Mariners Are Transforming
I had my reasons to doubt.
Eighteen years of wretched pitching, anemic hitting and throw-up-on-your-shoetops fielding led me to believe the Seattle Mariners would find a way to hurl the feast of victory into the toilet of defeat.
As a gullible Mariners rooter in my youth, hope ran step-for-step with despair in the Kingdome. I saw Gorman Thomas hit home runs, but not as often as he swung lamely over his paunch at strike three. I saw Mark Langston throw breaking pitches that gave batters seizures. But I also saw Matt Young throw batting practice. During his starts.
I’d been duped before by this squad.
Yet in my youth, I continued to think that if Alvin Davis just kept swatting the ball, if Eric Holman could just come back from having his shoulder roto-routered, then …
Then never came. Dave Neihaus aged 75 years in calling 19 years of Mariners baseball. Every August any semblance of a fresh-brewed pennant chase was secretly replaced by freeze-dried Folgers Crystals, and the bitter difference nearly turned me away for good.
So this year when the M’s lodged hot dogs in their throats in the final two games of the regular season to force a playoff with California, I was a little smug.
I confidently predicted that, in a perverse twist on the flick “Angels in the Outfield,” the ghosts of two decades of Mariners futility - John Moses, Jack Perconte, Phil Bradley to name a few - would swoop down from the Kingdome rafters and trip Ken Griffey Jr. while he galloped to make the winning catch.
I was a non-believer. Surely you were one, too.
The big win to clinch the division over California only deepened my doubt. With Randy Johnson spent, the M’s were mere table scraps for the hungry New York Yankees.
After Wednesday morning’s 15-inning Greek tragedy ended, our pitcher turned the tables and tried to gouge out the eyes of the public by threatening TV cameras after he’d served up the game-winning homer. My doubt blossomed into metaphysical certitude.
Even as Johnson’s Friday night fastballs threatened to reverse the rotation of the Earth and move us back in time like in the first “Superman” movie, I steeled myself for visions of joyous Yankees swarming the field, of George Steinbrenner spilling a whole Kingbeer on his lap in celebration. But Johnson prevailed, George did not wet his pants, and I saddled up the wagon for a long drive. I had a ticket for game four.
The Kingdome Saturday looked like the same dismal depository for Mariners losses I remembered from dozens of trips there in my youth.
Chris Bosio, whose knees are held together with twist-ties and dental floss, started for the Mariners. Soon, it was 5-0 Yanks. Somewhere, Dick Williams, who used his tenure as Mariners skipper to conduct game-losing experiments on players, laughed into his respirator.
Never had 57,100 humans seemed as sullen. Even flat-from-the-tap Kingbeers decayed into primary ingredients (water, particleboard, yellow coloring).
From the third inning on, however, I do believe I found religion.
When a Yankees fastball went from Scott Kamenicki’s fingers to Edgar Martinez’s bat and very quickly to some lucky fan out in left field, the Dome began to transform. It became, simply, the Church of the Divine Rally.
Multiple pastors delivered sermon after sermon at the pulpit of home plate. The messages were simple, direct, and inspiring to all. Try your best. Never give up. Sacrifice for the team. Hit that hanging crap from Yankees pitchers to Tukwila.
And when Edgar completed the rally in the eight inning by redirecting a fastball 426 feet in the opposite direction from which it came, the cacophony that followed was magical. It became too loud to think, to speak, and for me, just too loud to doubt.
Sunday, back in the confines of my cave-like apartment, I watched New York take three leads. The ghosts of Richie Zisk, Jim Presley and even Ivan Calderon loomed in the shadows.
But at no time did I think the M’s were finished. When Edgar struck the fatal double to Steinbrenner’s dreams and Griffey sped around third base to score, I was barely surprised.
All is possible in the Church of the Divine Rally.
And I do believe.
, DataTimes