Of course the M's were very competitive during that time but I lived in the Seattle area for about 3 years some time ago and up until then had never been a baseball fan to speak of. Something about the talk about the team every day (even from the main stream media members on the evening news and such), the fact that there was a game pretty much every night of the summer, etc made it pretty easy to get into. I thought I was a baseball convert for sure.
When I moved back to Utah I followed them from a distance and still do a little but it's mostly just watching the standings and reading an article or two from the web. Not the same for sure. Of course they've pretty much sucked since then other than being in the wild card race just this season, so that is part of it too.