This isn’t a story with a happy ending. The heroes don’t win. There is no cathartic victory parade. No streamers snaking through the air above the heads of jubilant fans dancing in the streets. But why does a story have to be defined by how it ends? The best stories — the most meaningful and endearing ones — are much more complex. History will remember the 2001 Seattle Mariners as one of the winningest teams baseball ever saw. Seattle won 116 games, matching the record set by the 1906 Chicago Cubs and surpassing the 1927 World Series champion “Murderer’s Row” New York Yankees by six games. The Mariners never lost more than nine times in a month. Ichiro Suzuki was AL Rookie of the Year and league MVP. Lou Piniella won Manager of the Year. Both Freddie Garcia and Jamie Moyer were Cy Young finalists. At one point or another Seattle led the entire league in runs scored, hits, on-base percentage, team ERA, batting average against, shutouts and fielding percentage. For perspective, in 2016 the eventual World Series champion Chicago Cubs reached 40-wins faster than any team since the 2001 Mariners, putting them on pace to match 116 wins. Come the end of the season, Chicago only won 103. What the Mariners did in the regular season is not easy to do. They won a lot, but they didn’t win it all. There is no championship banner waving in Safeco Field; the Mariners don’t own a historic record for most regular season wins, they merely share it. That’s the simple way to remember the 2001 Mariners — a good story with an anticlimactic, forgettable ending. But to paint such a black and white picture is to do a great disservice to the real story of that season. “I learned from my Dad’s tears the true meaning of being a Seattle Mariners fan.” That’s one of Kris Wong’s earliest memories not only of his fandom but also his life. That sounds negative, but not all tears are. There’s more than one way to remember the Mariners from that year. For folks like Kris, that season is the memory embedded deep within the DNA of their fandom; the Mariners might have lost, but they hadn’t failed. The real story of that 2001 team will forever be defined — and remembered — by those who lived through both the best and worst season a sports fan can possibly endure.

To fully appreciate what the 2001 Mariners did, you have to understand how unlikely any of it was. The team had absolutely no business being as historically great as they were. “I’ve never seen a baseball team where the sum of the team exceeded the individuals like the 2001 Mariners,” wrote David Schoenfield, a senior ESPN reporter and avid Mariners fan. “They were a team in perfect harmony.” No one saw the Mariners coming that year. Among ESPN’s 12 experts, only two — including David — had Seattle making the playoffs as a Wild Card team. One expert thought it would finish last in their division. The consensus settled on Seattle being a third-place finisher. The experts can’t be blamed. Seattle’s roster was largely constructed of castaways and unproven players. Bret Boone, who played for four different teams before 2001, was entering his 10th season. Mike Cameron was the unequal return in a trade that shipped Ken Griffey Jr. out of Seattle. Paul Abbott had been struggling and out of baseball for four years between 1994 and 1998. Ichiro Suzuki, perhaps the highest profile player on the roster, was a 28-year old rookie from Japan. Many wondered if he’d be able to adapt the American game. Bret Boone’s career actually started in Seattle in 1992, a tenure that ended a year later. He was never a bad player, but he was hardly better than average. He was an All-Star in 1998 but his selection had more to do with his fielding than anything else. He had a golden glove but was hardly thought of as a silver slugger. Three years later, with the 2001 Mariners, a veteran Boone would bat in 141 runs, more than the combined total of his previous two seasons. He reached base 206 times and finished the year with a .331 batting average — all career highs. Boone went from an average hitter to having one of the best seasons a second baseman has ever recorded. “At 31, before becoming a Mariner, Bret Boone was about as valuable as Doug Glanville,” said Mariners fans Jeff Sullivan. For the uninitiated, Doug Glanville was not good. “At 32, as a Mariner, Boone was about as valuable as Alex Rodriguez and Albert Pujols.” Boone was the heart of Seattle’s powerful lineup that season, batting fifth for most of the year. The only other player to occupy that place in the order as consistently as Boone was Cameron. Prior to 2001, center field in Seattle had been long occupied by Ken Griffey Jr. The face of the franchise for an entire decade, Griffey had helped put Seattle on the baseball map in 90s. When the team traded him in 2000 to Cincinnati, Cameron was the main piece Seattle received in return. Sporting News reporter Michael Knisley’s response to the trade felt just about right at the time: “For Junior Griffey, the man most likely to break Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record, the game’s most perfect all-around player in the prime of his career, the Reds gave Seattle … bits and pieces, drips and drabs of major leaguers and wanna-bes.” That was how Cameron was introduced to Seattle, an afterthought in a trade that shipped away a legend. He had already been in the league for a half decade at the time, but he had never been anywhere close to high profile. Emerging from the enormous shadow of Griffey, Cameron rose up to have his best season to date. In his 6th season, Cameron finished with 110 RBI and career highs in both home runs and slugging percentage, all large gains on previous season totals. He tied a career high in batting average from the year prior, and earned Golden Glove honors for his defensive prowess in the outfield. The cherry for Mariners fans was that Cameron bested Griffey in almost every statistical category that season. “If you tried telling me Cameron was going to have a better season than Griffey that year, I’d have laughed at you,” Mariners fan Rex Wilson said. In a shrine to his team, Rex still has a Mike Cameron bobblehead proudly displayed near a Ken Griffey plaque. “[2001] was when fans took notice and really started to embrace [Cameron] as part of our team.” One of the most extreme examples of the Mariners sudden success that season was Paul Abbott. He pitched in just 33 Major League games between 1990 and 1998, spending the last four years of that stretch out of baseball entirely. “To this day, when I talk about Paul Abbott, people think I mean the one-handed pitcher [Jim Abbott],” said Rex. “Yet there he was pitching in the ALCS at Yankee Stadium.” Somehow in 2001, Abbott won 17 games for Seattle. His best record before that came the year prior when he was 9-7. A year later, in 2001, he had the third-best winning percentage among pitchers, ranking behind Roger Clemens and above Curt Schilling, Randy Johnson and C.C. Sabathia. He posted one less win than Cy Young finalist Tim Hudson and finished tied in the category with future Hall of Famer Greg Maddux. For one season in an otherwise less-than-mediocre career, Abbott was an elite pitcher and walked among gods he should have otherwise worshiped. The 2001 Mariners had absolutely no business being as historically great as they were. The most remembered player from this team is Ichiro. He was the first Japanese position player in the Majors, debuting in 2001 after Seattle won the rights to his first ever MLB contract. He was already a legend Japan, having amassed over 1,200 hits and a .358 career batting average in his Japanese career. Ichiro also possessed an almost mythical arm in the field, able to throw a runner out from right field on a balls so perfectly thrown that Mariners manager Lou Piniella claimed you could hang clothes on it. He ended up being the only Mariners player from the 116-win team to sustain success over the course of his entire career, and is a virtual lock to become the first Japanese player inducted into Cooperstown. But in 2001 he fit right in with the narrative of not knowing what to expect from an unproven Mariners squad. For all his success abroad, Ichiro was a rookie two years away from his 30th birthday. Skeptics wondered if the American game was too fast for him. It turned out to be the other way around. After a quiet spring training, one so void of successes that doubters felt justified in their skepticism, Ichiro rose like the rising sun of his homeland to have an MVP season. He led the league in total hits and batting average, showing that MLB pitching wasn’t too quick for his bat. He also led the league in stolen bases, a stat that proved it was he who was quite literally too fast for American baseball. “It’s almost as if he has a tennis racket in his hands,” Seattle’s first base coach John Moses told Sports Illustrated in 2001. “I’m gonna lob this one—and it’s a blooper over the shortstop’s head. I’m gonna ace this one—and it’s a liner down the rightfield line. He’s toying with guys, and there’s nothing they can do about it.” Ichiro’s presence on the team also had the residual effect of drawing in more fans and further investing many who had already bought in. “People said at the time that Ichiro was signed to appeal to the Asian fans in Seattle. They weren’t wrong,” said Beth Tomoko, a Japanese-American who places her Mariners identity above all. “I loved the Mariners before but [with Ichiro] I finally saw myself on the team.” Ichiro also led the league in plate appearances, which was a testament to the team being in perfect harmony. The whole of the team was truly made greater by the sum of its unlikely parts. Abbott won 17 games thanks to the award-winning fielding that was behind him and the power at the plate producing runs. Seattle’s plus-300 run differential was thanks to guys like Boone and Cameron acting as the muscle in a lineup that reached base over 100 times more than any other team in the American League. Ichiro led the Majors in plate appearances for precisely that reason. That’s why the team won the most games any team had ever won in the regular season. Everyone came together at the right time to catch lightning in the bottle.

To put it into perspective, look at the 1995 Mariners. That team boasted a roster of Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Edgar Martinez and rookie Alex Rodriguez. All of those players, save possibly for Rodriguez, are in or headed to the Hall of Fame. No one from the 2001 team, aside from Ichiro, is likely heading to Cooperstown. Yet the ‘95 Mariners team trailed by as much as 15 games in their division, and needed a desperate late season push to force a 163rd game in order to win the AL West. The 2001 team had already won the AL West and the top playoff spot locked up two and a half weeks before the end of the season. The wrong team won 116-games. That didn’t stop the entire country from latching onto the 2001 Mariners as though they were rock stars. The attention wasn’t immediate, but after a team predicted to finish third in its division raced to 20-wins in the first month of the season, people started to notice. By the end of May, the Mariners were 40-12 and all eyes were on Seattle. Through mere coincidence, Safeco Field hosted that year’s All-Star Game in the midst of the nation’s obsession with the team. Nine Mariners players were voted to the All-Star Game and the team maintained an 11-game lead in first place. The baseball world was drunk on Mariners-Mania. “It was like the Nirvana thing all over again,” Rex said. “Seattle was the center of the world and there was a sense of pride in being attached to what was happening.” If the Mariners were Nirvana, that made Ichiro, strange as the comparison feels, Kurt Cobain and Boone, who, Dave Grohl? Ichiro stitched together international fan bases and earned the respect of critics through his quiet, almost robotic perfection. Boone forced the nation to pay attention to him through his fantastic play and cocky attitude. They were the perfect dichotomy. Sports Illustrated’s Richard Hoffer, in 2001, wrote of the second baseman “Humble … is not a word often associated with Boone.” The middle of the summer is when the sports world reached peak-Boone. He was named to his second All-Star appearance of his career and in July graced the cover of Sports Illustrated. At the time he was on pace to hit as many RBI in a season as Lou Gehrig did during the 1934 season. Analysts were in awe of his refined swing while fans latched onto his Tarzan-like physique and his aura of cocky cool. “I was all about the Boone, right down to the bleached tips,” said Damon Chlarson. He was nine years old that season, and cites watching the team that year as the reason he’s such a passionate fan now. “He embodied what cool was to me at that time, but I still think he was an incredible talent”. Boone might have been the classic example of an American poster boy but Ichiro helped the Mariners become an international sensation. He had arrived to some but not a ton of fanfare from the American press. The Japanese media, however, had an unquenchable thirst for all things Ichiro. That season, the Mariners issued season-long press credentials to 23 Japanese writers, 11 Japanese photographers and one entire Japanese television crew. Unbeknownst of the success that lie ahead, this coverage allowed for a direct pipeline from Seattle across an entire ocean for which word of the Mariners historic achievements could travel. “My father had friends in Japan who were obsessed with Ichiro but also fell in love with the whole team,” Beth said. “Ichiro was the pride but everyone started rooting for the rest of the players.” Back in Seattle, Mariners fans couldn’t get enough of their team. Just like Seattle was blowing teams away on the diamond, Mariners fans helped gain a sizable lead in attendance totals by filling the stadium on a nightly basis. Seattle led all of baseball in total attendance, totaling over 200,000 more fans than the next best team in the league. “I turned 7 that year and remember when the city really knew the magic was real,” one fan recalled. “I still remember being in the 300s and seeing the sold out stadium. It was picturesque.” Another fan remembers using Mariners tickets as popular excuse to skip school. “It was a valid excuse especially closer to the playoffs it got”. The love turned to an all out obsession. Local television ratings were off the charts, kids were skipping class to watch games and Mariners players like Mike Cameron, Aaron Sele and Edgar Martinez graced magazine covers everywhere from ESPN to TV Guide. It got to the point that the winning — and the degree to which victories were achieved — was so intoxicating that it was simply assumed. “The shock and awe of the early-season lapping of [Seattle’s] opponents waned as summer heated up,” said fan Gabriel Bogart. “We began to expect the nightly thrashing the M’s would hand out”.

As good as they were in 2001, Seattle lost games between Opening Day and the end of their season. What was surprising, and even troubling: the Mariners susceptibility to losing bad. Of the 46 losses Seattle suffered, over one-third of them had been by four runs or more. The dominant 1998 New York Yankees lost a similar amount of four-run games but only won 114-games. This only happened to the 1906 Cubs ten times. Seattle lost 26 games, more than half its losses, by three or more runs. This trend didn’t simmer to a boil; it was there from the start. Seattle lost the second game of the season 5-1, then won the next night 10-2. In July it lost 14-2 to the Rangers. The next night they shutout the Dodgers 13-0. Back in May, Toronto and Boston pounded Seattle in back-to-back games by a combined score of 22-8. Seattle followed that up by outscoring its next three opponents 22-9. That was the team in a nutshell, living extreme one way or another. It wasn’t just large margin losses that were troubling. Perhaps most damning was Seattle’s inability to win low scoring games. The Mariners played in 44-games where they scored three runs or less. Of those games they won just 15 of them. The big bats and extreme run totals were great for magazine covers and popularity, but Seattle needed them for a reason. There was a fine line that Seattle needed to walk in order to win, and there’s a decent chance the team simply got lucky at the right times. Another troubling trend, perhaps one that helps explain the team’s eventual demise in the postseason, was its increasingly streaky nature. In April Seattle didn’t lose in back-to-back games at all. In May it happened twice and in June the team lost back-to-back games three times. This indicates the high intensity success of the whole might have exhausted the part; September saw Seattle lose four games in a row and five of its last ten games of the month. Yet, things had been so good the entire season that no one really seemed to notice. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, until it does. The red flags were identifiable heading into October, and at the end of the day the Mariners simply lost control at the wrong time. “There was a point at the end of the season where I had some doubts,” Beth said. “But none of us believed they wouldn’t figure it out in the playoffs.” Away from the diamond, national tragedy shunted the Mariners’ feel-good story out of the country’s collective consciousness. “I think a lot people forget what 9/11 did to that season,” one fan remembered. “It was definitely a whole different season in its own right.” Baseball took a backseat to many people in the country after September 11th, and the national hype surrounding the Mariners ceased to matter. There were real things to worry about, none of which concerned watching a team in the furthest corner of the country from Ground Zero win some baseball games. Eight days after the terror attacks out East, Seattle clinched the AL West. That same day, Boeing announced they were laying off 30,000 employees in Seattle, many of whom were fans who had basked in the summer of glory. “Winning never mattered less,” said Seattle journalist Art Thiel. “Coping mattered most.” After all the success, all of the winning, and all of the hype, not a single champagne bottle was ever popped in celebration of that season. Sometimes all it takes is a bad stretch at the wrong time to derail everything. On a long enough timeline, like a 162-game season, the Mariners were able to sustain success despite the red flag trends that suggested imperfection. Once the timeline shortened to a tight postseason schedule, one with little margin for error, the flaws were magnified. They lost 5-0 in Game 1 of the ALDS to Cleveland, followed by a 5-1 victory and a 17-2 loss. Seattle needed to claw their way back in order survive the series. The end of the line came in the ALCS, against the Yankees and a team the country had rallied around after a summer of cheering on the Mariners to the point at which they had arrived. They were on the doorstep of glory and nobody wanted them to get there. “Suddenly, perhaps the most resented team in sports became Americas Team. The world cheered as the Yanks won,” Thiel said. Seattle only won a single game before being eliminated. The red flags were identifiable heading into October, and at the end of the day the Mariners simply lost control at the wrong time. After a season of having almost everything go right, everything that possibly could have gone wrong did; Seattle collapsed under the weight of history. The score of the team’s sole victory against the Yankees was 14-2, one last primal scream from a team that was greater than it ever should have been.