Mariners end two decades of misery returning to postseason

By TIM BOOTH
AP Sports Writer

SEATTLE (AP) — Baseball is fun again in the Pacific Northwest in a way that it hasn’t been in more than two decades. The longest postseason drought in the four major professional sports ended Friday night when the Seattle Mariners earned a long-coveted spot in the Major League Baseball playoffs. Seattle will play in the wild-card round, potentially as the beneficiary of the playoff expansion that added a third wild-card team for each league. But the path hardly matters to fans, who if they were born the last time Seattle made the playoffs in 2001 are now legally old enough to buy an alcoholic beverage to celebrate the return.