FanPost Friday: Dorktown | The History of the Seattle Mariners Open Discussion Thread

The six-part, 3 hour and 40 minutes long dissection of the Seattle Mariners Baseball Club by Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein is now completed. You can watch it all for free on YouTube right now. As any Mariners fan would guess, it’s one hell of a journey.

After Part III was posted, I did a FPF post discussing the first three episodes and asking LLers to pick their favorite. The results were resoundingly in favor of the one about 1995 Mariners and how baseball was allowed to even still exist in Seattle to this day. It’s the most magical part of the Mariners’ 43 years of pushing a giant rock uphill and Dorktown did it justice.

So, let’s hit the polls again!

Part IV does a great job of detailing the post-95 and pre-2001 era of the team rostering 4 of the literal best baseball players of all time and failing to win a championship. Part V is the Ichiro episode and it’s absolutely phenomenal, and it also covers the historic 2001 team in great detail and the rest of the first decade of the 00s. Part VI is about the era we all just lived through and it’s a doozy.

One major note about this series that you (the intense subset of internet nerd Mariners fans that read this site religiously) need to accept in order to enjoy it is that Bois focuses primarily on the results of on-field baseball actions by players. Exceptions are made when it comes to how Seattle got the team in the first place and the brief history of arson/shitty baseball stadiums in Seattle in Part I and also all the off-field politics in 1995 regarding the vote for creating a new stadium in Part III. Other than that, the documentary is focused entirely on the players and their cosmic struggles and triumphs. I really feel like if any of the Lookout Landing writers and content creators from over the years tried to make some kind of Mariners documentary, a lot of it would be focused on the cascading, compounding incompetence and poor decisions of all the General Managers and Team Presidents from the 70s onward. It would probably come out a lot angrier and blame-heavy than the detached bemusement and examination of absurdity presented by Bois because we’ve all been too close to it for too many years.

For example, Part VI might be my favorite because it highlights many of the astronomically bad and insane moments we’ve lived through recently and that many LLers have experienced through the lens of this site and community. LL finally gets a shoutout in this part during the Raul Ibanez Lawn Dart Review Extravaganza. Thanks, fellas. But! As ripe for dragging as the Jack Zduriencik front office is, there is no mention of the many embarrassing off-field failures from that crew during the examination of this era. It’s only concerned with the embarrassing baseball things like Jack Wilson pretending to throw a baseball and Eric Byrnes’ entire existence and walk-off dropped third strikes. So if the roasting of baseball executives is what you’re looking for, you won’t find it here. And that’s probably okay because this documentary would be like 7 hours long and not nearly as enjoyable as it is.

All right, before I leave you all to discuss all the finer points of the Dorktown doc in the comments below, I wanted to bring back last week’s “The Last Dance” poll.

2001 took the cake with 1995 not far behind it, which feels pretty accurate. We know just about all there is to know about 1995, and MLB Network already did their own documentary on it last year, but 2001 still has some mystique about it. An in-depth, warts-and-all documentary on 2001 would be incredibly compelling. I hope it happens some day, even if it’s not 10 episodes.

I’d like to give a special shoutout to the real seekers, the real truth hounds out there, who chose 2010 and 2018. We, the beleaguered and joy-starved Mariners fans of the internet, deserve closure on what happened to these teams and maybe one day we’ll get it. The truth is out there, friends.