Mariners and Phillies ending playoff droughts shows the power of going for it

The whole point of being a professional sports team is to try and win a championship. It is also, research has confirmed, impossible to win a championship without first making the playoffs.

The Seattle Mariners and Philadelphia Phillies are both headed back to the playoffs this week, getting their first chances in over a decade to compete for a championship. For the Mariners, it’s been 21 long years, a period that saw their former neighbors, the Seattle SuperSonics, make the playoffs twice, move to Oklahoma and go through the full cycle of title contender to lottery team before the M’s made their way back to the postseason.

Philadelphia has been absent from the playoffs since 2011, which came to an end with a crumpled Ryan Howard tearing his Achilles tendon on the final swing of their season. The Phillies have had six different managers and seven losing seasons since Howard’s injury effectively accelerated their bottoming-out phase.

But now, mercifully, both teams have scraped the postseason monkey off their back and caged it until at least next season. With the help of some much-needed outside acquisitions (as well as the expanded playoffs that allow three wild card teams), the Mariners and Phillies have laid a sort of blueprint for teams that are focused on making it back to the tournament, a perfectly noble goal for any franchise that suffered as long as Seattle and Philadelphia did.

While incumbent talent is always a prerequisite, the Mariners and Phillies showed the power of — and stick with me here — actually trying to win by making their teams better. It’s no secret at all that over the last decade or so, many organizations around professional sports have discovered the concept of purposefully being bad to cut costs, improve their draft position, sell the idea of a crummy present giving way to a brighter future, or a combination of all three. It is also no secret that said formula sucks for fans.

Also, make no mistake about it, the Mariners and Phillies both executed elements of that plan. While they didn’t sink as low as the Cubs and Astros did before winning their recent championships, Seattle and Philadelphia did experience lengthy rebuilds. For the Mariners, the most recent one began after the 2018 season. Robinson Cano, Nelson Cruz, Edwin Diaz, Jean Segura and Mike Zunino were all shown the door, the 2019 team used an incomprehensible 67 players, and all the while general manager Jerry Dipoto was watching his master plan come together behind the scenes.

Notable players drafted during and after that 2018 season (Logan Gilbert, Cal Raleigh and George Kirby) are now part of the first Mariner playoff team since 2001, when they were all still toddlers. Dipoto still recognized that his team was a few pieces away and — unlike many of his peers — was willing to risk prospect capital, his ownership group’s actual money, and self-embarrassment to end the drought.

The Mariners would not be in the playoffs without Robbie Ray and Luis Castillo, the two biggest pickups by Dipoto (a notorious transaction fiend) in the last calendar year. Ray cost $115 million, marking the biggest free agent swing Dipoto has taken during his Seattle tenure. While many teams are still infected with Moneyball brain worms telling them to create a Ray-like player out of three different guys who will cost much less, the Mariners said to hell with that and paid a fair price for a proven commodity.

Their return on that investment has been exactly what they wanted, a veteran clubhouse leader who played a huge role in ending the drought. But that was certainly not always a guarantee for the Mariners, who got another boost in late July. In trading for Castillo, the best pitcher available at the deadline, the Mariners threw caution to the wind in pursuit of something every team should be striving for: a better postseason chance. It will be years before we can determine anything tangible about the prospects Seattle gave up for him, which was all the more reason to flip them.

Selling patience to a fanbase that’s raised and sent children to college in the time since watching their last playoff game is a fool’s errand. Showing them that you’re in it to win it was an obvious move, and Castillo starting the first game of Seattle’s wild card series is the physical manifestation of that move.

In Philly, doubling and tripling down on the all-dingers, no-defense approach miraculously worked out. While the Phillies were mocked for their approach — including by this writer, who picked them to finish fourth in the NL East — it undeniably worked. Kyle Schwarber has, predictably, been an overwhelming negative on defense. But with an NL-high 46 homers entering play on Tuesday, he’s also one of the most positive offensive difference makers in the game. Nick Castellanos hasn’t panned out in the same way, but it’s always more admirable to try and fail than it is for a general manager to hold a press conference explaining why not getting any big names is good, actually.

Like the Mariners, the Phillies also addressed an issue of need at the trade deadline. Getting David Robertson — who’s struck out 31.3% of opposing hitters while holding them to a .198 average in his 22.1 innings for the Phils — not only strengthened their bullpen, it made sure that other teams wouldn’t get Robertson either. That kind of defense can go a long way, as now bullpen-needy playoff teams like the Mets and Cardinals do not have Robertson for their own postseason runs.

Therein lies the other huge advantage of going for it. By simply trying — and in the Mariners’ and Phillies’ case, succeeding — in the pursuit of getting better, it means your adversaries are, by extension, getting a little worse. Some teams were even more naked about getting worse. The Baltimore Orioles dealt proven bat Trey Mancini and All-Star closer Jorge Lopez when they were still very much in the wild card conversation. The Brewers did the same on the NL side, shipping Josh Hader to their direct competition in San Diego. While Hader has blown up in colossal fashion since joining the Padres, the move was a blatant sign from the Milwaukee front office that they were more interested in not paying Hader long-term than they were about him potentially saving postseason games for them.

Now, they don’t have to worry about that, as the Orioles and Brewers will watch from their couches. Even if they do end up “winning” those Mancini, Lopez and Hader trades, both the Baltimore and Milwaukee front offices punted on winning anything meaningful in 2022.

As we’ve seen year after year, anything can happen in October, and if the baseball gods have a sense of humor and distaste for tanking, maybe we’ll get a Mariners-Phillies World Series to reward the teams on the fringes that actually wanted to make it there.