You Gotta Love These Guys: Fifty Years of Seattle Mariners Baseball

Since the team's founding in 1976, the Seattle Mariners have become one of the most important social institutions in Seattle. Beginning with the brief tenure of the Seattle Pilots and the legal battle with MLB to bring baseball back to the city, the early years were a struggle, as were the 1980s. In 1989 Ken Griffey Jr. made his debut and established himself as one of the most talented players of his era. The Mariners had their first season above .500 in 1991 and then moved into their most successful years in team history.

Led by manager Lou Piniella and future Hall of Famers Edgar Martinez, Griffey Jr., and Randy Johnson, the Mariners won their first division title in 1995 and defeated the New York Yankees in dramatic fashion in game 5 of the American League Division Series, one of the most iconic moments in team history. When voters had rejected an earlier vote to build the team a new stadium to replace the Kingdome, the state legislature seized on the team's momentum to build a new stadium that would ensure their place in the Northwest forever. In 2001 rookie player Ichiro Suzuki led the team to an MLB record of 116-46 and won both the American League MVP and Rookie of the Year awards. While the team struggled for most of its fifty-year run, new management in the front office and a retooled farm system got the Mariners into the playoffs in 2022 and again in 2025, where they fell just short of the World Series.

In You Gotta Love These Guys David F. Schmitz recounts the full history of the Seattle Mariners, covering the team on the field, the larger history off the field, and the team's impact as a social institution on Seattle and the Pacific Northwest.

David F. Schmitz is Robert Allen Skotheim Chair of History, emeritus, at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. He is the author of several books including The Sailor: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Transformation of American Foreign Policy, 1933-1945 and Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War.