Billy Mac remembers being in the broadcast booth in 2019 when Félix Hernández pitched his final game for the Seattle Mariners. Hernández, a Cy Young Award-winner and six-time All-Star who also threw a perfect game, came up in the big leagues with the team in 2005. But over the course of his 15-year career in the Pacific northwest, he was often the lone bright spot for a franchise that at one time had a 21-year playoff drought (a streak that finally fell in 2022). From his first All-Star season in 2009 until his final one in 2015, Hernández boasted a stunning 2.83 ERA, winning 104 games and losing only 65. Yet, he never once made a postseason pitch. But for Mac, a fact like that is all too familiar for the team he’s rooted now for decades – a team that was established in 1977 and remains the only active MLB franchise to never make a World Series.
“Few careers were less taken advantage of than that of Félix Hernández,” Mac tells the Guardian, refraining from using the word wasted. In the booth that night, Mac says he snapped a photo of the team’s broadcast crew as Hernández left the mound. “They all stood up,” he says. “You don’t see a standing ovation in a radio booth – that was a really special moment.”
For the New Orleans-born Mac, who moved to the Seattle-area in the 1970s with his wife, the Grammy-nominated 1960s pop star Merrilee Rush, he always dreamed of living in a town with pro baseball. As soon as the M’s landed in the region, he bought season tickets in the bleachers. A musician himself, Mac says he’s sung the National Anthem before Mariners games upwards of 60 times and he’s since written a book on the team’s Hall of Fame broadcaster, the late Dave Niehaus, who was also the subject of this Macklemore song. Over the years, Mac and Niehaus became friends, bonding over a love of the game. Mac still follows the team, often listening to its latest standout broadcaster, Rick Rizzs, on the radio. But he can’t shake the fact that the Mariners continue to disappoint their fans.
“We have long had a succession of ownership groups whose understanding of the game was not sufficient to create a winning organization,” he says, diplomatically. In 2016 John W Stanton led a group that bought the team from Nintendo of America.
Mac, like many in the city, romanticize the good years the team has had, from the…