Win or lose in the American League Championship Series, there’s no team like the Seattle Mariners. This club’s story, now closer than it’s ever been to a World Series, represents not just Seattle and the state of Washington but a changing country over the past century.
Sound grandiose? Maybe. Watch the (unofficial) documentary of the team’s history, though — 2020’s “The History of the Seattle Mariners” — and you’ll see the description fits.
“There’s not another team like them,” said co-director Alex Rubenstein, discussing the project this week with the Mariners locked in an ALCS grudge match with the Toronto Blue Jays. “They’re the weirdest, most outrageous team in the history of sports.”
Directed by sports journalists Rubenstein and Jon Bois, the film is available to watch for free on YouTube. The documentary, hatched at the SB Nation office before the pandemic, follows the city’s baseball roots back nearly a century to pre-Mariners history (even further back than the 1960s, when the Seattle Pilots played one foul season at Sicks’ Stadium).
The directors envisioned a video that would run maybe 20 minutes; it grew into a 220-minute epic. With tales of an arsonist who indirectly led to the creation of the M’s, plus mysterious toilet pranks and many infamous moments from Seattle’s baseball history, the movie also holds surprisingly profound reflections on what this team means to those who’ve followed it for generations.
Truly, “The History of the Seattle Mariners” is about more than baseball. It’s a movie with sharp humor and deep emotion, taking us through the history of the organization, its most beloved players, dances with playoff destiny and many low points for the team, which remains the only one in Major League Baseball to have never reached a World Series.
Relying on graphs, old newspaper clippings, archival photos and footage, the unofficial documentary paints a portrait of how the Mariners got to this point. It didn’t predict the rise of Humpy the salmon, but the mascot fits the film’s arc, which pitches the Mariners as MLB’s “protagonist,” a team that audiences can see themselves in. A team with a grand, goofy story.
“I think they are the easiest team to identify with on behalf of just how very human they are,” Bois said. “They have a character to them that survives every era of Mariners’ baseball and just sort of drifts onward in a way that other franchises usually don’t. They have a spiritual throughline.”
He said that if the Mariners do win the whole shebang, “it would not teach us anything that we don’t already know. It would be sort of antithetical to the idea that we argued with the Mariners: Winning or losing isn’t particularly important,” Bois said. “You love them like a family member, whether they succeed or fail.”
Fans of the documentary gathered to watch when it was played in full at Columbia City Community Hall in Seattle in 2022; legendary Mariners pitcher Félix Hernández is a fan, too, in addition to being a key character in the movie.
Reflecting on the legacy of their film five years later, Rubenstein and Bois said they’re happy with how they captured their favorite baseball team and also how it resonated with both Mariners fans and casual viewers. Though the YouTube supercut is littered with comments from passionate fans clamoring for another chapter to be made, Rubenstein and Bois see the film as a complete work. (They wouldn’t rule out some sort of celebratory epilogue or a screening at T-Mobile Park, though.)
The Mariners’ next chapter remains unwritten, with the ALCS headed toward Game 6 on Sunday in Toronto. Whatever happens in these playoffs, Bois and Rubenstein said that making “The History of the Seattle Mariners” was not about the team’s on-field success. It’s a film for devoted stat heads and baseball romantics and documentary lovers alike, a piece of art capable of making even a coldhearted sports fans tear up.
Five years later, Bois said the moving impact of the film’s final frames, when they zoom out and show the entire wacky timeline, was “the desired effect.”
“We wanted the final drawout of the virtual camera to be evocative and dramatic in that way,” he said. “You could trace every step you took over the last three, four hours.”