Castoffs Find Home With M’S

Perhaps Vince Coleman and Norm Charlton are the Mariners’ odd but awesome couple.

They are, in this September to remember, the first and last men you are most likely to see.

An exciting beginning and a powerful end.

A leadoff hitter and a pitcher with the velocity and control to finish.

Two skill-position players with solid major league credentials who bookend the Mariners’ nightly, and now mostly winning, endeavors.

Both are on the Good Ship Mariner by chance, by luck, by strange baseball fate. It is the M’s who are benefiting. Monumentally.

These two very different veterans share strangely similar sagas. Charlton was written off by the Philadelphia Phillies and Coleman released by the Kansas City Royals. Both turned up in Seattle to play important and starring roles with the pennant-chasing M’s.

Coleman. Charlton.

Starter. Closer.

The first one up to bat. The last guy on the hill.

A base-stealing run-scorer. A heat-hurling game-stopper.

Just what the Mariners needed to make this improbable run at the American League West pennant plausible, possible, probable.

Adversity? Charlton and Coleman have known their share of it, to the point where both considered their careers in jeopardy. Or worse.

What else could a power pitcher like Charlton think when doctors told him, as they did last spring when he was with the Phillies, that they were about to take a tendon from your wrist and sew it into your elbow, which is blown out and out of commission?

What else could Charlton think back in 1993 with the Mariners when they said the “Tommy John surgery” he needed on his left elbow would diminish his velocity and compromise his pitch selection?

“Basically, I said just put the stuff back in there and we’ll see,” Charlton said.

“I said, ‘You fix it and let me go back to work on getting it strong and we’ll see if I can throw hard,”’ said the 32-year-old Texas rancher who claims rehabilitation to his throwing arm was strengthened by a lot of fence-post digging and work on the ranch back in 1993 and 1994.

“Before I pitched for the Reds, they said my mechanics were bad and that I’d never pitch in the big leagues. If you tell me I can’t do something, I’m going to do it. Don’t throw me in the briar patch or tell me not to go someplace because that’s where I’m going.”

Then there’s Coleman, who in another way has climbed back into prominence after his own troubled 1993 season. As a New York Met, he made the awesomely dumb mistake of throwing a firecracker into a crowd, only to see his solid and record-setting career nearly go up in smoke.

Who would want such a player? Not the Mets, who held Coleman out of the lineup for the rest of season and then sent him to the Royals, who also cut him loose for different, less understandable reasons - at least to Coleman.

Back from the ashes, Coleman, 33, is primed to reclaim his rightful place as one of the game’s premier leadoff men.