The Seattle Mariners were out of it, as always, four games away from winter in 1991. This was a Wednesday night in Arlington, Texas, three ballparks ago, 12,000 people in the stands. To the visiting broadcaster, it might as well have been the World Series.
For the first time in their tortured history, the Mariners had a chance to avoid a losing record. One more victory and they’d have 81 for the season. It was a modest achievement, clinching mediocrity, but it would mean something. And when the Mariners beat the Rangers that night, Rick Rizzs cared enough to let the moment move him.
“We knew that this could be a baseball town,” Rizzs said, in a conversation in Seattle a few years ago. “We just hadn’t seen it yet, because they hadn’t seen a really talented ballclub. We didn’t have a winning season for 15 years, nothing to go crazy about. And finally, we went nuts! We were crying in the clubhouse in Texas, hugging Alvin Davis and Dave Valle. It was something special. We weren’t losers anymore.”
Rizzs, 72, confirmed on Tuesday that the 2026 season – his 41st with the Mariners – will be his last in the radio booth. He said he would call all the home games this season, plus four road trips. And then, perhaps after another postseason run, he would retire to spend more time with his three grandchildren.
But he will not stray far.
“I’m going to have four tickets, so I’ll still be coming out to games,” Rizzs said by phone on Tuesday. “I’ll be going to spring training. So I’m not going anywhere. I’m just going to wind down a wonderful journey.”
The journey started as a boy in Chicago, where sirens whirled through Rizzs’ neighborhood when the White Sox won the pennant in 1959. Sixteen years later, Rizzs started his career with the Alexandria (La.) Aces, where a college friend had gone to work. Rizzs took a summer job as a clubhouse kid, shining shoes before games and then working three innings of play-by-play.
Life in the booth suited Rizzs, who moved on to call games for teams in Amarillo, Texas; Memphis; and Columbus, Ohio, before the Mariners hired him in 1983. After a discouraging three-year detour in the 1990s with the Detroit Tigers – he replaced Ernie Harwell, who wasn’t ready to retire and ultimately returned – Rizzs came back to Seattle and never left.
“He is Mariners, through and through,” said Dave Sims, the radio play-by-play voice of the New York Yankees, who spent 18 seasons as a fellow Mariners broadcaster. “If he could snap his fingers, that franchise would have five or six rings. I know from talking to him today, he’d love to go out with a bang and win a World Series.”
Rizzs, in fact, has been to the World Series just once, as a fan in 1993. The Mariners nearly delivered him there last fall, coming closer to a pennant than ever with a seven-game ALCS loss to the Toronto Blue Jays.
It was a bitter defeat, a dream season halted eight outs short of the World Series. But never expect Rizzs to lose faith.
“He leads with optimism,” said Shannon Drayer, the Mariners’ longtime pre- and postgame radio host. “And it’s not a blind optimism. It’s truly based in a rock-solid belief that good things are going to happen. He’ll talk to guys behind the cage in batting practice, pat them on the back and give encouragement, and it’s from such a real place. That belief and goodness just radiates from him.”
For Drayer, the feeling crystallized in the abbreviated 2020 season, when pandemic restrictions kept fans from the ballpark and broadcasters from traveling. They called road games off a TV screen in the home booth of a silent stadium. Invariably, Rizzs would remind the audience that scientists were working hard on a vaccine, and someday soon they would all be together again.
Rizzs celebrates with fans at T-Mobile Park after the Mariners’ Game 5 win over the Blue Jays in the 2025 ALCS. (Tyler Kepner/The Athletic)
It was hard to find light at such a dark time, Drayer said, but Rizzs did. That outlook makes him the perfect correspondent for the daily saga of the only franchise to never reach the World Series.
“That’s who he is,” she said. “He believes that the Mariners can get to a World Series. He believes he can sit down with Dave Henderson and figure out, on a cocktail napkin in a bar at the end of a season, how they can help thousands and thousands of needy kids in this area.”
Rizzs and Henderson, the former outfielder, founded a charity in 1995 that has provided new toys at the holidays for 360,000 underprivileged children in the Pacific Northwest. In the decade since Henderson’s death, Rizzs has awarded 80 $5,000 scholarships in Henderson’s name, while starting another foundation providing baseball equipment to kids in need.
“Rick is so kind,” said Chicago Cubs pitcher Matthew Boyd, a close friend of Rizzs who welcomed him for pancakes at his home just last week. “As a human being, it just doesn’t get any better. He’s selfless, he cares for others. He’s kind to my whole family. I’m just so grateful to call him a friend.”
Boyd grew up a Mariners fan on Mercer Island, Wash., and the first time he pitched in Seattle, he sought out Rizzs to thank him. Riding home from Little League games in the back of his father’s Crown Victoria, Boyd said, it was always Rizzs on the radio, synonymous with childhood. Rizzs and Dave Niehaus, he said, made him fall in love with the game.
Niehaus is the Mariners’ forever voice, from the first game in franchise history in 1977 until his death in 2010. He has a statue at their ballpark, which sits at the corner of Dave Niehaus Way and Edgar Martinez Drive.
When Rizzs was struggling in Detroit, it was Niehaus who lobbied to bring him back home – and he did, just in time for the 1995 playoff run that sparked the kind of baseball fervor Rizzs always knew could grip Seattle. His mentor is always on his mind.
“I will never, ever replace Dave Niehaus,” Rizzs said a few years ago. “When the bases are loaded, I’m still gonna say, ‘Get out the rye bread and mustard, Grandma, it is grand salami time!’ He was the best storyteller, one of the greatest announcers of all time, and my job is for his legacy to continue. I want people to feel like Dave Niehaus is still sitting next to me in the broadcast booth.”
By the time he retires this fall, Rizzs will have worked seven more seasons of Mariners baseball than his best friend. He has one more chance for the call of their dreams.