Mariners, Padres create the ‘Vedder Cup,’ endorsed by Eddie himself

SEATTLE – It took a Long Road to get here. Baseball fans in Seattle and San Diego whose Wishlist has included seeing an informal nickname for the rivalry series between the Padres and Mariners become official can now Smile.

Time to Spin the Black Circle and Hail, Hail the lucky ones: The Vedder Cup is happening.

With the approval and support from Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder, the Mariners and Padres announced Friday that beginning this season the two “natural rivals” will formally compete for the Vedder Cup.

What started as a fun running joke among baseball scribes and bloggers in San Diego years ago and caught on by their colleagues in Seattle, and was later adopted by a subset of Padres and Mariners fans will be an actual competition for Once.

As the namesake of this competition sang in Love Boat Captain: “Let the games begin.”

“He was super engaged with it and thought it would be really fun to be able to do it,” Mariners chief operating officer Trevor Gooby said. “(We) worked really closely with him and the team there and came up with the logo, working through some things of what the actual cup would look like. So it’s been a lot of fun working with the Padres and Eddie to really make this something that will be a fun rivalry and something I think the fans would really love as well.”

The first phase of the Vedder Cup will take place May 16-18 in San Diego as part of MLB’s “Rivalry Weekend,” with the return fixtures Aug. 25-27 in Seattle. As the teams are playing six games, should there be a 3-3 tie in the season series there are tiebreakers in place to determine a champion. Run differential will be the first tiebreaker. If it’s still tied, the team with the highest recorded exit velocity (EV, get it?) on a hit will be declared the winner.

There will be no Indifference here. And yes, there will be a trophy for the winner that is still in the design phase but will likely include a guitar provided by Vedder.

As part of the annual series, the Mariners and Padres will also partner to support EB Research Partnership, a charity co-founded by Vedder and his wife Jill as a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding research to discover treatments and cures for Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB).

Turning the mythical legend into a tangible, official competition was Given to Fly when the Mariners approached Vedder this last offseason. There’s been a strong relationship between the band and the ballclub since the “Home Shows,” sold out T-Mobile Park for two nights back in 2018. Guitarist Mike McCready has regularly performed the national anthem before games, including before Game 3 of the ALDS in 2022, the M’s first home playoff game in 21 years. There have also been nights at the ballpark in recent seasons with specific promotions for members of Pearl Jam’s fan group, the “Ten Club.”

“It’s been a really great relationship. As a fan of the band and a fan of the people, they are some of the most down-to-earth people around and I just really appreciate everything that they do for us,” Gooby said. “And Ed is a huge baseball fan and this is just a really cool way to partner again.”

While bassist Jeff Ament’s sports passion is basketball and skateboarding, and McCready seems to be a fan of all the Seattle teams, Vedder’s sports love centers on baseball. He’s spoken at length – usually during breaks in Pearl Jam concerts – about his affinity for baseball, growing up in Chicago and going to Cubs games at Wrigley Field before he moved to San Diego. His favorite player was José Cardenal, a Cuban outfielder with wild hair flowing out from beneath his ballcap. He wrote a song – All the Way – as a request from Ernie Banks in tribute of the Cubs. When the Cubs ended their championship drought and won the World Series in 2016, Vedder was in the middle of the celebrations.

Vedder’s never held much connection to baseball in either Seattle or San Diego, other than the occasional appearance at T-Mobile Park to throw a first pitch, show up as a spectator or in 2018 on the stage in center field for the concerts. But he’s forever linked between the two cities by what happened in 1990 when a demo tape ended up in Vedder’s hands while living in San Diego. He recorded some song lyrics – the trilogy of Alive, Once and Footsteps – moved to Seattle and the rest is music history.

When interleague play began in Major League Baseball, the Padres and Mariners were designated as “natural rivals,” which seemed to be more out of convenience than actual reason. But it designated that no matter how the interleague schedule fell, the Mariners and Padres would meet almost every season. The 2017 season is the only one where the teams haven’t played.

The suggestion of the Vedder Cup was first mentioned by Padres fan and blogger Geoffrey Hancock when writers covering the team – namely Dan Hayes, then of the North County Times, and Corey Brock, then of MLB.com – sought suggestions for the “rivalry” one year during spring training more than a decade ago.

Hayes, who now works for The Athletic covering the Minnesota Twins, said it came from the boredom of spring training.

“You start thinking of random stuff. The Giants have the A’s. The Dodgers have the Angels. The Cubs have the White Sox. … The Mariners and Padres, what do they have?” Hayes said this week. “We were thinking about it one day and we went on social media and crowd sourced.”

The Padres television broadcasters at the time jumped on to calling the matchup the Vedder Cup and naturally, it made its way to Seattle with local writers and broadcasters – many fans of the band – latching on to the name as well.

Now, it has formality and won’t fade to Black anytime soon.

“We just did this because we liked the band,” Hayes said. “So I’m all for it.”