Hello! It’s that time again, friends. Yup, you guessed it. It’s FanPost Friday time. The title gave it away, I know.

The Mariners just got swept by the lowly Detroit Tigers, including a no-hitter. The prospects are good and fun to watch and that’s all very exciting. Kyle Seager, Mitch Haniger are playing like All-Stars and Kyle Lewis is returning to form. Every other hitter on the roster who isn’t injured is currently hovering around a dumpster fire and a .150 batting average. Things are pretty bad! It didn’t have to be this way, but due to a lack of spending by ownership in the offseason, the team just does not have nearly enough MLB-ready hitters. Also, something probably changed with the construction of the baseball yet again because it’s May 21 and there have been SIX no-hitters and that cannot just be simply due to more pitchers eating their Wheaties and learning about spin rates.

Anyways, while it’s not fair to lay the failures of 44 seasons at the feet of the current Mariners ownership group, which is led by majority owner John Stanton, there is one common thread that has haunted the team’s various ownership groups and decision makers throughout all the years of cascading, compounding fuck-ups: the refusal and/or inability to spend enough money on the right players at the right time to augment the existing roster.

Wikipedia.org

Instead of writing it all out, I figured the handy chart above from Wikipedia would do nicely. The folks who owned the team in the 70’s and 80’s were infamously cheap and George Argoyos was a casual white collar criminal. The Jeff Smulyan group wanted nothing more than to move the team to Tampa. The team saw practically all of its success under the Nintendo of America/Howard Lincoln years, but that’s also when the above mentioned failure to spend at the right time trend began to really take hold. With the current group, we saw it happen in 2016, 2018, and most recently in the offseason prior to the 2021 season.

It’s easy for us as fans at home to just say, “Pay more money for right players, duh!” Surely it’s never quite that simple, but maybe it is? I don’t know, I’ve never been a multi-millionaire before so I can’t say for certain. But, that thought exercise whole point of this post and this week’s prompt!

Who would be your ideal owner(s) of the Seattle Mariners?

If it’s you, give us your justifications why in a FanPost or in the comments below. If it’s not you, I encourage you to speculate wildly on who would be the type of owner who would actually spend money at the right time to push this team over the top and finally, at long last, win a championship.

Rant and rave in the comments or give us your detailed plans in a FanPost. Have a good weekend and, as always, go Mariners.