While some Major League Baseball teams call on a monkey for help, or try to chop their way to a dramatic win, the Seattle Mariners managed to rally during a game this season on the strength of a presumably failing computer.
The situation was the bottom of the eighth inning of a 4-4 game on May 31 against the Los Angeles Angels, who had just erased a 4-0 deficit with a T-Mobile Park-silencing grand slam in the top half of the inning.
Sensing the need to get the crowd’s energy level back up, members of the Mariners’ game entertainment team turned to a rally video on the centerfield scoreboard that, at first, looked and sounded like a major fail.
As a Mariners hype clip began to play along to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the music and video suddenly stopped with an error message. The giant video screen then displayed the dreaded “blue screen of death,” which happens in Microsoft Windows when a serious problem causes the operating system to shut down or restart.
As the screen switched to the rolling green hill and blue sky of Microsoft’s default Windows XP desktop wallpaper image, the hush in the ballpark seemed to indicate fans’ cringing sense of sympathy for whomever was running the video board.
Adding to the increased attention: it was Microsoft night at the ballpark, with thousands of fans in attendance with ties to the Redmond-based software giant.
But as a cursor arrow quickly moved across the screen and new windows began to pop open, including a Spotify playlist titled “Emergency Rally Songs,” the rally gimmick started to materialize. The “operator” opened a PowerPoint document and started typing: “Sorry our last video bugged out … BUT FANS, WE NEED YOU NOW!!!! …. SEATTLE, ON YOUR FEET!!!!!!!!! …. IT IS RALLY TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Motley Crue’s “Kickstart My Heart” kicked in and fans jumped up. Thin “ribbon” video screens at T-Mobile were turned into status bars of sorts, showing the rally clip “loading” as the adrenaline in the stadium increased.
Mariners first baseman Ty France eventually stepped to the plate and hit a go-ahead home run in what would become a 5-4 Seattle win. Another successful rally — and rally video.
“You’re always looking to engage the fans, or surprise and delight them in some kind of way,” said Nick Sybouts, a game entertainment coordinator with the Mariners. “It’s those things that I feel like everyone can relate with — that iconic desktop background, the blue screen of death — that not only myself, but probably hundreds of thousands of other people have seen.”
Sybouts, who previously did similar work as an intern with the Seattle Seahawks, is a University of Washington graduate who works closely with Tyler Thompson, a former Spokane Indians press box manager, who is a senior manager in the experiential marketing department and game entertainment team with the Mariners.
Along with video editor James Carlin and others, the small team handles live entertainment elements on Mariners game days, from writing scripts to coordinating ceremonial first pitches, anthems, contests, content for the video board, music, the new Salmon Run and (very viral) Hot Dogs from Heaven, and more.
Sybouts and Thompson alternate at home games, working with producers to “call the show” from a T-Mobile Park control room.
“It is 100% my dream job,” Thompson said. “Working in entertainment, and specifically in sports, this is what I’ve always wanted to do, and there’s no team in the world I’d rather do it for than the Mariners.”
“I didn’t know a job like this existed, and now I know it does and I’m just having the time of my life with it,” Sybouts added.
The win over the Angels was not the first appearance of the so-called “desktop rally.” It was used on Opening Day this year and a couple other times. The reaction was good, so the entertainment team kept it at the ready.
Thompson said you could “hear a pin drop” when fans actually thought something was going wrong in the control booth.
“People think one of two things,” he said. “Whoever this is is the most brilliant on-their-feet thinker of all time, and was just able to turn a live production catastrophe into the hype moment of the year, or, dang, the Mariners really got us because we thought that they actually were experiencing technical difficulties.”
Fans on social media agreed that the Mariners entertainment team pulled off a superior piece of ballpark content. Jack Surge, who writes a newsletter about how to elevate your brand through memes and viral trends, called the video the greatest thing he has ever seen in a post on X that has 12.6 million views.
Thompson said the sweet spot with such content is to not overuse it. It has to remain a surprise for fans. Last July, the team went viral with another clip in which they laid Mariners highlights into a SpongeBob SquarePants “Sweet Victory” video.
“It got posted online and received millions of views and we haven’t run that rally clip since, trying to preserve a little bit of what was special that night,” Thompson said.
Ultimately, the team says it’s in the lab every day trying to pick its spot for the next big moment. They’ve found that rally video success doesn’t necessarily need to come from intensity or drama or be set to “Thunderstruck” or “Seven Nation Army.”
“With young millennials, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, there’s energy and excitement that can be created from meme culture and from the surprise or silliness of something,” Thompson said. “It’s a little bit of our niche, but also something that separates us from the rest of Major League Baseball teams. And we’re going to continue to go down that path, and I can’t promise you that it won’t continue to get weirder.”
