Mariners

The Seattle Mariners have played more baseball than any other American franchise without once reaching a World Series, a distinction that has followed them since their creation in 1977 — the city, King County and the state of Washington sued after the Seattle Pilots lasted one season before decamping to Milwaukee, and the resulting expansion club cost its original owners, led by Lester Smith and Danny Kaye, $5.53 million.

Nothing in the club's history matches 2001, when it won 116 games in the regular season, a mark no other modern-era team has equalled, only to fall to the Yankees in the American League Championship Series. Six years earlier, a shorter run had mattered more: the 1995 team reached the postseason for the first time, and Edgar Martínez's double against New York in the deciding game of the division series is still replayed as the moment that is credited, in Seattle, with keeping the franchise in the city at all.

The Kingdome housed the club for its first twenty-two years before T-Mobile Park, opened in 1999 under its original name of Safeco Field, replaced it with a retractable roof over Sodo. The Mariners' interleague meetings with the San Diego Padres, played every year since 1997, only acquired a name and a trophy in 2025, when the two clubs formalised the fixture as the Vedder Cup, after Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, who designed the cup itself.

Of the four Hall of Famers who passed through the roster, it is Ken Griffey Jr. who is remembered first — the player whose swing, in a city otherwise still waiting for a pennant, is what people mean when they say the Mariners were worth watching.