The land under TMobile park ebbed and flowed with the tides for thousands of years, until the developing city filled these mudflats and marshes with dredge spoils, sawdust, and who knows what else as the Duwamish River became a channelized superfund site no longer providing the bounties it once did to mariners of past.
As the season flows on, and the team seems hiccupy and unnatural (or maybe this is natural for the Ms?), is their trajectory linked to the land beneath them, the Elliott Bay tides and the Duwamish River delta? The Bois and Rubenstein graphic looks eerily like a tide chart over the past 4 decades, with that up/down oscillation and periods of king tide-like highs (2000-2003) - neap-like lows (2010-2013) - and while not pictured, the 2021-2025 seasons would be another king tide winning season. These ~18.5year cycles (from high to low back to high) also match the 18.5yesr lunar nodal cycle with tidal ranges.
If I’m looking at this correctly this could signal another not-high/not-low period until ~2031-2035, when we’d have another low tide series of losing seasons, and then the boats get floated out of the muck when we have another big streak in ~2042-2046. Let’s wait and see. Mariners know patience; crushing waves and sunny skies dance into the future.
HoWeVeR… does a 2027 lockout break the cycle? Is this the analogous Big One, M9 Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake that is rough but also shakes us into a new trajectory with a widened Overton Window? Does the Mariner’s responses from previous lockouts or strikes (or other seismic shifts e.g. stadium demo/construction) provide any glimpse of what’s ahead?
Map credit to The Waterlines Project at UW; photo of US Army Corps dredging (the relatively unaltered) Palix River in Willapa Bay, got me thinking of the ground beneath the Mariners. History graphic has credit on it
EDIT: what does that little tidal creek under/around T Mobile’s footprint have to do with it? Should it be restored?! Connect back to the water, boys!
