PEORIA, Ariz. — When they arrived on set together, Julio Rodriguez and J.P. Crawford knew they would be shooting a Mariners commercial with one GOAT.
They didn’t know anything about the other goat with whom they would also be sharing the stage.
“Oh (expletive)! That’s a real goat in there!” Crawford howled, quickly turning the other direction and out the nearest door, as if he’d just walked out of a haunted house.
Welcome to the set of “GOAT Yoga,” one of the newest — and, certainly, the messiest — Mariners commercials for the 2025 season.
Ichiro is supposed to be the star of this production. He’s the GOAT (all caps, always) who plays the part of a teacher leading a goat yoga class. Rodriguez, Crawford, Bryce Miller and a handful of Mariners’ minor-leaguers play his students.
The real star of the show, though, is Honey, a 4-year-old goat from the Phoenix Zoo, who was cast as Ichiro’s pet — a four-legged character named “Junior” (after Ken Griffey Jr., of course).
In their initial pitch about the commercial, the creative team from the Mariners’ marketing department had explained to Rodriguez, Crawford and Miller that they would be performing with Ichiro, but the creative team purposely did not tell the players about the actual breathing (and bleating) goat.
“The big idea was to not tell those guys, so that we can capture their raw reaction,” said Tim Walsh, the team’s senior director of digital marketing, and unofficial animal casting director. “We wanted to keep that a secret.”
The first scene for “GOAT Yoga” was shot in late February inside the minor-league locker room at the Mariners’ spring training complex.
Five handlers from the zoo brought Honey to the Mariners’ facility, along with her understudy, Nugget, who waited patiently in one corner of the locker room.
Like Crawford, several minor-league players leaving the shower were startled when they turned a corner and embarked on the four-legged visitors hanging out near their lockers. Talk about a stocked farm team, eh?
Over the next hour, those five handlers will be busy keeping Honey and Nugget on task, and even busier sweeping up their pellet-sized droppings off the locker room floor. (For the record, goat manure is virtually odorless.)
Miller, the Mariners’ pitcher, was also surprised when he first walked into the locker room and saw the goats. Mostly, though, he was nonplussed. He grew up spending weekends on his grandfather’s ranch in southern Texas, doing all kinds of odd jobs. This wasn’t new to him.
“Oh yeah, I know a goat or two,” he said.
The most entertaining — and most challenging — scene of the shoot involves Ichiro trying to command Honey to follow him around a corner and off camera.
Ben Mertens, the Mariners’ VP of creative content, went through handfuls and handfuls of treats for Honey over the course of a dozen takes, trying to help coax the animal to follow Ichiro on cue.
For the final few takes, Mertens had placed a row of treats on the ground to get Honey into the camera’s frame, and then after “action” Mertens quickly ducked inside a locker, curling himself in a ball to hide from the camera.
“You never know how anyone’s going to perform, whether it’s players or goats,” Mertens said. “I think all the performances were really good. We had some trial and error … and that was a first for me, working with a live animal on set.”
After a five-year hiatus, the Mariners commercials returned in 2024 with an overwhelmingly positive response. The creative team got to work early this offseason brainstorming ideas for 2025 commercials, and they knew they wanted one of them to center on Ichiro, who was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in January.
“These spots are just such a wonderful opportunity to showcase the personalities of our players and highlight some of the things people may not know,” said Keri Zierler, the team’s creative director. “I think Ichiro is well known for having a very strict regimen of stretching and things like that. So being able to play on that, even though he may not be a yogi per se, he certainly has a reputation for that stuff, so being able to position him as that kind of mentor for the next generation was certainly a fun place to play from a script-writing standpoint.”
The Mariners debuted all four of their new commercials on social media over the past week, and they’re scheduled to be part of a rotation throughout the season on ROOT Sports.