FanPost Friday: Are the 2024 Seattle Mariners good?

Plus a hats-off, standing ovation to the founder of Uni-Watch on his retirement

Hello and welcome back to FanPost Friday! Apologies for the absence last week, but we are back and I’m here to ask the Big Question: Are the 2024 Seattle Mariners good?

You may have noticed the Mariners have battled their way back into first place in the AL West this past week. You also may have noticed the other four AL West teams are currently below .500.

It’s almost June, so there is still a long ways to go, but I’m feeling encouraged. The Rangers are currently on a pretty significant slide, so it feels like only a matter of time before the recently surging Astros are once again the team to worry about. Good thing the Mariners go head-to-head with Houston back home in Seattle next week. That should be spicy and fun. The A’s are certainly plucky, but nothing to really worry about long term and then the Angels can’t have an article written about them that’s not unintentionally hilarious.

So, the AL West is not quite the horse race it has been the last five seasons or so and the Mariners might finally be in position to fully take advantage of a mediocre, although not AL Central-bad, division and continue to float along in first place just by staying 3-5 games above .500. Stranger things have happened.

But are the Mariners actually good?

The team’s run differential took a hit this past week in Baltimore and the Bronx, but they are still ahead of all of other AL West teams at -4.0. The Rangers are right behind them at -7.0. If we look at Expected Wins, the Mariners record is 25-26, which honestly feels pretty accurate if you were to go by the eye test. They’ve had some definitely lucky moments and the team’s starting pitching and bullpen have both escaped plenty of jams, but it hasn’t felt like the team has been overly lucky in my view. Around .500 is honestly how I view this team, for better or worse.

What do you think?

Happy Retirement to Paul Lukas of Uni Watch

On a different note, I feel the need to call attention to the retirement of an honest-to-goodness pioneer of the sports internet era. Paul Lukas built his Uni Watch empire from a print column to a website to a real, living community of fellow sports uniform obsessives with strong opinions about aesthetics. I have been very influenced by Paul’s work over the years, even before I really knew who he was. When I first found the Uni Watch site probably around 2009, (right around when I found LL I think!) I felt incredibly seen and justified in my years of paying close attention to sports uniforms, my idle hours at school spent drawing logos and sports gear in notebooks. To say Paul Lukas is a legend of the sports sartorial game is an understatement. May his aesthetically perfect jersey hang from the rafters forever.

Happy trails, Paul. Hope you find more things to get obsessed with and write about in great detail.

Have a great weekend, folks!