TORONTO — Every so often in the Seattle Mariners clubhouse, the “Top Gun Anthem,” full of soaring guitar notes and uplifting vibes, will blare randomly from inside a locker. Everyone knows the culprit. Jorge Polanco, the Mariners’ veteran second baseman, doesn’t like to silence his phone.
“But he loves Maverick and Iceman,” Mariners star Cal Raleigh said.
It really doesn’t bother anyone. When a player does what Polanco did in the postseason — saving the Mariners from the danger zone seemingly daily, with his final trick, a three-run home run that paved the way for Monday’s 10-3 victory — his ringtone could be Limp Bizkit and no one would utter a word.
Instead, it’s the perfect soundtrack for this Mariners run, which currently sees them two games to none against the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League Championship Series. “Top Gun Anthem” is an epic ballad filled with highs and lows that personify an organization that has spent 49 years alternating between the desolation of mediocrity and the heartbreak of underperformance. The only Major League Baseball team never to appear in a World Series, Seattle is two wins away from winning its first American League pennant and returns home to T-Mobile Park for Game 3.
The Mariners’ dominance is largely due to a 32-year-old infielder whose exploits have earned him the right to call himself Iceman — and yet that’s not the nickname Polanco goes by these days.
“It’s George Bonds,” said M catcher Mitch Garver.
Yes, Polanco’s alter ego is the anglicized version of his first name and the last name 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) into a gap or over the fence. It was unbelievable.”
Especially considering last winter, Polanco wasn’t sure if he would be healthy enough to continue playing in the major leagues. Polanco, who had suffered years of left knee problems, underwent surgery in October 2024 to repair his patellar tendon. A free agent, Polanco received limited interest on the market and ended up re-signing with the Mariners for one year and $7.75 million.
“It’s been a journey, man,” Polanco said. “That’s how 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 was a little hurt, so yeah, but now we’re here, and I’m glad to be back.
“You just have to have faith. You will overcome. Come back stronger.”
Polanco’s strength was on display throughout October. He first appeared in Game 2 of Seattle’s division series against the Detroit Tigers when he hit two home runs off ace Tarik Skubal, who is on his way to winning his second straight Cy Young Award. It continued three games later in a winner-take-all Game 5 when he hit a single into right field in the 15th inning, giving the Mariners their first ALCS since 2001. It didn’t stop there, with Polanco’s single in the sixth inning of Game 1 against the Blue Jays on Sunday.
Then came Monday’s fifth-inning blast against Toronto reliever Louis Varland, which launched a 98 mph fastball over home plate and saw 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 just has that kind of spin right now where he stays put.”
This is no coincidence. Polanco arrived in the big leagues with the Minnesota Twins in 2014 at the age of 20, a bat-to-ball savant whose ability to hit from both sides of the plate earned him a regular role with the team.
“He wasn’t George Bonds before,” Garver said. “It was Harry Potter. Because he was a wizard. He was just conjuring up achievements.”
Polanco found power five years into his career, and he hit a career-high 33 homers for the Twins in 2021. But the degradation of his knee sapped the juice from his bat and left him struggling too often on pitches he would have sputtered on before. Last year, in his first season with the Mariners, his numbers exploded, but the organization liked Polanco’s level-headed attitude and believed that repairing his knee would also fix his swing.
The Mariners were right. George Bonds was born during a ridiculous first month of the 2025 season when he hit nine home runs in 80 plate appearances. Polanco had adopted M’s philosophy of shooting the ball in the air. Raleigh led the MLB with a 1.594 OPS on drawn balls. Third baseman Eugenio Suarez was second with 1.497. Polanco has hit 23 of his 26 home runs this season from the jumper side, and his two home runs against Skubal (hit from the right side) and the one against Varland (left) were met in front of home plate and blasted over the fence.
“Over the years, I hated going to Minnesota just because of him,” said shortstop JP Crawford, the longest-tenured Mariner. “The guy alone has beaten us so many times. We all know what type of player he is when he’s healthy, and it’s clearly showing right now.”
Never in the 150-year history of the game had a player recorded three consecutive game-winning hits in the fifth inning or later during the postseason. It’s the kind of performance teams need to win pennants – and championships. As brilliant as Raleigh has been in a potential MVP campaign and as conflagrating as Julio Rodriguez was in the second half and as dominant as Seattle’s pitchers have been on the road thus far, winning baseball in the postseason takes more.
Like, say, a guy who, during the winter, was relegated to cleaning as an afterthought and never wavered, even in the most demanding situations.
“The most impressive thing is bouncing back from a tough year last year,” said Seattle pitcher Bryan Woo, who will start Game 3 Wednesday against Toronto’s Shane Bieber. “Especially for a guy on his second team, halfway through his career. To do what he does – be healthy, come back, help the team like he did – is even more impressive than just playing good baseball.”
Playing good baseball helps too. Polanco helped Seattle find itself in a situation that just a month ago seemed impossible to conceive. From mid-August to early September, the Mariners lost 13 of 18, trailed the Houston Astros by 3 1/2 games in the AL West and held a half-game lead over 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 blazed a trail into history.
They are 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.
“Yes, we are considering it,” he said. “We’ve heard it a lot. We know it.”
This knowledge did not deter them. Raleigh rakes. Rodriguez punches. Josh Naylor, who grew up in nearby Mississauga, Ontario, hit a two-run homer in Game 2 of the ALCS. And George Bonds showed up in style, cold like Iceman, cool like Maverick, perfectly happy to eschew silent mode in favor of loud contact.
