, all-caps WARNING: Houser was wearing an Oklahoma City Thunder jersey.

Sir, there are lines everywhere you go. And when you do something like that in Seattle, you've crossed a big one.

Adrian Houser paid the price for repping the Thunder in Seattle

To be fair to Houser, this may not have been a blatant case of intentional trolling on his part.

He is an Oklahoma native, after all, as he was born in Tahlequah and went to high school in Locust Grove. The Thunder are the only representative of the four major North American professional sports leagues in Oklahoma, and they just won the NBA Finals for the first time in June. Houser thus has every reason to be not just any Thunder fan, but a proud Thunder fan.

Intentional or otherwise, however, he was indeed engaged in a bit of trolling by wearing that jersey on Friday. And not even the good-natured kind either. This was just plain mean-spirited.

One thing everyone in Seattle knows is that the Thunder used to be the Seattle Supersonics. Another thing everyone knows is that the day they left for Oklahoma City in 2008 is a dark day in the history of Seattle sports. It might even be the darkest day, as Matt Calkins wrote for the Seattle Times in 2023.

What makes everything even more infuriating in retrospect, of course, is just how opaque the rationale for the move still is 17 years later. The sale of the team from Seattle businessman Howard Schultz to Oklahoma City businessman Clay Bennett may have made the exit inevitable, but even former Sonics coach George Karl isn't sure of the specifics.

“I still don’t have a good understanding on why the team ever left,” Karl told Calkins. “I’ve heard all the thoughts — my daughter works in the legislature and she tells me what happened there, and I hear what the league office says, and it just doesn’t seem like it should have happened. It seemed like it was just a couple angry people who said, ‘Screw it, we’re moving on.'”

Whatever the case, the Thunder have spent the better part of their existence in Oklahoma City thriving, all while Seattle has been left without an NBA team to share the city with the Mariners, Seahawks and, at least as of 2021, the Kraken. To say that everyone is a little salty about it would be an understatement.

Granted, to note as much is not to imply that the Mariners took Houser's wardrobe choice as an excuse to knock him on the chin and say, "Seattle sends its regards." Simply being in the AL pennant race is the only excuse the Mariners need to hand pitchers Ls, as they did with Houser on Sunday.

And yet, the message to Houser either way is the same: Best keep that one on the rack the next time you're in Seattle.