The History of the Seattle Mariners (miniseries, SB Nation, 2020)

[9/10]

Episodes:
"This is not an endorsement of arson" - [9/10]
"Ken Griffey, Jr. and his quest to save the Mariners" - [91/0
"The Battle for Seattle" - [8/10]
"The Seattle Mariners build a death star" - [8/10]
"The Age of Ichiro" - [9/10]
"The Seattle Mariners enter the great beyond" - [8/10]

Alex Rubenstein is probably my favourite of Jon Bois' collaborators so far. Felix Biederman, who wrote SB Nation's MMA docu-series, matched Bois' attention to weird little details, but his brand of political cynicism strikes me as heavy-handed. Meanwhile, Kofie Yeobah matches Bois for personality, but their series about breaking video games lacks the human interest of Bois' other work. Rubenstein, however, is a statistics geek, which means that his and Bois' Dorktown series doubles down on the exploration on graphing historical narratives and the anomalies within. 

This Seattle Mariners miniseries is Bois' third long-form documentary, after the MMA one and a two-part trifle about athletes named Bob. What I really like about his work is how he extracts pathos from mere statistics - the visuals of his videos tend to consist entirely of minimalist slideshows full of charts and newspaper clippings, but he makes the emotional significance of those charts accessible. In The History of the Seattle Mariners, Bois and Rubenstein will crawl through the team's statistical achievements at the same time as a plebiscite determines their fate. Visually, this sequence is little more than basic graphs and lists of numbers, but combined - and in the context of the occasional personal anecdote - these two charts give each other meaning and build significant tension. Little moments like these, combined with the expected smattering of bizarre smaller stories, find Bois and Rubenstein putting their subjectivity aside and wearing their investment on their sleeve, and in the process they unearth the drama and humour of sports history. Sometimes the charts are replaced with a lengthy procession of headlines, and sometimes the two are mixed evenly, but in each case the effect is the same. 

As someone who doesn't know anything about sports and often struggles with statistics, there are stretches where I couldn't quite keep up, and on top of that Bois and Rubenstein will occasionally belabour a point for a bit too long. I ultimately prefer Bois' smaller works; his video on NFL punts is a favourite of mine. And yet the bigger picture is one of his more poignant works, and the much greater scale here is undeniably impressive. Here, he's building to a thesis about the very nature of sports fandom, explaining not only why a losing baseball team like the Seattle Mariners could attract such devotion, but how that devotion differs from fandom built on victories and World Series qualifications. It's enlightening for an outsider like myself, and resonant even outside the realm of sports. I crave this kind of opinionated take on subjects I don't understand, and this is one of the most sophisticated and accessible examples of such - but of course, that's what I expect from Bois.