8/20/26: Good Intentions Are Not Enough

“If you’re gonna make a wish
Then you better be specific
You’re gonna have to live it everyday”

For the purposes of discussion follow along with this dollop of hyperbole: Dan Wilson is the finest man alive. Such a claim, were it opened to the town square for debate, would not suffer much dissent.

Yes, there is a folksy charm to his midwestern sensibilities and mannerisms. Yes, he appears to have achieved a sort of Lutheran Pope ideation in his decades of ceaseless kindness and good manners. But kindness and calling every woman your age or older “ma’am” has its limit. To truly engender the kind of universal respect and admiration a man like Dan Wilson enjoys, you have to be good.

You need to love others; to pour yourself into them in big and small ways, everyday, for years. You need to be that person to everyone, everywhere, all the time. Character is consistent, and consistency cannot be faked.. By every account that is how Wilson has comported himself for nearly 40 years of public life in the Pacific Northwest. It’s a staggering testament to his character, and one any and all of us can and should aspire to emulate.

All that to say that Dan being so like that is why it’s easy to see the appeal of him as manager of the Seattle Mariners. Cynical voices (hello!) were quick to skewer the team for indulging their 1995 fetish upon the announcement of Wilson’s hiring back in 2024, but I think it has much more to do with how highly so many of the organization’s power brokers think of Dan*.

A quick aside: As one of this internet’s finest and foremost purveyors of scorn for the ownership group of the Seattle Mariners Baseball Club, I want to offer them some slight praise. As sports ownership groups are rapidly shifting from family-owned luxury totems to yet another market for faceless amalgamations of venture capture, oil blood money, and what Defector’s David Roth would term “prospective genocidaires”, the Mariners ownership group consists by and large of old world rich guys.

These are people with far more money than sense, yes, and that wealth has absolutely rotted their brains and souls, but they are still people for whom relationships and loyalty hold a sort of value. Many of these dudes have been banging around the halls of Mariner power as long as Dan Wilson has been here, and they love him. They love him because knowing such a kind, good person must mean there’s an element of kindness and goodness in them, or so I would imagine they tell themselves.

Anyway, we have then a man whose foremost life skill is being a fabulous human being, and one who earnestly wants to be a baseball manager. Given that, as near as we public can tell, baseball managing is a role at least as much a hybrid shaman/medicine man as it is Bonapartian field general, it’s not hard to see how “Good man = good manager” becomes an alluring hypothetical.

All that, then, makes the reality of the present so stark. Dan is every bit as good of a man as everyone says. His players seem to genuinely love him and appreciate his role in both their careers and lives. And yet the Mariners - who entered the 2026 season with as much hype and fanfare as any in franchise history - enter today’s off-day 59-66, in danger of finding themselves out of the playoffs in the weakest American League in recent memory. Dan’s goodness has not only not elevated the team to new heights, it has failed to prevent precipitous fall off to arguably the franchise’s lowest point of the decade..

There is at the core of this a level of hubris from both Dan and the team. An idea that character is a catch-all substitute for acumen and skill requires a level of self-dilusion. The Mariners love Dan, and Dan really wants to be a good manager. Everything he does, all-day, everyday is geared towards achieving this outcome. And yet, for reasons both within and without his control, the team is wretched and unwatchable in a way that fans are not only ignoring the team, they are beginning to hate the unhateable man himself.

This is the cruel reality, in baseball and life: You can mean well, and spend every moment of your life trying to do well, and fail spectacularly. Good intentions serve as a starting point, but do not guarantee an outcome. An opposing hitter does not factor in the purity of the intent with which you called Michael Rucker in from the bullpen, and a hanging slider to Christian Walker cancels out any thoughtful check-in on a player’s loved ones before the game.

We can want good, and be good, and still fail to do good. Good intentions are not enough; for Dan Wilson, the Mariners, or for us.