One neat thing about watching the Mariners for your entire life is that it doesn’t take much to make a baseball game entertaining. It also doesn’t take much for a season to start to “mean something”. After all, when you’ve spent enough time squinting at terrible games in an attempt to salvage some positive aspect, you get used to it. The trouble is, it’s not clear whether that’s because you get better at seeing the positive, or if you’ve spent so much time squinting that your eyesight is gone.
For me, all it takes for the 2021 Mariners to be watchable is to be able to look at every player in the starting lineup and say “sure, I guess they would be rostered on other teams”.