First of all, let me be clear: this isn’t JUST about Josh Hamilton. Sure, the Mariners were rumored to be in the hunt for the services of the 31-year-old outfielder. And yes, they failed miserably in their quest to land him. But come on. Let’s be real here. Did anyone really, truly believe the Mariners had the wherewithal to sign a free agent of Hamilton’s ilk? The most coveted free agent of the 2012-2013 class? No. We didn’t believe it. We might have hoped. We might have prayed. But we didn’t believe. Because we can’t believe. Believing requires faith. And the Seattle Mariners have destroyed ALL our faith in recent years. They are Lindsay Lohan behind the wheel and we, their fans, are reluctant passengers. This will not end well. We know it won’t end well. But we hope and pray that it WILL end well. Ultimately, our hopes and our prayers go unanswered.

The Mariners are murderers of happiness. You wake up one morning full of blissful ignorance, stupidly giddy over nothing at all, and then the team you love with all your foolish, little heart comes and craps on your day with remarkable aplomb. Why do they do that? Why do we let them? These are questions no one has answers to.

This has been going on for years. Decades, even. The M’s have let us down, let us down, and let us down again. We are the wives who watch our husbands come home from work each day, toss their briefcases aside, crack a beer, and sit on the couch in silence, doing nothing at all. They don’t pay attention to us. They don’t acknowledge our existence. They don’t take us nice places. They don’t buy us nice things. There’s no reason for us to be together. We should get a divorce. We should! These are irreconcilable differences. There’s no spark. There’s no zest. There is seemingly nothing. There is just this thing holding us together. This thing you can’t describe, really. It’s not love so much as it’s the hope that love exists. We hope there’s something there. And even as we are disappointed time and time again, we continue to wait for our hopes to be rewarded. We are buffoons.

It’s not the failure itself that bothers us. It’s the way they fail. They fail for lack of trying. It’d be one thing if the Mariners front office was falling short in amazingly spectacular fashion. Throwing millions and millions of dollars at wise investments only to watch each and every one of those investments crash and burn like the Hindenburg. But no. They refuse to put forth much effort at all. They carefully calculate their decisions before f**king them all up. They are beggars who choose. They constantly seem to be in search of the prototypical player. They are the people who shop at Wal-Mart looking for bargains, then bitch and moan when their 99-cent headphones don’t provide Bose quality. They are the fat, ugly bastard living in denial who refuses to date any woman short of Cindy Crawford. It is ridiculous to believe that they can get what they want when what they want apparently does not exist.

They are the girl who has been burned by two or three jerks who, as a result, gives up on men altogether. They threw money at Richie Sexson, Adrian Beltre, Chone Figgins. It didn’t pay off. Their recent free agent signees turned out to be busts. So now, they won’t even go after the big names that command big money contracts. They’ll spend a couple pennies on scrap heap material. They’ll take their chances on a decrepit Jason Bay, like it’s 2005 or something. But they won’t pay the cornerstones they need to build a franchise around. They refuse to do that. They’ll date low-risk, safe guys only. No taking chances here. Not Seattle. Safety first in Seattle.

And to top it all off — to top it ALL off, as if this hasn’t been enough — they treat us like shit. Like we’re naive dumbasses that don’t know jack about baseball. Naturally, that behavior is epitomized by our team president, Chuck Armstrong, and team CEO, Howard Lincoln. Every time I see Howard or Chuck on my TV, I notice those annoying little half-smirks on their faces, as if we couldn’t POSSIBLY do their jobs as well as they think they can. Every time I hear their voices on my radio, every time I see their quotes in print, I imagine those half-smirks. Every time I so much as THINK about those two bumbling idiots, I envision those half-smirks. And at the end of the day, all those half-smirks add up. Those dickheads treat us like children. Like we wouldn’t know shit if it landed in our toilet. They patronize us. It’s disgusting. Flat-out disgusting. There is ZERO respect for the Seattle Mariners fan base from the men who run the team. They could not care less about us. And that pains me to the utmost degree. Because we want to love the Mariners so, so, SO badly. But they don’t care. They don’t care about loving us in return. Assholes. They’re assholes.

When I look back on the twilight of the Howard Lincoln-Chuck Armstrong Seattle Mariner regime, I’ll remember all the shit they put us through. Bad trades, half-assed attempts at landing free agents, zero effort to improve the product on the field. And of course, their wholehearted desire to stop an arena from being built in their own backyard. It’s the only thing they’ve passionately devoted themselves to. If they cared half as much about their ballclub as they do striking down an effort to improve the lives of Seattle sports fans in this region, we’d already have a few World Series banners hanging in the Safeco Field rafters. But alas, they don’t give a damn about us. They suck. They just suck.

Here’s a suggestion to Chris Hansen and all those individuals working diligently to get a multi-purpose sports arena built in the SoDo neighborhood: disguise your arena as a big-ticket free agent or a loyal M’s fan. If you do that, the Mariners are sure to turn a blind eye.