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For much of the last 20 years, marketing the Seattle Mariners has been less about promoting big events at the team’s T-Mobile Park and more about reminding fans that it exists and baseball is played there.
Prior to 2022, the former Safeco Field last hosted All-Star and playoff games in 2001. It was so long ago that the Mariners’ 2002 All-Star outfielder and reigning American League Rookie of the Year Julio Rodriguez was an infant at the time.
Thanks to his efforts and those of a young core of teammates, however, the Mariners qualified for a Wild Card berth and repaid the Toronto Blue Jays’ Canadian fans for their repeated occupations of Seattle over the years by sweeping their team at home (before being swept themselves by the Houston Astros in the Division Series).
This year, Mariners marketers find themselves with not only known commodities in players like Rodriguez, George Kirby, J.P. Crawford, Luis Castillo and Robbie Ray, but with two premier events awarded to the franchise before it’s even played an inning in 2023. As T-Mobile Park prepares to host both the 2023 MLB All-Star Game and its nearly full week of festivities, it’s also gearing up for the National Hockey League’s next Winter Classic with a potential postseason return by the Seattle Kraken.
Drawing fans and sponsors to a 162-game regular season is enough of a challenge for any MLB marketing department. To effectively sell that slate and multiple major events as well, the Mariners, their sponsors and their partners at MLB, as well as the NHL and the Kraken, have made welcoming fans to T-Mobile Park in 2023 a team effort.
“That’s one of the great things about baseball,” said Gregg Greene, the Mariners’ vp of marketing. “We have 81 home games, we have 47,000 seats, we have 3 million+ opportunities for fans to come inside the ballpark.”
Welcome to Seattle
The Mariners draw from a five-state home region—Washington, Alaska, Oregon, Idaho and Montana—whose more than 961,000 square miles are larger than all but nine nations on the planet.
They play in a city whose population has added nearly 200,000 people since the Mariners last hosted an All-Star Game, and a metropolitan area that’s absorbed nearly 1 million during that same span. Along with the Mariners’ return to the postseason, that has Major League Baseball excited to host one of its jewel events beside Elliott Bay again.