Why we’re making a 3-hour documentary series on the Seattle Mariners

A few months ago, Alex Rubenstein and I had a call with Graham MacAree, lifelong Seattle Mariners fan and our editor-in-chief.

Jon: Right now, we’re planning our next Dorktown project, and we think this is gonna be a big one. We want to tell the whole story of the Seattle Mariners. Everything from the founding of the team up until last —

Graham: Fuck you.

He thought we were joking. We were not joking. The History of the Seattle Mariners is a six-part video documentary series that figures to be about three hours long. As with all our other video content, it will be free for everyone to view. The first episode will debut Thursday, March 26, on what would have been the Mariners’ 2020 Opening Day.

Even to those familiar with Dorktown’s typical insistence on chronicling the least important things in the world, our story selection might seem a little strange. Know this: we have absolutely no affiliation with the team, we’re not doing this to fulfill conditions with any sort of sponsorship deal, and neither of us are even Mariners fans. (Alex is a Dodgers fan, and I’m a Royals fan.) This ought to underscore just how badly we want to tell the story of this fascinating, outrageously weird franchise, starting all the way back with its bizarre origins.

When we first started outlining this project in December, Alex and I originally planned to produce a single video that lasted 30-40 minutes. This idea quickly went out the window as we continued to dig up more and more stories. Some of these stories are tension-filled, some are funny, some are strange, and some are downright stupid. We edited ourselves down to the point at which the only stories we had left were the ones we couldn’t bear to leave out. It was still three hours long.

We’ve written this series with everyone in mind, from people who find baseball to be the most boring people on the planet, to the casual sports fan, to the diehard Mariners fan. You diehard fans will certainly see a lot of things coming, but I think I can safely guarantee there are at least a few things in here that will be new even to you. I grew up obsessed with baseball, always sort of considering the M’s my “other” favorite team, as I think a lot of other kids did during the Ken Griffey years. At least half of this series is made up of stories that I had no clue about until a few months ago.

As you’d imagine, Events have slightly complicated the production and release schedule of this series. We’re pretty confident we’ll be able to release the first three episodes as follows:

• Episode 1: Thursday, March 26
• Episode 2: Thursday, April 2
• Episode 3: Thursday, April 9

In a perfect world, we’d love to release the final three episodes on each Thursday thereafter, but if they’re slightly delayed, we hope you’ll understand.

This series will have absolutely no relevance to anything going on in our lives or the world at large. We just want to make some shit you’ll enjoy for a little while. That’s the beginning and end of it. Love y’all. If you want to be there when each episode drops, you can subscribe to SB Nation on YouTube.