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This Sunday, a 72-year-old man will sit down in a radio booth in Seattle, put on his headphones, and call a baseball game for the last time.
His name is Rick Rizzs. For more than four decades he has been the voice of the Seattle Mariners, the man in people’s kitchens, cars and garden sheds every summer evening, describing a game they couldn’t see. He has done this job for over 50 years in all. And in all that time, his team has never once played in the World Series.
Not once. The Mariners are the only team in Major League Baseball that has never made it there.
So what do you call a career like that? A lifetime spent faithfully describing a dream that never quite came true? Rick Rizzs has an answer, and it isn’t the one you would expect.
Who Is Rick Rizzs?
If you don’t follow baseball, here is the short version. The World Series is the championship at the end of the North American baseball season. Reaching it is the whole point of the year. Radio broadcasters like Rizzs “call” the games, meaning they describe every pitch, out loud, live, for the people listening at home. Over a season that’s roughly 160 games, most of them three hours long.
Rizzs came to Seattle in 1983 to work beside Dave Niehaus, the legendary Mariners broadcaster he has called “the single most impactful person in my life.” He left for three years to be the lead radio voice of the Detroit Tigers, then came back to Seattle for the 1995 season and stayed. He became the longest-serving voice the club has ever had.
In January he announced that 2026 would be his last season. His reason was simple: “the reality is that the time has come for me to step back and spend more time at home with my grandkids.”
The Promise He Made in January
Here is the part of this story that most of the farewell coverage steps past.
When Rizzs announced his retirement, he made his fans a promise. He would cut back on travel, he said, “But, believe me, I’ll be on hand to be at every Postseason game all the way to the World Series!”
It wasn’t a crazy hope. In 2025 the Mariners came within eight outs of the World Series before losing the deciding seventh game of the American League Championship Series. Almost the whole team came back for 2026. Going into the season, they were given the best odds of any American League team to win it all.
Then the injuries came. Rizzs counted them off himself: “I think the biggest thing right out of the gate was all the injuries.” Seventeen players went on the injured list. This week the Mariners were officially knocked out of the playoff race. There will be no postseason this year. His final game on Sunday will be the last game of an ordinary regular season, against the Los Angeles Angels, with nothing on the line.
After 52 years in the booth, the man who promised to ride all the way to the World Series will retire having never called one for the team he loved.
“I’m Happy. I’m Sad.”
You might expect bitterness. Or at least a little wistfulness about what might have been. Instead, listen to how Rizzs talked this week about his last days on the job:
“I’m happy. I’m sad. And if you can wrap all those emotions in between all into one, that’s what I’m going through.”
He also admitted he will cry. “I’m a crybaby,” he said. “I cry at Hallmark commercials.”
There is a real sadness underneath this. Three years ago Rizzs lost his son, Nick, at 43. He has called it “an unbelievable loss in my life.” It is part of why family now comes first for him, and why his plans for retirement are so ordinary and so good: time with his grandchildren, and a first trip to Europe to trace his Italian roots.
And yet the word he keeps coming back to isn’t regret. It’s gratitude. “I’m so grateful to the Mariners, to this organization, and the fans have been so great to me,” he said. And: “I’ve been so lucky to do something I’ve loved to do for such a long time.”
Back in January, he put it even more plainly: “I’ve been blessed to live my dream as a baseball play-by-play announcer.”
Notice what he says the dream was. Not the trophy. The job. The calling of the game itself.
How Do You Measure a Career That Never Won the Big One?
Most of us measure a life’s work the way sports measures a season: by the result at the end. Did you get the promotion? Did the business make it? Did the kids turn out the way you hoped? Did you win?
By that scoreboard, Rick Rizzs’s career looks like a long wait for something that never came. But nobody who listened to him for 41 years thinks of it that way, and neither does he.
Think about what he actually did. He showed up for thousands of games. Most of them didn’t matter much in the standings. Plenty were losses. Some seasons were hopeless by June. And every single night, somebody was listening: a trucker on a late highway, a kid in bed with a radio under the pillow, an old man in a care home who couldn’t get to the ballpark anymore. For those people, the game that night was the game that mattered. Rizzs gave it to them as if it did.
That’s also why, in 1995, he helped start a charity called Toys for Kids. The work was never only about the score.
We saw something similar this month when Justin Verlander took the mound one last time after a lost season. And when hockey’s Barry Melrose said goodbye, his farewell named his wife, not his wins. At the end, people rarely talk about the scoreboard. They talk about the people, and the gift of getting to do the work at all.
There’s a very old idea, far older than baseball, that what is asked of the person entrusted with something isn’t that they win. It’s that they be found faithful. Faithful with the ordinary Tuesday night game in August. Faithful with the listeners nobody counts. Faithful for 41 years whether the team was good or not. By that measure, it’s hard to think of a career that finished better than this one.
What Rick Rizzs Can Teach the Rest of Us
Most of us will never win our own version of the World Series. Most lives don’t have a trophy moment. There’s the long middle: showing up, doing the work well, caring for the people in front of us, and hoping the big thing comes.
Sometimes it doesn’t. Rizzs’s last season is proof of that, and he is not pretending otherwise. He still hopes the Mariners get there. “Next year, I’m really positive for this organization,” he said.
But he is also walking away from the microphone saying, “I’m ready. I’m really ready.” Not because he got everything he wanted, but because he knows what he was given.
If you’re in the long middle of something right now, a job, a family, a hope that hasn’t come true yet, that might be worth sitting with. Who you are when the chase ends matters more than whether you caught the thing you were chasing.
On Sunday, somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, people will turn on a radio one more time to hear a familiar voice call a game that means nothing in the standings. It will mean everything to them. That was always the point.
Discussion Question
Is it possible to have a truly great career without ever winning the biggest prize in your field? Who’s someone you admire for how faithfully they showed up, even if they never won the big one? Tell us in the comments.
Share This
Post 1: 41 years calling games for the only MLB team that’s never been to a World Series. Rick Rizzs retires Sunday and the word he keeps using isn’t “regret.” It’s “grateful.” https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bgodinspired-news/bgodinspired-sports-news/rick-rizzs-last-call-mariners/
Post 2: I needed this today. Rick Rizzs never got his World Series. He still says he’s “been blessed to live my dream.” Maybe the dream was the work all along. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bgodinspired-news/bgodinspired-sports-news/rick-rizzs-last-call-mariners/
Post 3: Most of us live in the “long middle”: no trophy moment, just showing up. This piece about a broadcaster’s last game says that’s not a lesser life. https://bgodinspired.com/index.php/bgodinspired-news/bgodinspired-sports-news/rick-rizzs-last-call-mariners/
Questions About Rick Rizzs’ Retirement
When is Rick Rizzs’ last game?
Rick Rizzs, the longtime radio voice of the Seattle Mariners, calls his final game on Sunday, September 27, 2026, against the Los Angeles Angels. It is the last game of the Mariners’ 2026 regular season. He announced in January 2026 that it would be his final season as the team’s primary radio broadcaster.
How long was Rick Rizzs with the Seattle Mariners?
Rick Rizzs joined the Seattle Mariners broadcast team in 1983, working alongside Dave Niehaus. He spent three years as the lead radio voice of the Detroit Tigers before returning to Seattle for the 1995 season. His run with the Mariners spans 41 years, the longest of any voice in the club’s history, within a broadcasting career of more than 50 years.
Have the Seattle Mariners ever been to the World Series?
No. The Seattle Mariners are the only Major League Baseball team that has never played in the World Series. They came within eight outs in 2025, losing Game 7 of the American League Championship Series, and were eliminated from playoff contention in September 2026.
Why is Rick Rizzs retiring?
Rick Rizzs said the time had come “to step back and spend more time at home with my grandkids.” Family has taken on greater importance for him since his son Nick died three years ago at age 43. He has also said he plans a first trip to Europe to trace his Italian roots.
Can a career be great without winning a championship?
Many people who have spent decades in one role say the value of their work was in faithfully showing up and serving others, not in trophies. Seattle Mariners broadcaster Rick Rizzs called games for 41 years for a team that never reached the World Series, and at retirement described himself as grateful and “blessed to live my dream.”
