The Dorktown series detailing the history of Major League Baseball’s Seattle Mariners, written by Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein, might not be the most talked-about sports journalism of the COVID-19 era, but maybe it should be. While ESPN/Netflix’s The Last Dance, by Jason Hehrin, thrills us with previously unseen footage of the 90s-era champion Chicago Bulls, and highlights the backstories of the players that ultimately led Chicago to winning six titles, the success of that documentary feels like a lay-up. Jordan, Pippen, Jackson, Rodman, winning it all six times. Of course we’re interested.
If Hehrin shows us what athletes are capable of when the sporting gods smile upon them, Bois shows us in his inimitable, hilarious way what happens when the gods never give so much as a cursory glance.
His tales are usually ones of comic tragedy, sometimes recalling a player’s fall from grace, or their improbable ascent to superstardom, or, in the case of the Mariners, endless quarry for no apparent reward.
But merely being told that the Mariners are perennially unsuccessful isn’t an appealing narrative on its own. Bois, however, with great instincts for visual clarity and comedy, arranges newspaper clippings, grainy footage charts, and Google Earth into an elaborate historical mosaic, giving us a panoptic view of Mariners baseball that encapsulates how unfortunate their existence has been and how ridiculous baseball as a sport is. That isn’t to say he’s critical of the sport - he very clearly loves it - but loves even more to revel in its apparent arbitrariness and contradiction, and to ask us to appreciate, for a moment, the sublime, the odd, and the improbable galactic alignments that often escape our vision.
He has a very impressive mind for numbers and records, often performing laborious and time-consuming number crunching that would make most writers of his ilk second-guess their sanity (see “We Decided to Erase the Three-Pointer”, or “What if Barry Bonds Played Without a Baseball Bat”). It is, however, his knack for finding pathos and comedy in sports, as he does here, that is his most enduring skill.
He also serves to codify an important idea that is often grasped for and missed; that the achievement of a great and lofty goal can be thwarted - equipped though you may be with all the skills, personnel and preparation - but the character, the memory, and the beauty found in its pursuit will nonetheless remain.
And through the eyes of Bois that beauty becomes clear. He has a gift for storytelling that makes this writer lament not being born years earlier - or at least more geographically proximate - to appreciate more fully the impact the subjects of his videos can leave. Maybe I’m nostalgic for a time I never witnessed, or an emotion that never was, but after watching this nearly-four-hour saga about a baseball team - and I never cared about baseball at all - I really wish I had the chance to feel what Seattle felt when Ken Griffey Jr lined up alongside his father, or when Randy Johnson pitched himself to exhaustion against the Yankees in ‘95, or when Edgar Martinez would knock another one out of the park, or when Ichiro Suzuki would do literally anything.
The Mariners, despite endless talent and opportunity, never made it to the World Series. I wish I was in the stands watching them fail.