In my adult life as a baseball fan, I don’t know that I’ve ever felt as excited as I do now. As I write this on the last night of September, my team — that is, my home team these past eight seasons, the Seattle Mariners — is tied for the second wild card slot in the American League. (For those of you less than familiar with baseball’s playoffs, it works like this: Each league has three divisions, which means there needs to be a one-and-done wild card game between two non-division-winning teams to have four teams ready to compete in the rest of October’s post-season games: first the league divisional series, then the league championship, and finally the World Series.)
There’s been big buzz in baseball land this week over how tight the American League wild card race has become. As of tonight, the New York Yankees are 91-68, with a two-game lead on the top wild card spot, so they’re likely in the game. The next three teams have nearly identical records: the Mariners and the Boston Red Sox are tied at 89-70 and the Toronto Blue Jays are one game back at 88-71. Between now and Sunday afternoon, a variety of scenarios might unspool to determine who will get to play in the AL wild card game next week and quite possibly a tie-breaker “play-in” game (or two) beforehand, depending on how many teams finish with the same record.
As a fan of baseball and good writing, I enjoy reading Lookout Landing, a Mariners fan site. The site’s logo shows a lone dejected man sitting slumped, head down. I’ve only been here for eight seasons, but that’s long enough to know the perennial pain that Mariners fans feel. Ours is the only team in Major League Baseball that’s never been in a World Series. We famously have the longest post-season drought in major professional sports, nearly two decades without a playoff appearance. Why should that change now?
It should change because change is inevitable, as is chaos, which is what the Mariners have been riding all year. Last April, no one gave this team a chance to make the postseason this year. As of tonight, the Mariners have scored 48 fewer runs than their opponents, and yet here they are, poised to make the playoffs anyway — or not, and in many ways, it hardly matters. Whatever happens these next three days won’t diminish the fact that this has been a magical year of shattered preconceptions and us-against-the-world camaraderie: of rookies toughing it out to learn what it takes to be in the big league … of a widely derided trade at the end of July turning out to be a brilliant move … of 33 games won by just one run … of an 11-2 record since mid-September … of 17,366 people at last night’s game sounding like twice that number.
Yesterday morning, I took a walk with the person I’ve mentioned a few times in my infrequent recent posts, someone with whom I shared some stellar days and nights over the past few months. Alas, we mutually and a little sadly agreed that our summer fling apparently wasn’t meant to last. I went home and got ready to go to my job at the ballpark, where the contrast couldn’t be more apparent, where those 17,366 fans were showing what it means to be all in, to be vulnerable, to accept risk, to risk failure and foolishness in the pursuit of something worth remembering.
I was already scheduled to work Friday and Sunday. This morning, I asked to work Saturday, too. Baseball has a habit of breaking hearts, and by Sunday night, mine might be shattered. Or not. Either way, the ride has been worth it.