SEATTLE — The Mariners are gearing up for a big campaign for 2025 as they hope to make it back to the playoffs for the first time since 2022. And the excitement from fans is already through the open roof!
“Yeah, I am so stoked! My gosh!” Jake Lowe, a lifelong Mariners fan, said outside T-Mobile Park.
And with that excitement, we as fans tend to do crazy and really bizarre things we think help our team win. Of course, the classic baseball superstition is where fans wear their hat inside out as a rally cap, but fans like Lowe also tell us they do other things he thinks help the team win.
“You know I am big on just grabbing the hand of someone who is in my section. I mean my wife deals with it,” Lowe said.
But one habit that made Mariners history in recent years is the Rally Shoe.
“It was on a whim to put the shoe on my head, yelling at my brother-in-law and be like it can happen!” Ben Cox, the inventor of the Rally Shoe, said.
Cox started this trend during the Mariners Wild Card watch party against the Blue Jays in 2022. T-Mobile Park was filled with thousands of fans hoping and praying to see the Mariners make it to the divisional round.
Cox says at one point in the game, things were looking grim, so he got the idea to put his Birkenstock on his head like a rally cap to get this going for the M’s. He says once the organization noticed what he was doing and getting the crowd involved, they brought him down on the field to rally the crowd.
“We were just running, at least I was running up and down like the 3rd base line and huck the sandal and was yelling rally shoe!” Cox said.
The Mariners went on to beat the Blue Jays to advance that day. After the game, the Mariners inducted Cox’s shoe into the team’s Hall of Fame. As a lifelong Mariners fan, Cox says it really is an honor.
“To have a piece of like I guess technically kind of me that lives with the Mariners who I grew up loving,” Cox said.
Over the years, Cox says he does see fans do it occasionally at games. He will be the first to tell you that it is a weird thing to do, but he is glad that it has had some impression on fans and on the team he will always love.
“That has been pretty surreal to watch and people are like dude you did that and I am like kind of!” Cox said.
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