Odds & Ends and Miscellany

The A's are the new Sonicsgate, NW Baseball History endorses its first book, I indulge in astrological trivia, and share thankfulness and a few invites.

Hello! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. I’d meant to get something out last week, but life has been life-ing, as it tends to do. So, I’ve got a weird little mishmash of random things for you.

First up, the Hot Stove is not hot. In fact, it’s downright boring (and we’re not even going to acknowledge what the Mariners did). Really, the only thing of note is that MLB owners voted to allow the Oakland Athletics to move to Las Vegas.

The A’s will have the distinction of being the most relocated team in MLB history (Philadelphia → Kansas City → Oakland → Las Vegas), breaking their tie with the Braves (Boston → Milwaukee → Atlanta). I’m foolishly holding out hope it doesn’t actually happen because this move sucks. It sucks for A’s fans, it sucks for Oakland, it sucks for baseball as a cohesive whole, it just sucks. The only people it doesn’t suck for is baseball owners, who seem to think their only purpose on earth/as team owners is to raid the coffers for all they’re worth.

Elements of the A’s relocation quest is reminiscent of the Sonics leaving Seattle, so it resonates a little harder here. Going back further, the Mariners threatened to leave Seattle on regular basis for most of their existence until Safeco Field/T-Mobile Park was built. When teams are starting to rebuild stadiums that were built in roughly the same era (Texas and Atlanta) the A’s pending relocation is a reminder that our civic connection to a sports team is always a house of cards.

I have some uncomfortable feelings about the whole situation around the Mariners staying in Seattle too. Using tax money to build the stadium was put to a vote and it failed. People voted no, they did not want to spend public money on a stadium. Which makes sense because the Kingdome had been built to house multiple sports teams two decades earlier, and now we were told we actually needed specialty stadiums for each team. To be fair, the vote was close and I’ve seen it argued that people changed their minds as the Mariners got deeper into their first postseason run, so it’s not egregiously against public opinion. The stadium was funded by the legislature and the Mariners stayed in Seattle.

Of course I’m happy the Mariners are still here. I often wonder if I’d be a baseball fan now if they had moved to Tampa Bay (and I can only imagine that rage I’d feel now when the Rays threaten to leave). I think that relocation after a magical 1995 season would have been a death blow to major league fandom at least. But I suppose it’s possible I would have jumped on board my ancestral Red Sox fandom and seen my team win two World Series.

I don’t think Mariners ownership and marketing set out to drive the 1995 nostalgia into the ground the way they did in the two decades since that season, but it has been a convenient way to hide the corporate welfare they received as political opinion has started to question that sort of thing more. Look at this magical team that saved baseball in Seattle! They play today in the House that Griffey Built! The least John Stanton can do is pay us back by spending more money on the team. Let us have our moment of glory.

Book Recommendation/Exciting Personal News

On Friday I got a book in the mail that I have been looking forward to for a long time. It’s Heartbreak City: Seattle Sports and the Unmet Promise of Urban Progress by Shaun Scott, a political organizer, writer, filmmaker, and subscriber to this very newsletter. The combination of sports and political history is extremely relevant to my interests. I started reading it almost immediately, and found a delightful surprise at the beginning of the second chapter:

Shaun had reached out to me after reading the piece he mentions here, but I had no idea any of it made it’s way into his book. I’m so thrilled this particular bit did. When I wrote the story about shipyard baseball, I wasn’t able to uncover more about the Ku Klux team. At the time I was a limited in my ability to dig beyond anything available online (it was the spring and early summer of 2020). I felt like it was important to include if for no other reason than people in the northwest can get very defensive about racism and I’ve often heard things like, “Well, at least it wasn’t like the South here. No Klan or Jim Crow laws.” And, if you read Shaun’s book, or any history that doesn’t intentionally gloss over it, you’ll see that isn’t quite true.

It’s my belief that the best pieces of historical writing inspire your mind to go wild thinking about it and drawing connections between the past and present, and inspire you to want to learn more. I’m so happy that something I wrote did that. To drop a little nugget of information and have someone else pick up the baton and run with it is genuinely so cool to me.

When I started doing historical research of my own, I came to appreciate bibliographies and endnotes. I’m equally as excited to be in the end notes of a published book:

I’m only about halfway through this book, but I’m enjoying it and I have tons of post-its in there with notes and thoughts, and inspiration for other research ideas. Since it’s the season for gift buying, I enthusiastically recommend this for all the political sports people on your list.

The Fault, Dear Mariner Fans, Is Not in Our Stars

Astrology is one of my pet interests. I’ve long thought that someone who knows more about it than I do should make a website or blog or newsletter that analyzes baseball through astrology. Frankie de la Cretaz recently wrote about the Mars cazimi in Scorpio and its historical influence on women’s soccer. I want more of this! I dream of the day when players’ Mars placement becomes the new market inefficiency.

Even if you know nothing about astrology, you’re familiar with sun signs. When someone tells you their sign, it’s their sun sign. I’ve always been curious about the astrological makeup of the Mariners, so I went through every single player in Mariners history to run the numbers (special thank you to Josh Starkey for the spreadsheet, which made this much easier!).

Sun signs aren’t going to tell us whether a team is good, or have anything to do with how you should put together a team because that’s not how they work. This is simply trivial trivia, the type of trivia that is the most fun.

Of all the humans to exist on planet Earth only 985 of them have played for the Seattle Mariners. It sure seems like there should be more; 985 feels like the number that have been rostered during the Jerry Dipoto Era alone (Jerry Dipoto himself is, quite fittingly, a Gemini).

The most well represented sign in Mariners history is Leo, with 108 players. The next highest total is Virgo at 102. The full breakdown of sun signs over the course of Mariners history:

108 Leo
102 Virgo
88 Cancer
84 Capricorn
82 Libra
81 Aries
78 Gemini
75 Pisces
73 Scorpio
73 Taurus
71 Aquarius
70 Sagittarius

Curious how this compares to the 2023 Mariners? The most prevalent sign was Cancer, represented by 8 players throughout the year. Virgos also played a big role, clocking in at 7, tied with Aquarius. The rest:

5 Capricorn
5 Libra
5 Taurus
4 Gemini
4 Leo
4 Sagittarius
3 Aries
3 Pisces
1 Scorpio

I also looked at the 2001 Mariners and it’s an interesting departure from the all-time totals:

7 Leo
6 Pisces
5 Libra
4 Capricorn
4 Scorpio
3 Aries
2 Sagittarius
2 Virgo
1 Cancer
1 Taurus
0 Aquarius and Gemini

2001 was heavy on the Fire (12) and Water (11) signs. 2023 leaned into Earth (17) and Air (16) signs (and, I should note, that were 35 players for the 2001 team and 56 for the 2023 version). The all-time roster is pretty evenly distributed among the four elements (air, fire, water, earth).

Again, this isn’t a guide on putting a team together. If anything, the distribution of signs could give insights into clubhouse culture and team chemistry, which isn’t something to discount! (Intangibles by Joan Ryan is an excellent look at team chemistry, if you’re looking for more book recommendations). If you’re going to get into the weeds of astrological analysis, the full scope of players’ placements and the astronomical events that happen during the season would have to come into play.

I think about the cliched experience every woman sports fan has had where a man is suspicious of your sports fandom and says something like, “Oh, you say you’re a Mariners fan? Then what was Alex Rodriguez’s slugging percentage in odd numbered home games in May and August of 1998?” I’d love to hit them back with, “Oh, you claim to be a Mariners fan? Well, name the two Virgos on the 2001 Mariners to prove it.”¹

Bluesky Invites

Twitter continues to go downhill, rapidly picking up speed as it does. Turns out a well-known automaker endorses antisemitic conspiracy theories. History doesn’t repeat or rhyme, it’s just the same damn thing over and over again. It would be incredibly boring if it didn’t have dire consequences for human beings all over the world. I’ve reached the point where I have no interest in even looking at it anymore.

So, if you’re interested in joining the Blue Sky party but haven’t made the leap yet, here are some invite codes:

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I’m there sporadically at amandalc.bsky.social

Thank You!

Since it’s still technically the month of thankfulness, I want to say how thankful I am for everyone reading this. I decided to start this little newsletter as an outlet to share the things I discover and because I missed writing regularly. The whole freelance pitching and negotiating and then hurriedly writing song and dance is fine for bigger projects, but sports media (and all media, really) is in such a terrible place there aren’t a ton of outlets for the stuff I want to do. I do have a few things in the hopper for other outlets next year though, so stay tuned for that eventually.

I was expecting a handful of people to be interested in this little newsletter, so I’m very happy that significantly more than a handful of people subscribed. And most of you open the emails too!

Thank you for reading, I appreciate it very much.

1. Paul Abbott and David Bell