I got work here in about an hour, meaning I have to leave in about 45 minutes, meaning I should probably start getting ready to head out in about 41 minutes. So this’ll be a shorter post, in the interest of time. They’ve all seemed to be that way lately, huh?

The Mariners are playing right now, and I’m hardly even making an effort to watch it on my second monitor while I write this. With every loss, each more embarassing than the last, Dan Wilson scatters more of the Mariners’ ashes into the marine layer surrounding the Seattle skyline. By the time Max Fried finishes with us this morning, he’ll be shaking an empty urn.

“Dom Canzone draws an eight-pitch walk off Max Fried!” Aaron Goldsmith announces incredulously. Grow up.

This team is loaded with guys in whom I have absolutely no faith — Logan Gilbert, Bryce Miller, Brian Woo, Cal Raleigh, etc. It’s full of players against whom I harbor intense scorn — Colt Emerson, Julio Rodriguez, Josh Naylor, etc. It has performed so inexplicably poorly, so jaw-droppingly disappointingly, that there’s no commentary left to be had. The bit is dead. They killed it. They died.

Anything I try to do to outline the futility will have already be done. It’s all contrived at this point. The media has its hands on the throat of the bit at this point. Our job is done. Not only have the Mariners killed their season, they also killed — excuse me, George Lombard is so much better than Colt Emerson in every aspect of the game of baseball — the point of this blog, thus exonerating me from ever having to write about them again (as Weston Wilson throws his bat into his own team’s dugout. Why is he on the team again? Didn’t we get Donovan back? Lol he just hit a home run).

I’ve decided the only real way to show respect to the Mariners’ complete death is by ignoring them completely. From now on, the content of these posts, while still going out under titles of similar Mariners-adjacent ilk, will consist of stories and ideas almost completely unrelated to baseball. Underlying themes and theses will, however, remain consistent. Without further ado, here’s how I felt flipping through a photo album my parents made in 1989 after the summer they spent hitchhiking through Europe.

Shit I ran out of time. Stay tuned for next week’s post.

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Lately, I’ve been feeling really stupid about having any emotional investment in an organization as meaningless as the Seattle Mariners. It’s really embarrassing. And it’s not necessarily because of how drastically they’ve failed to meet expecatations, either. That may have been the catalyst for my emotional detachment, but it’s not really the crux of the issue.

I was in the duldrums of doom-scrolling on Sunday, smothering what little temporal autonomy I have in this life with 30-second bits of sardonic humor, and I kept getting these nauseating advertisements for some ‘Seattle Mariners’ corporation pop up on my screen. They’d show like these guys holding baseball bats, smiling or laughing maniacally in front of a blue-green background, and there’d be some caption enticing me to come spend money to watch them play at their partner sponsor-themed stadium. It’s disgusting, really.

I mean a lot of organizations’ social media teams can get away with that kind of shameless promotion because they promote successful entities. It’s a lot easier to blindly accept or even possibly be enticed by ads plastered across the side of metro buses as authentic representations of a baseball team’s commitment to its city and fanbase when that baseball team is actually successful.

One of the advertisements I literally just saw on Instagram while I was taking one of my many breaks from writing this piece was a promotion for center fielder Julio Rodriguez, a.k.a. DJ Pleno, who will make his disc jockey debut at T-Mobile Park this Friday. For a variety of reasons, Julio often serves as the centerpiece in Mariner promotional advertisements. For one thing, he’s obviously a very talented, exciting baseball player. He’s also very attractive, with an easy-going demeanor, an infectious smile, and kind, friendly eyes. Perhaps most importantly, however, he also appears to care so very much about the fans and the city he represents, wearing his heart on his sleeve and appearing to play as hard as he can to bring a championship to Seattle. It makes sense, then, that the Seattle Mariners would choose him as chief representative of their organization. His aura reflects everything they want the city to think about their brand.

But the reality is that he’s a decent — not great — starting center fielder with a propensity for performing well below his highly touted ceiling. And the further into his career we have gotten, the less likely it looks that he’ll ever perform anywhere close to the way Ken Griffey Jr. did in a Mariners uniform in the ‘90s. That, however, does not matter to ownership, whose eyes have never drifted far from the prize: money.

As soon as you start looking at the Mariners as an organization, or a corporation, whose sole purpose is to become as profitable as possible, as opposed to a team, it becomes much easier to detach from their performance. This year, in fact, I’ve almost reverted back to not caring about their trajectory at all.

Think of the Mariners as closer to a Target or a Wal-Mart than your nephew’s little league team, and you’ll find yourself much less embarrassed by their gross inability to meet expectations. People will say, ‘That’s heartless. You’re a fairweather fan. You’re taking the fun out of baseball.’ To them, I say, the Mariners took the fun out of baseball for me 27 years ago. When a team tells you it cares about bringing success to fans and a city, and then they fail to do so, it becomes appropriate to view them as a money-making entity strictly.

Thus, as a person with little to no knowledge of or experience with any form of economics, either in theory or practice, I’ve come to determine that the loyalty of the Mariners and every other professional sports franchise — alongisde maybe every person in the world — is pretty much only to money, aside from the occasional bout of guilt absolution. Even Randy Arozarena, our best every day player this season by a constitutional mile, has proceeded to hit .280 and steal 20-plus bases strictly because the amount of money he makes next season depends directly upon his performance in this one. If I were you, I’d put money on him hitting under .200 with fewer than 15 home runs in next year’s campaign — if it even happens.

For some — not even most — teams, winning is a byproduct of the pursuit of money. Investing in the right players at the right time typically leads to positive results. But, clearly, even losing teams have to make a profit, or remain financially viable at the very least, to survive (looking at you, Oakland Athletics). That’s why teams have social media accounts. They’re promoting their product. Their marketing professionals spend their paid hours scouring their team for some way to manipulate people into coming to the stadium. The Mariners, stripped of the presence of a 60 home run-hitting catcher with a body and brain reeking of humility, have landed on Julio Rodriguez, hot dogs from heaven, fireworks nights, and a variety of misleading statistics to accomplish this very feat.

And they’ve been very successful. The Mariners, who sent just one player to the All-Star game, have had the eighth-highest per-game attendance of any team in baseball so far in 2026. So next time you’re watching the Mariners, and announcer Aaron Goldsmith starts hyping up recent call-up Leo Rivas’ stats during his time in triple-A, or George Kirby’s ‘prolifically low’ walk rate, or Colt Emerson’s potential, just remember: it’s all a ploy to make more money.

“It’s segments like this, where the listener can’t see what we’re talking about, that’re gonna make us really successful.”

3:47: Evaluating Matt Damon’s performance in “The Odyssey”

7:40: The Josh Naylor-Colt Emerson beef

13:48: Zander breaks down Josh Naylor’s deterioration by reading his Baseball Savant stats page

20:25: Trying to pronounce Andrew Benintendi’s name

24:00: Alex talks about the meals he ate on Monday

31:05: Glazing Ryan Divish

31:15: Shitting on Adam Jude

31:30: Indecipherable segment

32:00: Debriefing Caleb Ferguson’s outing from Monday

32:45: Niche reference to coed softball league

“That’s exactly what Hoffman Dinger Co. thought when I came up there left-handed the other day.”

Link to Baseball Savant’s player comparison tool.

_{Song selection: “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow (feat. John Turturo, Tim Blake Nelson, Chris Thomas King),” by George Clooney}

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5:45 — Starting Pitching: B

“None of our pitchers is a ‘guy.’” -Nick

8:00 — Relief Pitching: C

“I can’t lose sight of who I am as a baseball observer: negative and against analytics.” -Alex

10:00 — Catcher: F

“That Pereda stretch was a lot of fun, though, guys. Let’s not forget about that.” -Alex

12:00 — First Base: D

“He just sucks. He went from being like—just like a fun, kind of unique body shape, like fun guy, played hard—to just rolling over and sucking.” -Alex

13:15 — Second Base: A

“How many kids do you think he’ll have in the 20th year of that contract?” -Jack

“Probably like 7 bro. He’s a dog.” -Alex

16:37.5 — Third Base: B+

“Are we sure that Donovan’s not the guy outside of T-Mobile with the blowhorn, talking about Jesus? That guy’s got long hair and a beard too.” -Jack

14:15 — Shortstop: C

“Have we seen enough from him to call him a bust?” -Nick

“Yes.” -Alex

19:45 — Left Field: A

“He’s about as low on the eye test as you can get.” -Zander

“Honestly, Jesse Winker and him, it’s a coin flip in left field.” -Jack

21:35 — Center Field: B+

"Shiv and him have a lot in common. Similar frame. Kind eyes.” -Alex

22:50 — Right Field: N/A

“He’d have to hit like .650 the rest of the year to break .200.” -Alex

“Just a disgusting player.” -Nick

“He is—he has been the—. He is ‘F.’” -Jack

“He’s the worst batter in Dipoto history.” -Zander

25:00 — Manager: D-

“Has he ever managed a baseball team at any level before this?” -Nick

“He was in the Reds’ system.” -Zander

25:15 — Front Office:

“I’m starting to think Dipoto’s a little limited, man.” -Jack

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Pete Alonso. Juan Soto. James Wood. Chris Sale. Jacob Misiorowski. Today, it was recent waiver-wire acquisition Trevor Rogers. It’s just so hard to root for this Mariners baseball team when my fantasy team is wildly more successful and so much more potentially lucrative. I’ll never win money on the Mariners because I’ll never bet on them because I deleted the Kalshi app, and even if I were to redownload the Kalshi app and begin betting on them again, they’d just lose me more money, either because of their incendiary mediocrity or my gross ineptitude as a sports gambler. David Aardsma’s Tots, meanwhile, my aptly named fantasy baseball team, could earn me $400 this fall, close to at least a dollar an hour.

This summer, I’m working on growing up. Maturing. It’s evident, based on everything I’ve learned in my time since high school, that this process involves understanding the value of money. In order to survive, especially comfortably, it’s absolutely integral to prioritize the accumulation of wealth. With that comes the understanding that entities and opportunities that offer the possibility of financial growth greatly outweigh those that don’t. John Stanton knew it when he created his budget. My stepmom knew it when she developed hers. And we just took an exorbitantly expensive trip to Ireland.

Those people are in command of their lives. I’m not. I haven’t developed a conceptualization of money that can afford me the kind of autonomy I desperately desire—at least not yet. But with this newfound investment in my fantasy baseball league with my friend Drake and all of his coworkers? I may just as well have found a path towards freedom.

Of course, what with time being a four-dimensional simulacrum and everything, free will as a concept simply cannot exist. I don’t still understand why that’s the case, or how those two variables are related, but I do truly believe that the future is equally as material as the past, and certainly much more enduring than the present, which, in my opinion, doesn’t actually exist; it’s sort of just an integral of one’s memories. Or more like a summation of integrals, each consisting of memories from birth to some point in one’s life, ending at a fraction of a milisecond in the ‘past.’

John Stanton has obviously done a great time conceptualizing this since his first few conscious moments as a real person—which for him may have happened as early as the age of eight or nine—through his tenure at Whitman college in Walla Walla, and really up until the current recent past (or present, if you can call it that). He must view time as a sphere drawing circles in the air in front of him, probably on some kind of monthly or even yearly calendar, leaving a visible path slightly resembling a jetstream behind it in space. Meanwhile, all I can see in front of me is — ohhh penalty for France!!

Julio hasn’t figured this out either, clearly. He’s still living like his future wife might be sitting in the J-Rod squad behind him on a nightly basis. Neither has Cal Raleigh. Josh Naylor certainly has this down, though. He had 2026 circled on his calendar as the “don’t try year” since the day he figured out what arbitration meant. Randy might have an even more advanced conceptualization of time than Josh, though, considering how much stronger his numbers are this season than Naylor’s last year. I can only imagine what he has in store for the league next year. Other guys, like Mitch Garver or Luke Raley, might have this kind of bullshit figured out, too, but are inherently much too shitty at baseball for it to show up on the field.

Ultimately, I’m working on deprioritizing the success of the Seattle Mariners. It does nothing to help me financially, which makes it inherently valueless as an exchange of time for my future autonomy. The Yahoo! Fantasy Sports app, meanwhile, holds infinitely higher value as a four-dimensional object in time. Here’s hoping Nico Hoerner and Francisco Lindor can turn it around. (And that Garrett Crochet comes off the injured list after the All-Star Break, of course!)

Storylines:

• The Mariners are dogtaint, so don’t pay any attention to them. Use your autonomy else where.

• David Aardsma’s Tots is up 7-2 this week against one of Drake’s coworkers, Kynanpods Kids.

• Willson Contreras got suspended yesterday, which should deliver a bit of a blow through the rest of the week, and Kyle Harrison is now day-to-day with an elbow thing

Player highlight: Jacob Latz

• The Rangers’ reliever and recent Aardsma’s Tots acquisition has four saves over the past two weeks and nine saves over the past 30 days but hasn’t seen any action in July due to the shitty, underperforming nature of his ballclub.

Three numbers from Game 93:

• .215: Wilyer Abreu’s batting average over the past 30 days. Is this the week he’s let go?

• 21: The number of RBIs Baltimore Oriole Pete Alonso has over the past 30 days. Imagine.

• 51: Aardsma’s Tots star Jacob Misiorowski’s strikeout total over the past 30 days. The Mariners don’t have a starting pitcher who is CLOSE to my guy, the Miz.

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The only advanced metrics on Baseball Savant’s immediate profile page that he’s excelling in are expected batting average, squared up percentage (I don’t really know what that one means. Think it has to do with timing.), whiff percentage, and strikeout percentage. Both his fielding stats are lower third. He’s in the fourth percentile in sprint speed.

Basically he’s playing like an average utility infielder with the speed of an aging first baseman. Apparently he ‘squared up’ a ball to deep right field — to his pull side — the other night and it only went warning track. Didn’t even leave the yard. Meanwhile Pete Alonso is raking on my fantasy team. Absolutely raking. Had a slow start to the year but has been raking recently. And still I’m on a three-week losing streak.

I had a funny thought the other day while I was watching the highlights from Luis Castillo’s start. There’s this play where he has to run pretty hard to cover first and makes a tough catch across his body, and I was picturing Dan Wilson and Pete Woodworth watching from the dugout muttering, “Please get injured please get injured please get injured.”

Colt Emerson sucks now. Baseball Savant has a caption below his name in the search bar that says, “#1 Prospect for SEA.” He’s number five in all of baseball. You don’t even wanna look at his Baseball Savant page. I’ll give you his second-highest advanced metric: Sprint Speed. In which he’s 43rd. He’s slower than Hunter Goodman and Matt Wallner.

One guy who seems to be fucking incredible is Bryce Miller. Is he this year’s 2025 Brian Woo? He’s in the 75th percentile or higher in every single one of those Baseball Savant stats that I think matters except for the run value of his breaking balls (still 54th percentile, though). He’s got a WHIP of 0.66! He’s allowing two-thirds of a baserunner per inning. If he’d thrown enough innings to qualify for the league leaderboard, that’d put him in first place, ahead of Jacob Misiowski’s 0.78 by 0.12. Not an insignificant margin. The next highest is Yoshinobu Yamamoto who’s at 0.88.

Then it goes Drew Rasmussen then Logan Gilbert, of all people. He has a WHIP under 1! And is seventh in the league in innings pitched with 107, more than double Bryce Miller’s total. Logan Gilbert’s Baseball Savant page says he’s 98th percentile in pitching run value — 71st in offspeed pitches, 90th in fastballs, and 96th in breaking balls. It also says he’s in the 100th percentile in extension, which I think refers to how far his delivery reaches off the mount. How close he is to the hitters when he releases the ball, in other words. And 92nd percentile in walk rate!? Better than the alleged leader of the walk-prevention simulacrum, George Kirby. We all knew George Kirby sucked all along, though. With a WHIP of 1.32, he’s allowing literally twice as many baserunners as Bryce Miller.

I’m not even going to disgrace this blog with *** *******’s name. He’s been so shitty for a significant enough period though at this point that it’s gained national attention, which makes it kind of less fun.

Well now that I’m back home from Ireland and have a slightly firmer grasp on the concept of time as a four-dimensional concept, practically eliminating the notion of freewill entirely, I’m going to try to allocate my remaining autonomy — temporal and otherwise — to allow for more contributions to MADUnlimited, so hopefully I’ll be putting out some kind of horseshit at least twice a week.

Storylines:

• Emerson Hancock looks to have emerged a little bit. Impressive start against a Blue Jays offense that has been almost as bad as ours over the past 30 days.

• Hey, Munoz kind of doing it lately, eh? Hasn’t given up a run in eight appearances.

• The Mariners shut out the Blue Jays in back-to-back games to take the 2025 ALCS series rematch.

Player highlight: Cole Young

• Cole Young failed to record an RBI tonight, helping my bold take from a podcast from May I never got around to editing that he would finish the season with fewer than 50.

Three numbers from Game 91:

• .636: The Mariners’ OPS over the past 30 days. They’re 29th.

• .164: Cal Raleigh’s batting average

• .759: Luke Raley’s OPS now, which has dropped over 100 points since June 2.

It’s crucial to remember that the Mariners will never win a World Series, at least not in this city. I don’t care about their slightly above-average record. I don’t care that they will most likely make the playoffs, if for no other reason than the depleted division they play in. This team won’t win a World Series in this century, and if this planet has another century in it, and if that century consists of enough resources to provide baseball to the general public, the Mariners won’t win a World Series then either.

The Mariners rank 17th of 30 MLB teams in payroll. Even if they overcome their financial deficit, they’ll need to play pretty consistently solid baseball to beat the other slightly above-average teams in the American League throughout a postseason run. If they can manage that, they’ll still need to beat the Dodgers — who are spending 230 million more dollars than the Mariners in 2026 — four times in seven tries.

For context, 63 games into the season, the scrapheap 2026 Mariners had not won consecutive series until their most recent eight-game winning streak, which was, for all intents and purposes, spurred by weak competition, unreliable sources of run support (home runs and ghost runners starting on second base in extra innings), and opposing coaching staffs not yet having scouting reports on Colt Emerson or Jhonny Pereda.

After a meteoric start to 2026, Luke Raley has begun his stratospheric nosedive towards the Pacific Ocean. Julio Rodriguez is once again posting an OPS of .772, just slighltly below the ground level of his potential. Every starting pitcher, aside from similarly yet-unscouted Emerson Hancock, has regressed. JP Crawford can’t keep juicing forever. Colt Emerson is 20 years old and not Juan Soto — or even 2025 Jorge Polanco. Josh Naylor has been a below average hitter through the first one-third-plus of the season. And Cal Raleigh’s 60 bombs no longer exist. The only papers the M’s really have to roll with are their bullpen arms, which, I think fans can agree, no longer consists of a closer whose walk-up music feels unironically amusing. The other thing about bullpens is that in order for them to matter a team must hold a lead in late innings.

All signs point to the Mariners having lower potential than what they finished the year with last season, which was their best season ever as a franchise and ultimately ended without, yet again, as much as even a World Series appearance. And let fans not forget what happened at the end of the regular season last year, when the Mariners — with an objectively better roster than the one they currently possess — faced the load-management Dodgers.

(They got swept handedly.) (We also got obliterated by the Phillies.)

Lugging my bin full of sunflower seed shells and torn youth softball mitts back to my car after last night’s back-to-back adult rec league losses, my white middle-class male brain starving for dopamine, I found myself replaying the outcomes of my two plate appearances over and over in my head.

Facing a seven-run deficit, I had stepped into the box overly eager to produce and look impressive to my friends in the dugout. My eyes the size of sunflowers, teeth clenched, I had gotten out front of and under a pitch too far in front of the plate in the second inning and popped it up to third base, squandering what I’d thought might be my only at-bat of the game and ending the inning with a runner in scoring position.

Unfortunately, by some miracle, I’d ended up back in the box in the fifth. But by the time I’d come up again, 16 batters later, I’d already cemented my fate, having spent the past 45 minutes internalizing a new identity as an overrated athlete with a severely inflated ego. With a runner on second, I’d tried to salvage my image by taking a pitch away to opposite field but ended up just rolling over a ball to the pitcher for a fielder’s choice, ending the threat and ruining my next 36 hours.

This morning, now slightly emotionally removed from last night’s tragedy, my male brain having latched onto some other interpersonal, genocide-adjacent cataclysm about which to ruminate and feel sorry for myself, I can’t help but compare myself to Julio Rodriguez.

The man just can’t hit in the big moment. He’ll never be able to get out of his own way at the plate! He thinks he should crush every ball, make every play, dazzle in front of every member of the crowd. But his expectations for himself — his arrogance, his self-importance — cause tension. He overgrips. He tightens his triceps too early. He flails. And, ultimately, he fails.

The Mariners will never overcome. Fortunately, baseball doesn’t matter.

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“Most of these guys are used to playing in beat-down stadiums like this,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson told reporters after the game. “They looked comfortable out there — like they’re back where they belong.”

Even the defense seemed relatively at home on the diamond on Wednesday, bailing out starter Logan Gilbert (2-4) on several occasions to help him salvage his reputation as an above-average Major League starter.

Victor Robles made his presence felt almost immediately, laying out for a scalding line drive to right field in the first inning. Even guys as slow as JP Crawford were sporting dirt-streaked jerseys by the end of the otherwise largely forgettable contest.

“Those hard-hit balls have all been finding grass so far this season,” Gilbert said. “So today was a nice return to the kind of luck I’ve grown accustomed to so far in my career.”

Wednesday’s game cemented a Mariner sweep of the previously first-place Athletics, who’d had the profound fortune of playing real MLB teams to this point in 2026.

This week, unlike when they’ve hosted other visiting ballclubs, whose players had wandered through their disheveled facilities like patients recovering from hernia surgery, the Athletics had to contend with the Seattle Mariners — a scrap-heap bargain bin of guys who feel at home when the visiting team’s clubhouse is in right-center field.

And it showed. The Mariners doubled the Athletics’ hit total in the three-game set, racking up 32 hits throughout the series. Colt Emerson, Rob Refsnyder, and JP Crawford benefited dramatically from the drop-off in seriousness and professionalism of the tail-end of the road trip.

Refsnyder got the scoring started in the first, devouring a cookie of a slider that Athletics starter Jeffrey Springs (3-5) left frisbeeing at 85 miles per hour over the plate for a three-run blast.

Even Jhonny Pereda drew a pair of walks, raising his season on-base percentage to .310. Emerson, meanwhile, looked young and athletic, knocking in Pereda as part of a two-out triple in the fourth inning.

“Yeah, I mean his dad is like 38 years old,” Wilson said of Emerson. “He reminds me a lot of (former Mariner) Dustin Ackley.”

Gilbert, for what it’s worth, did his part, rewriting the script on Sacramento first baseman Nick Kurtz’s overall skill level and potential as a young hitter in this league. Anyone who looks that silly against someone as objectively league-average as Gilbert can’t be anywhere close to an MVP candidate.

“I mean, Gilbert has literally sucked poopy bumhole all year long, and today was no different,” Wilson said. “He just got lucky. The A’s actually had an expected batting average of .279 today — which is actually somehow almost 30 points higher than what Logan has been slopping out there so far this season. I knew there was a reason we kept Robles on the roster.”

The Mariners have an off-day on Thursday before their upcoming interleague homestand, where they’ll face the Diamondbacks and Mets in a pair of three-game sets. Seattle will once again be expected to compete in a legitimate big-league park beneath professionally constructed stadium lights in front of real fans.

Listen, I know how little I know about this shit. My laundry smells more like privilege than it does shit, cat piss, or spliff smoke. I mean we barely even know anything about the Mariners which is something we spend like six hours of our days obsessing over. Well, Zander knows quite a bit. We know how to complain about them, at least. But how could I possibly be expected to know about mere trifles like the war in Iran or Spirit Airlines, topics I only know about by the way they are described in New York Times headlines?

Fortunately, Hayden shows up to save the day and share some of the opinions that current elected Democrats have decided are appropriate. He’s super knowledgeable about this shit, it appears, as are Zander and Alex and Jack, honestly. I think before you crucify us/me for our/my ignorance, though, please be honest with yourself.

2:00 — Shaming Marine Layer podcast listeners

5:45 — U.S.’s role in the Iran War-New York Mets analogy (Maptap-sponsored section)

6:00 — Price of gas venting

11:00 — The Italian-American Baseball Asset Relief Program

14:00 — Spirt Airlines shutdown

18:30 — Evaluating the first attempted assassination of Trump

22:00 — North Korea

26:00 — Hayden explains how single-payer healthcare works in Europe

30:00 — AIPAC

42:00 — the Jordan-Tatum GOAT debate

44:00 — John Stanton v. Bill Clinton ‘Huzz Debate’

45:15 — Alex puts forth perhaps the worst take of the year about Kirby (this was recorded on May 14)

46:30 — Luis Castillo: Hemorrhoid or polyp

My grandpa died of colon cancer and I have hemorrhoids so it’s appropriate for me to talk about that.

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Substack analysis told me our podcasts and blogs show up sooner and more frequently on people’s search results when we include the ‘SEO’ phrase, “Mariners score.”

King Street Station: Sam Haggerty… You convinced four of your friends to go downtown to the Mariners’ game against the Astros when they were going for their 15th-straight win, having confidently told your friends that they’d be able to buy their tickets at a cheaper price day-of, or even after first pitch, because people will inevitably sell them. Killing time while you monitor ticket prices on SeatGeek during the second inning of the game, you smoke between two of the buildings at King Street Station outside the exit of the Light Rail. You end up standing at the back of a bar to watch the final two innings of the game, and Sam Haggerty strikes out to it. One of your friends, Edward, was in town from Virginia for a brief time.

Main floor balcony at my house: JP Crawford… Super high OBP. Whether he’s solid or underwhelms, he’s always there and you always end up being glad you had him…🧐

Alex’s deck: Nelson Cruz… Power hitter, expensive, but worth it. It’s clear what you’re paying for. It’s fleeting, later stages of its career but producing at a high level. But the end is in sight.

Deck at Alex and Jack and Inge’s old apartment: Yuniesky Betancourt… One of your early favorite players. Really taught you a lot about baseball. Taught you what it meant to be a Mariners fan.

Discovery Park: Jorge Polanco… You don’t realize it yet but he’s going to be part of one of your most important memories of all time.

Trash spot in the alley behind Magnuson: Andres Munoz… Always a great way to end the night until you throw your back out because you were exhausted and in a hurry, so you relied solely only on your lower back to heave the huge kitchen trash bag over the lip of the big bin. Stoned, your forearm covered in greasy soot, you bend over double and feel guilty because now Mikey has to wait for your ass even longer when he finishes dish pit.

Boiler room at Magnuson: Casey Legumina… You keep hoping and praying he’ll get DFA’d but for some reason he keeps making his way into the later innings.

Dock at magnuson: Jose Ferrer… The new guy! Solid, very visibly appealing… a great bridge guy. But you know you still have the hardest part left and he might not quite get you where you need to be.

Golden Gardens: Jean Segura… Great producer, though never overly relevant in my life. Reminds me of college.

Porch at Shelley’s in Twisp: Leo Rivas… Cold. Try to keep it hidden from your grandparents. Usually pretty drunk. In front of your father.

Back porch of my grandparents’ cabin: Ichiro… Homey (usually done with cousins or close friends). Always hits. An earlier memory.

Front porch of my grandparents’ cabin: Dominic Canzone… Another one I thought I’d have to hide from my grandparents but apparently don’t have to. Surprising newcomer. Never would’ve tried him before but now that I’ve seen what he’s capable of I wanna try him again… though I still can’t trust him.

Top of the sled run in Twisp: Nelson Cruz… Done nothing but produce. Always a good douse of adrenaline.

Current basement: Brendan Ryan… thought about this one for a long time, probably the longest of any I’ve done yet. He’s like JP Crawford if JP Crawford didn’t get walks and was three times better on defense. Like kind of an unbelievably special fielder but just never on base. Basically as good at hitting as Clayton Kershaw. Maybe worse. Your 9-hole hitter, through and through. A better bunter than a hitter. And much worse plate vision than JP. You’d take JP over Brendan Ryan any day. But he’s fun to look back on fondly.

Queen Anne Boulevard: Colt Emerson… Haven’t seen much of or know much about it but pretty excited about it.

Pickleball trees: Cal Raleigh… Old-fashioned and highly public, this smoke spot has the capacity to do unprecedented things but is far more likely to end up not creating success. Not nearly as good as it gets credit for but generally beloved nonetheless.

Magnuson more secluded dock at work: Matt Brash… Has the potential to be phenomenal but can leave you feeling nauseous.

76 parking lot in Fremont: Mitch Garver… Really only intended for cigarettes.

Fremont Cut: Brendan Donovan… Good so far but hasn’t really been around.

Montlake Cut: Robinson Cano… Really awesome but becomes prohibited during college.

Cal Anderson Park: Chris Wilcox… Not ideal.

Volunteer Park: Cole Young… Can really unlock something for your team if you do just the perfect amount. Easy on the eyes. Youthful. Good-natured. Doesn’t make you anxious.

Lumen Field Parking Lot North Entrance before Mariner game: Julio Rodriguez… Gives you the spark you need to forget about anything existential for the better part of the next three hours.

Outside Leny’s: Hisashi Iwakuma… I would guess pretty incredible but can’t really remember.

Outside 4B’s: Bret Boone… I’ve been told pretty fun but I definitely don’t remember.

Steps on east end of Green Lake: Gabe Speier... Fairly underrated and rarely talked about but solid.

Deck at the 3005 house: Felix Hernandez... All-time great while he lasted. Threw a perfect game once. You find yourself missing him quite often.

Deck at Zander and Davidson’s new place: Brendan Donovan... Really good. Like a 9 out of 10. But haven’t gotten to see its potential yet.

Window at Zander and Davidson’s old place: Luis Castillo... Was consistent while it lasted.

Roof at Zander and Davidson’s old place: Cal Raleigh… Was great while it lasted.

Alex’s bathroom with the fan on: Carlos Vargos… You think he’s only gonna be throwing when the game’s already over, it’s 2 in the morning, your girlfriend’s asleep… But realistically he’s pitching in a lot of leverage spots in the 7th and 8th innings, when the games matter. And ultimately getting in the way of the team’s success.

Northern arboretum extension looking back at UW stadium: Cole Young… Youthful. You can almost trust it.

Stanwoodstock stage: Ken Griffey Jr…. An absolute pearl. Timeless.

Alley behind Teddy’s: Dom Canzone... Reminds me of something slightly Italian or New Yorky. Grime. Swinging for the fences.

Walking around Robert Eagle Staff Middle School: Brendan Donovan… Great but slightly problematic.

Gasworks: Mitch Haniger… Generic but good. Not super memorable but highly productive. Trying to figure out how to work in an innuendo about him only having one nut that doesn’t involve something having to do with him falling off the big structure because someone died doing that recently apparently, so it isn’t good to talk about.

The bridge over the UW Urban Horticulture spot: James Paxton... Mmm he was amazing during the spring of my freshman year of college.

Spokane “More like ‘Smokekane’”: Brendan Donovan… He looks like he’s from Spokane.

Seward Park: Ketel Marte… One great memory from a few years ago but really have never been back.

The only research I had to do for this post was look up James Paxton on Baseball-Reference. Looks like I nailed it though — Spring 2018 was definitely the best stretch of his career. Went with a hunch.

I had this full conversation last night with Nutty about how addicted everyone is to their phone. Every spare moment I’m looking at it. It’s just so easy to make excuses not to get off of it because we can easily convince ourselves that nothing bad is happening as a consequence, because there really isn’t any proven physical damage that being on our phones causes tangibly to our bodies.

Pissing. I’m on it. Walking to get coffee. Waiting to get a haircut. I’m on it. Merging onto I-5. On it. Walking to the bathroom. On it. Shitting. I’m on it. Before I know it I stopped shitting seven minutes ago.

Instead of head-checking for semi trucks I’m checking to see what Luke Keaschall, the second baseman for the Minnesota Twins, did today at the plate. As I accelerate up to 60 miles per hour to merge onto I-5. Our brains have now been conditioned to be able to see anything they want at pretty much any moment. When the wifi is down at the brewery, it’s already been brought up at least once by at least one employee — including me — to at least one other. When the thought flashes across my brain that I want to know how man runs washed up Mariner pitcher Luis Castillo has allowed through the first three innings of his current start, I can immediately resolve that desire by looking at my phone. That’s how you get 100-plus Yahoo Fantasy Sports app opens every day.

But it’s like — as I put my phone down — this has gotta be one of those things like Julius Caesar or space travel that marks a cornerstone of human history, an infamous invention in future history books. Bigger than space travel for sure. Something where if there’s a world in 2082 or 2150 or 2533 they’ll be learning about it like we learned about Martin Luther or The Crusades. Like the invention of the cell phone has to be closer to the invention of the wheel than the fall of the Berlin Wall, right? Like, by a lot.

If Cal Raleigh had deigned to exist as a Major League player 20 years ago, and had I wanted to know Cal Raleigh’s box score from a certain day’s game, I’d either have to have memorized it during the game, found a computer, which could’ve taken hours, to look it up, or waited to look at it until the next day in the sports section of the newspaper. Can you imagine waiting like that? Right now I could unfortunately pull that kind of depressing information up on my phone within eight seconds and use it to come up with contrived hate blogs for my favorite baseball team.

Speaking of, Cal—sorry, I mean, ‘Raleigh’—has actually homered in three straight games, allegedly. I’m tired of referring to him as Cal as if I have any kind of affinity towards him or we’re on some kind of informal level like that. Yeah, upon a quick check of Baseball Reference on my shitty laptop which I own that provides me with whatever information I could possibly demand of it on a second-to-second basis, aside from the somewhat uncommon situation in which it will freeze up or crash on me because of its age and the hours of baseball (come on guys) I’ve streamed on it on sites riddled with dozens and dozens of the kinds of pop-ups you wouldn’t want your mom to ask questions about when she walks into the living room where you’re watching football on a Sunday afternoon (those same foreign sites host NFL games) because you were at your mom’s house that weekend and she doesn’t pay for NFL RedZone or even cable for that matter like your dad does, in which case I’ll usually have to restart it, causing me to roll my eyes and say something like ‘fucking cock ass’ under my breath, it does look like he’s homered in three straight.

Julio’s got that on-base streak going right now. What’s his deal again? Oh, he’s gotten on base in 19 consecutive contests. Getting on base consists of getting any kind of hit (single, double, triple, or home run), drawing a walk, or getting hit by a pitch. It does not include reaching on an error, recording a sacrifice hit, or reaching on a fielder’s choice. Julio—excuse me, Rodriguez—gets on base 33.9% of the time he goes to the plate. Right now, the average on-base percentage for MLB players is 32.2%, so he’s a little over that. Unfortunately, with just one home run in 26 games, Rodriguez’s slugging percentage, which represents a player’s ability to hit for power, is just .306 — 80 whole points below the league average of .386.

The best way to conceptualize a guy’s slugging percentage is by thinking about it as the amount of total bases — completely ignoring walks — he averages per at-bat. So Rodriguez averages, ignoring when he walks or gets hit by a pitch, just over three-tenths of a base per plate appearance. If someone had 10 plate appearances and hit a double in every one of those at-bats, their batting average would be 1.000 (10 hits divided by 10 opportunities equals 1 hit per time at the plate. You just write the .000 because it allows you to get more specific and rank people more acutely), which you pronounce as, ‘a thousand.’ Their on-base percentage would also be 1.000 (10 outcomes reaching base safely divided by 10 opportunities equals 1.000 outcomes reaching base safely per opportunity). But their slugging percentage would be 2.000 because you do 20 total bases (10 two-base hits) divided by 10 at-bats, which equals 2.000 total bases per at-bat. Ten triples in 10 at-bats results in a slugging percentage of 3.000. Ten home runs gets you to 4.000.

People really like to look at on-base percentage and slugging these days to determine offensive baseball players’ worth as men.

Now, today is an off day, but let’s say Josh Naylor somehow had FIVE plate appearances in tomorrow’s game. Actually, let’s be more realistic for the sake of the exercise. Let’s say in tomorrow’s game Luke Raley had FIVE plate appearaces, and in those five appearances, he hit a two-run home run, drew a walk, struck out, struck out, and hit a double.

• Now, let’s calculate his batting average. That one is easy, aside from the fact that you don’t count ‘walks’ in batting average. You basically just erase that entire plate appearance from the batting average and slugging percentage calculations. Raley’s hypothetical batting average for tomorrow’s game would be .500 — 1 home run plus 1 two-base hit divided by 4 at-bats ((1 + 1) / 4 = .500).

• His on-base percentage, which does keep walks in the equation, would be .600 — 1 home run plus 1 walk plus 1 double divided by 5 total opportunities at the plate ((1 + 1 + 1) / 5 = .600).

• His slugging percentage, meanwhile, would be 1.500 — 4 bases on the home run plus 2 bases with the double divided by 4 at-bats ((4 + 2) / 4 = 1.500).

• You can slide to the far right of a game’s box score on most sports apps and websites to look at what pundits like to call a player’s season-long ‘slash line,’ which just lists his batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging, in that order.

• Raley’s ‘slash line’ for this completely hypothetical game would be .500/.600/1.500

Obviously, that’s a really great game. Most Mariner hitters don’t have games like that. And across the span of an entire season, even the best hitters in the game, far far from this Seattle lineup, won’t see numbers like that across a large enough sample size. But those numbers are pretty useful in determining someone’s worth.

Now, I encourage you to go take a peak at the 11-15 Mariners’ lineup, using those three statistics as a frame of reference to judge how much you should hate them so far this season.

1. You have anything to do OR

2. You are affiliated with me professionally in any remote understanding of the word

   1. AND you care about professionalism

OR

C. You hate The Wall.

Please leave in the comments if you think I/we should change our name(s) on here so they don’t reflect who we are professionally. I’m thinking some sort of pseduonym (i.e., Nigel Williamson???). Also, mailbag: jackweigand33@gmail.com. Drop some comments about whether or not you think Nick should get ***********.

“The Northwest deserves a World Series,” Stanton said. “I know we are going to get there. This is the beginning of a special era of Mariners Baseball. There is work to do to take that final step. That work starts now”

Primed with playoff experience and loaded with a young, cheap starting pitching core, MVP talent up the middle, and a sharp bullpen, the city of Seattle enters 2026 with an opportunity to become the first city to hold both the Super Bowl and World Series title at the same time.

Despite not being historically strong spenders (fig 1), the Mariners had never had this good of a reason to spend.

The Mariners have not spent the league’s average annual payroll and have never exceeded the luxury tax. (Spotrac)

Baseball America’s 2025 Executive of the Year Jerry Dipoto has put together a phenomenal team on a tight budget. Thanks to Major League Baseball’s exploitative contract laws, the Mariners pay their elite starting pitching staff a total of $43 million in 2026. For comparison, newly signed Tigers starter Framber Valdez will earn $42 million this year. Our elite bullpen collectively earns $15 million. Newly signed Dodgers closer and former Mariner Edwin Diaz will earn $23 million in 2026.

Offensively, stars Julio Rodriguez and Cal Raleigh — both of whom had top-five pre-season MVP odds this year — are signed to team-friendly contracts through the end of the decade. (Cal infamously signed an extension one day before he began the greatest season by a catcher in baseball history. Remember this when you see his smile across a Bob Oates plumbing commercial).

The only other significant contacts committed to offensive players entering the 2026 offseason belonged to Randy Arozarena and J.P. Crawford, both of whom entered the final year of their contracts this March. Both of the Mariners’ starting corner infielders in 2025, Eugenio Suarez and Josh Naylor, acquired from the Diamondbacks at the trade deadline in 2025, alongside former Mariner second baseman Jorge Polanco, entered the offseason as free agents.

$87 million of available tax space entering 2026 offseason

Offensive players with significant contract obligations for 2026

Thus is the context for the offseason. A young, cheap pitching staff. MVP-caliber players up the middle on team-friendly contracts. $87 million of luxury tax space to fill free-agent holes in the infield, with holes to fill in right field and at the designated hitter spot. Would the Mariners invest in a World Series to fill these positions or scavenge the bargain bin?

The M’s opened free agency by signing first baseman Josh Naylor to a 5-year, 92.5 million-dollar contract. Passing on vibes guy and World Baseball Classic hero Eugenio Suarez, they traded prospect Ben Williamson for all-star Cardinal infielder Brendan Donovan. Maybe this was a new Mariners squad, one invested in winning.

Offensive players after Naylor signing and Donovan Trade. $62 million remaining in luxury tax space

Second base, right field, designated hitter. How would the Mariners fill these holes?

The question at second base began with Jorge Polanco. Polanco was nails in the playoffs, driving home the winning run against Detroit in the ALCS. At 32 years old, his defense and knee put in question his ability to play second base, but he could move to DH if necessary. Polanco signed a two-year contract with the Mets for $40 million. Bargain Bin. Instead, our every day second baseman will be second-year guy Cole Young, who was so bad last year he was left off the playoff lineup.

In 2025 the Mariners’ opening day starter in right field was Victor Robles. Robles obliterated his shoulder in April diving into a net in San Francisco and then faced a suspension at the end of the season for attacking a minor league pitcher. In this void, the M’s threw the bargain bin collection of Dominic Canzone, Luke Raley, and Leody Taveras at the position. Surely the Mariners would look to make improvements here before 2026; with Kyle Tucker and Cody Bellinger looming as big-ticket free agents, the M’s could signal a new era of Mariners baseball. Instead, they opted to sign 36-year-old journeyman Rob Refsnyder, famous for mashing lefties and sucking against righties, for $6 million.

The designated hitter position does not have to play defense. Therefore, that position can be filled by anyone! Vibes guy and home run hitter Eugenio Suarez was a strong candidate to cover the position. Ryan O’Hearn, Josh Bell, Marcell Ozuna, and Kyle Schwarber as well as literally any player who can swing a bat were available. Who did the Mariners sign to fill this position? No one. Dan Wilson will captain the platoon boat of Refsneyder, Robles, Raley, and Canzone through the season

Thus, the Mariners enter 2026, second in World Series odds after letting two out of 3 outgoing free agents walk, having signed no meaningful free agents. They’ll rely on the bargain bin guys, who’ve obviously been our best hitters through the first six games of the season while I finish this scathing critique of their existence.

2026 Opening Day Roster

Regardless of how the bargain bin boys play, the point remains that we are in a rare championship window, yet we left money on the table. The Seahawks don’t win the Super Bowl without aging-yet-experienced free agent acquisitions like Demarcus Lawrence and Cooper Kupp.

We let two veteran players with playoff experience, Suarez and Polanco, walk and didn’t replace them with anyone who can step up when the lights become too bright for, say, Leo Rivas or Dominic Canzone, both of whom struck out in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Blue Jays in Game 7 of the ALCS.

The Mariners won the division on a late season sweep of the Yordan Alvarez-less Houston Astros. They advanced against the Tigers thanks to a miraculous Leo Rivas pinch hit. These are the teams we will need to beat again in 2026 to advance to our first World Series. We are trying to beat them while spending 50 million fewer dollars. Good luck.

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The Jesse Winker/Taylor Trammell Award for Worst Outfielder: Luke Raley

The Luis Castillo Award for Most Hated Starting Pitcher: Bryce Miller

The Matt Festa Award for Least Trustworthy Reliever: Carlos Vargas

The Jesse Winker Award for Most Disappointing Acquisition: Rob Refsnyder

The JP Crawford Award for Shittiest Every Day Starting Position Player: Leo Rivas

The Teoscar Hernandez Award for Best Former Mariner Player on a Different Team: Eugenio Suarez

The Cal Raleigh Award for Least Shitty hitter: Brendan Donovan

The Felix Hernandez Award for Not Yet Shitty Pitcher: Brian Woo

The Jesse Winker Award for Shittiest Defender: Randy Arozarena

The John Stanton Award for Most Deceitful MLB Owner: John Stanton

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“This isn’t a place for people to get reliable news, right? You know, that’s not this platform. That’s why they have other platforms — is for that kind of thing.”

“You’re reading a bedtime story, and you have the paper behind your kid’s head, and you’re rolling while you’re reading. I wonder if my dad ever did that — how cool would that be?”

“I’m sure a lot of our listeners are hitting that [Pagliaci] Wednesday BOGO discount.”

“I was at a game where [Carlos Vargas] was in the bullpen, and we were walking past him in the stadium, and he was talking to Honeys.”

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I realized today that I care more about the Mariners than the Seahawks, in spite of the fact that the Seahawks are an infinitely more successful franchise that just won a Super Bowl. And while this year’s Seahawks team has me riled back up to some degree, the Super Bowl win still didn’t hit as hard as a Mariners World Series win would have, which has been something that’s been really hard to reconcile with my 15-year-old self—something I’ve convinced myself makes me a better person than others for being able to do.

It’s the reason Paul Allen and the Seahawks have failed where John Stanton has succeeded. When the ‘Hawks became average again after their back-to-back Super Bowl appearances in 2014 and ‘15, it didn’t take long for me to lose interest. By the time they’d gotten back this February, all other potentially confounding factors (going to college, hitting puberty, dating, finding out that entities outside of Seattle sports can also hold vague importancef in life) aside, I’d become somewhat indifferent—they’d already taken me there.

The Mariners, meanwhile, still leave something perennially to be desired—and boy, year after year do I continue to desire it. I’m more invested in the Mariners’ upcoming season than I am reveling in the Seahawks’ most recent one. I mean obviously I still think about the Seahawks a good amount, and I still have dreams about the Seahawks at least every week. But I’m already investing much more time, energy and soon-to-be money into caring about the Mariners.

Stanton has figured out how to edge his fan base just enough to keep them stimulated without ever actually letting them get to the summit.

Now, it would be contrived of me to say Stanton was the biggest winner of the Seahawks’ Super Bowl run, although narratively that might have more impact, because that honor obviously belongs to the Seahawks themselves. Saying otherwise would just be over-the-top pessimistic to the point of unrealisticness. Stanton definitely took home the silver, though.

So how did he do it? How did John Stanton actually win the 2025-26 NFL Playoffs?

Well, to start with, with the city distracted, clamoring for their spots back aboard the Seahawk bandwagon, Stanton did what he always does this past fall and winter—very little. And with an entire city already placated by one major men’s sports franchise, nobody noticed how little money was spent on the success of the other. Nobody noticed that the Seattle Mariners, who finished last season on the precipice of their first-ever World Series appearance, had the bargain bin offseason of a playoff contender. Excuse me—they are the bargain big version of a playoff baseball team. They are the bargain bin man’s playoff baseball team.

Based on what ownership did over the past five months, we have little to no chance of beating the Blue Jays or Yankees, let alone the fucking Dodgers (although the existence of the Dodgers may negate the point of this blog entirely). But the majority of fans are riding so high on the Seahawks’ victory parade bus that they’ll swing at pretty much anything the Mariners’ social media team spins at them.

Thirsty for more winning, for the opportunity to tell people about how the Seahawks and Mariners won championships this year, the year they lived in Seattle, people have glued themselves to the seats of a city-wide bandwagon with infinitely spawning benches.

It’s like the guy from whom contributing writer Alex Johanson bought a bagel this morning told Alex, right after he complimented Alex’s Mariner hat. The guy said he couldn’t wait for the humpty plush shoulder giveaway series against the Astros this April. “We’re gonna be even better this season,” the guy told Alex.

People are so bought into Seattle sports after the Super Bowl it doesn’t even matter what happened over the MLB offseason. Most people might not even know we lost Jorge Polanco and Eugenio Suarez, and those that do have probably convinced themselves that Brendan Donovan and Colt Emerson will be just as good.

The window was supposed to be now, but Stanton let it slide shut—not all the way, though, of course. That re-signing of Josh Naylor in November left it cracked open just enough for the Mariners’ social media team to get their grubby little fingers in there and keep blowing smoke through it. Now that I think about it, the Naylor move came just in time for the Seahawks to make their incendiary run.

Picture lifelong Mariner fan Rick Timmons in his room with his girlfriend, watching Rob Refsnyder swing and miss at the final pitch of the 2026 American League Wild Card Series on FS1. “Oh well,” Timmons says an hour later, letting his mouse hover over the ‘confirm’ button on TicketMaster for just a fraction of a second before breathing out a short sigh through his nose and clicking to renew his season tickets through 2027. “At least the Seahawks won the Super Bowl.”

Fortunately, this is probably the last MLB season for a few years, so I guess Stanton may not actually get the opportunity to guzzle the hypothetical Timmons’ hypothetical money in a hypothetical 2027. Perhaps a player strike would help splash steaming hot gatorade on Stanton and the rest of the league’s bargain bin owners. I won’t even pretend to understand what ‘margins’ means, but maybe a lockout could convince certain owners to invest more of their worth into their teams. Is that how it works? Shows you how credible my opinion is.

On that, guess who our 10th-highest paid player is? I’ll give you a hint: his name rhymes with Dob Plefsnyder. Speaking of which, you know what I can’t wait for? Baseball season. And you know who else among the Rick Timmonses of the world will find himself plodding up to T-Mobile Park in a subdued haze all spring and summer, a sheep trotting mindlessly amongst its herd? Me.

1. Steven Kwan LF (Traded in the offseason for OF Lazaro Montes)

2. Ketel Marte 2B (Traded in the offseason for SS Colt Emerson, 2B Cole Young)

3. Cal Raleigh C

4. Julio Rodriguez CF

5. Josh Naylor 1B

6. Haruki Murakami 3B (Signed in the offseason for 5 years, $100 million)

7. Jorge Polanco DH (Signed in the offseason for 4 years, $56 million)

8. Randy Arozarena RF

9. JP Crawford SS

Brian Woo SP

Keep in mind, this is a fantasy world

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The guys sit down and get to the bottom of just what, exactly, a ‘no-trade clause’ even means.

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