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The outfield assist is sick as hell. It always feels real good to air out the arm, and you get to publicly embarrass someone in the process. It’s like, hey idiot, you could have just stayed put. Instead, you trusted your human legs to go faster than a baseball. That’s just bad practice.
Longevity obviously helps here, as outfield assists are incredibly circumstantial and can’t just be conjured by pure talent. Being a Mariners outfielder for a long time is definitely the best way to make the all-time outfield assist list, even if you were notoriously a sinkhole dressed as a left fielder! It is wild though that there’s a guy on this list who only played two years in Seattle. He accumulated 20 outfield assists during that time, which I decided would be the arbitrary cutoff for today’s quiz.
Some of my favorite outfield assists in Mariner history include this Charles Gipson dart at the Metrodome, Mitch Haniger and Jean Segura teaming up for one of the best defensive plays in recent memory, and José Guillén vaporizing Lance Berkman. Of course, there’s only one guy on here who threw something out of Star Wars.