How ‘Louie Louie’ returned to T-Mobile Park for 2025 Mariners season

The Seattle Mariners are one of the hottest teams in Major League Baseball, with the team off to their best 36-game start since 2003.

That means a lot of happy fans singing “Louie Louie.”

Wait, what?

Yes, the song that one Seattle Times reader described as “as essential in Seattle as peanuts and Cracker Jack” is now back as the team’s popular seventh-inning stretch song, with a little bit of flair.

The Portland-based Kingsmen’s 1963 version of the groovy song — that hardly anyone knows the words to — made its grand return to T-Mobile Park on opening day of the Mariners’ 2025 season, three years after it was benched in 2022, much to the dismay of fans.

So far, the return of “Louie Louie” has been well received by fans, said Tyler Thompson, the team’s director of game entertainment and experiential marketing.

In fact, the fans didn’t even know the return was coming. 

The Mariners had replaced “Louie Louie” with Macklemore’s “Can’t Hold Us” in 2022 in what the team’s marketing head said was a way to bring “a new, fresh energy to the ballpark.” But two years later, the team removed the song when the local rapper made controversial remarks at the “Palestine Will Live Forever” benefit concert in Seattle.

“Straight up, say it. I’m not going to stop you,” Macklemore told the crowd, criticizing the U.S.’s role in the Israel-Hamas war. “Um, yeah, F— America.”

For the last three games of the 2024 season, the Mariners parachuted hot dogs from on high with their “Hot Dogs from Heaven” segment instead with Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven Is a Place on Earth.”

After “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” played on opening day, the Mariners made a play to misdirect the fans. A baseline drum began to play for an extended period of time, Thompson said.

Then, the instantly recognizable guitar riff at the top of “Louie Louie” played and the crowd gasped, Thompson said.

Then they began to cheer. 

“Louie Louie” was first played with “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” at the start of the 1990 season, the first year of the Jeff Smulyan ownership.

As the new owner group tried to make its own imprint on the team, it started playing “Louie Louie,” which was part of a highly publicized but unsuccessful campaign in 1985 by Ross Shafer, the host of KING 5’s sketch comedy show “Almost Live,” to make it the official state song.

The song became cemented in Mariners tradition in the summer of 1990 when the Kingsmen performed it live at the Kingdome. 

But the traditional version of the song won’t always be playing this season. A remix of the decades-old classic, juiced up with “some added BPM (beats per minute) to it to give it a little bit more energy” will play during evening games, Thompson said. The original version will play during daytime games, cleaving to what Thompson said is a “throwback or retro-type experience for our fans.”

The remix was stirred up by local artists DJ Cide and Fraze of Seattle, Thompson said, and went through several rounds of different productions.

But maybe don’t go betting $10,000 that “Louie Louie” will play at the M’s games in perpetuity, like avid Mariners fan Devon Beck who made the lighthearted bet with his buddies, only to share a video of his shock when “Can’t Hold Us” first played in 2022.

“Whether it’s our home run song or what song we play when the team takes the field, we’re always evaluating our experience and our music at the ballpark,” Thompson said. “So we’ll always make the best decision based off the team and the tone of the ballpark.”

Material from The Seattle Times archives was used in this story.