TORONTO — Every so often in the Seattle Mariners clubhouse, the «Top Gun Anthem,» full of soaring guitar notes and pick-me-up vibes, will randomly blast from inside a locker. Everyone knows the culprit. Jorge Polanco, the Mariners’ veteran second baseman, is not a fan of silencing his phone.
«But he loves Maverick and Iceman,» Mariners star Cal Raleigh said.
Nobody really minds. When a player is doing what Polanco has done this postseason — rescuing the Mariners from the danger zone seemingly daily, with his latest trick a go-ahead three-run home run that paved the way for Monday’s 10-3 victory — his ringtone could be Limp Bizkit and nobody would utter a peep.
Instead, it’s the perfect soundtrack for this Mariners run, which currently sees them up two games to none against the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League Championship Series. The «Top Gun Anthem» is an epic ballad filled with the sorts of ups and downs that personify an organization that has spent 49 years alternating among the desolation of mediocrity and the heartbreak of underachievement. The only team in Major League Baseball to never to play in a World Series, Seattle is two wins away from capturing its first American League pennant and is heading home to T-Mobile Park for Game 3.
The Mariners’ dominant position is in large part thanks to a 32-year-old infielder whose feats have earned him the right to be called Iceman himself — and yet that’s not the nickname Polanco wears these days.
«He’s George Bonds,» M’s catcher Mitch Garver said.
Yes, Polanco’s alter ego is the anglicized version of his first name and the surname of Major League Baseball’s all-time home run leader. He earned it earlier this season, Garver said, when «everything he hit was 110 [mph] in a gap or over the fence. It was unbelievable.»
Particularly when considering that last winter, Polanco didn’t know whether he would be healthy enough to keep hitting major league pitching. Polanco, who had struggled for years with left knee issues, underwent surgery in October 2024 to repair his patellar tendon. A free agent, Polanco drew limited interest on the market and wound up re-signing with the Mariners for one year and $7.75 million.
«It’s been a journey, man,» Polanco said. «That’s the way I can put it. I wouldn’t say it’s been bad. I wouldn’t say it’s been easy. I think God just prepared me for this year. I’ve been hurt a little bit, so yeah; but now we here, and I’m glad to be back.
«You just have to have faith. You overcome. Come back stronger.»
Polanco’s strength has been on display all October. It first appeared in the second game of Seattle’s division series against the Detroit Tigers when he hit two home runs off ace Tarik Skubal, who is about to win his second consecutive Cy Young Award. It continued three games later in a winner-takes-all Game 5 when he lashed a single into right field in the 15th inning that advanced the Mariners to their first ALCS since 2001. It didn’t stop there, with Polanco’s go-ahead single in the sixth inning of Game 1 against the Blue Jays on Sunday.
Then came Monday’s fifth-inning blast off Toronto reliever Louis Varland, who fed a 98 mph fastball over the plate and watched it leave the bat at 105.2 mph, flying 400 feet to turn a 3-3 tie into a 6-3 Seattle lead.
«He’s always been a great hitter,» Mariners manager Dan Wilson said. «His swing right now is very short. That ball tonight, I wasn’t sure it was going to go out of the ballpark, but I think he’s just getting that kind of spin on it right now where it stays up.»
That is no accident. Polanco arrived in the major leagues with the Minnesota Twins in 2014 at age 20, a bat-to-ball savant whose ability to hit from both sides of the plate carved him out a regular role with the team.
«He wasn’t George Bonds before,» Garver said. «He was Harry Potter. Because he was a wizard. He’d just make hits appear.»
Polanco found power five years into his career, and he maxed out with 33 home runs for the Twins in 2021. But the degradation of his knee sapped the juice in his bat and left him flailing too often at pitches he’d have previously spit on. Last year, in his first season with the Mariners, his numbers cratered, but the organization appreciated Polanco’s even-keeled demeanor and believed fixing his knee would fix his swing too.
The Mariners were right. George Bonds was born during a ridiculous first month of the 2025 season when he whacked nine homers in 80 plate appearances. Polanco had embraced the M’s ethos of pulling the ball in the air. Raleigh led MLB with a 1.594 OPS on balls pulled. Third baseman Eugenio Suarez was second at 1.497. Polanco hit 23 of his 26 home runs this season to the pull side, and both of his homers off Skubal (hit from the right side) and the one against Varland (left) were met in front of the plate and yanked over the fence.
«Throughout the years, I hated going to Minnesota just solely because of him,» said shortstop J.P. Crawford, the longest-tenured Mariner. «The guy single-handedly beat us so many times. We all know the type of player he is when he is healthy, and it’s clearly showing right now.»
Never in the game’s 150-year history had a player logged three consecutive game-winning hits in the fifth inning or later during the postseason. It’s the sort of performance teams need to win pennants — and championships. As brilliant as Raleigh has been in a could-be-MVP campaign and as conflagrant as Julio Rodriguez was in the second half and as dominant as Seattle’s pitching has been en route to this point, winning playoff baseball takes more.
Like, say, a guy who over the winter was an afterthought now hitting cleanup and never wavering, even in the highest-leverage situations.
«What’s most impressive is bouncing back after a rough year last year,» said Seattle pitcher Bryan Woo, who is lined up to start a potential Game 5 on Friday. «Especially for a guy on his second team, back half of his career. To do what he’s doing — get healthy, come back, help the team like he has — is even more impressive than just playing good baseball.»
Playing good baseball helps too. Polanco has helped get Seattle in a place that barely a month ago looked impossible to conceive. From mid-August to early September, the Mariners lost 13 of 18, trailed the Houston Astros by 3½ games in the AL West and held a half-game lead on the Texas Rangers for the final wild-card spot. From there, the M’s went 17-4, won the West, earned a first-round bye and charted a course for history.
They’re not there. And yet even Polanco admitted that Seattle players can’t ignore the team’s history and recognize what it would mean to get to the World Series.
«Yeah, we think about it,» he said. «We’ve heard it a lot. We know.»
The knowledge hasn’t deterred them. Raleigh is raking. Rodriguez is slugging. Josh Naylor, who grew up in nearby Mississauga, Ontario, blasted a two-run home run in Game 2 of the ALCS. And George Bonds has shown up in style, cold as Iceman, cool as Maverick, perfectly happy to eschew silent mode in favor of loud contact.
