Harger: Goodbye, baseball. Rick Rizzs signs off after 41 seasons with the Mariners, and Seattle loses its kindest voice
Sep 25, 2026, 7:25 AM | Updated: 4:21 pm
In 2002, I was a brand-new board operator at the Mariners’ radio flagship station, running the Mariners’ Hot Stove League show and botching almost all of it. Rick Rizzs, a voice I’d grown up listening to, walked over after the show and made sure I was OK. Looked me in the eye. Asked my name. He’s remembered me every step of the way since.
I’m hardly special. Spend any time in Seattle radio, TV, or around the ballpark, and you hear some version of that story again and again. Stadium workers, interns, producers, clubhouse staff. Rick knew their names and asked about their kids. He made them feel like part of the team.
Rick retires Sunday after 41 seasons with the Mariners. The Mariners were eliminated from playoff contention Thursday, and that’s what makes this weekend so bittersweet. The man called more than 6,000 games, and he never got to call one in the World Series.
Rick Rizzs never stopped being a Mariners fan
Rick has always rooted for this team out loud. Back in 1990, when the Mariners were still losing most nights, he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “I want to see this ballclub succeed.” The columnist called that commendable given the team’s “consistently dreadful past.”
Thirty-six years later, nothing’s changed. In January, fighting back tears at his retirement announcement, he promised, “We’re going to get there and we’re going to win the World Series.” This season, with 17 players on the injured list and the playoffs slipping away, he told “Seattle’s Morning News” last Friday, “We still have a chance.”
Of course he did.
The players feel it. This week, Cal Raleigh unveiled a Rick Rizzs chest protector as a retirement gift. Mariners Chairman John Stanton put it this way in January: “His legacy is the relationships he’s formed with the fans, with players.”
Fans trust Rick because Rick believes. And when a broadcaster loves the team that much, and treats everyone around it with that much respect, he ends up selling the whole game.
Toys for Kids started with one question in 1995
In September 1995, Rick and former Mariners center fielder Dave Henderson were watching a news story about Seattle’s homeless count. Both men asked the same thing: Where are the kids?
The next day, Rick passed a baseball cap around the Mariners clubhouse, and the players filled it. That first year, Toys for Kids bought toys for about 300 children.
Thirty-one years later, the charity serves more than 6,000 families across the state every holiday season.
One cap. Three hundred kids. Six thousand families a year.
Through a program called Rick’s Locker, it also buys gloves, bats, catcher’s gear, and registration fees for boys and girls who couldn’t otherwise afford to play. Somewhere in Washington today, there’s a kid playing catch with a glove Rick Rizzs’s charity paid for. The kid probably has no idea. Rick likes it that way.
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Seattle summers won’t sound the same without Rick Rizzs
Next April, somebody else will call the first Mariners home run of the season. They’ll do fine. It won’t sound the same.
For a lot of us, that voice has been the sound of summer since we were kids. Rick was on in the garage while Dad fixed something that didn’t need fixing. He was on the car radio, stuck on I-5, when the Mariners were down three in the seventh inning, and he still sounded sure.
Extra innings on a school night. In the headphones as you mowed the lawn.
That’s what goes quiet on Sunday.
He’s earned it. Forty-one seasons of road trips, red-eyes, and hotel rooms. So here’s hoping that next summer somebody spots him in the stands at T-Mobile Park, cold beverage in hand, rooting out loud like always.
He’ll still believe.
Holy smokes, Rick. Thank you.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
