The ball curves like it’s already been agreed upon where it’s going, like a stage punch planned out to be in an exact spot at an exact time. All Dylan Moore has to do is get to his mark, and he’s a very responsible young man, so he gets to his goddamn mark. Ash meets horsehide, and Moore goes sprinting out like he wants to catch his own fly ball, but his enthusiasm won’t help him, because he hit it where no player can go.

A beautiful thing about baseball is that tinkering with a swing, hitting a weight room, and putting the finishing flourish on a legend’s career can transform you from just a guy into A Guy. That’s what Dylan Moore has spent the last 12 months doing, and it’s absolutely delightful to watch.

*****

The western half of the United States is undergoing a historic level of wildfire damage. Today in the Puget Sound we are experiencing near record heat and enjoying a “super massive cloud of smoke.” The air quality this morning is officially categorized as “very unhealthy”. It is going to prove hazardous for many, including survivors of COVID-19, the respiratory-based disease that has been ravaging our nation for going on seven months. 

Because of COVID we are finishing up our children’s first week of the 2020-2021 school year at home; juggling devices, Zoom meetings, Google classrooms, things called “Class Dojo,” “Kahoot,” “Hello ID,” and a million other small, new weights thrust upon our daily lives. We are planning on them spending the entire school year at home with us. That is, of course, assuming the upcoming election and its fallout allow for this entire frankensteinian horror to plod along as-is.

Yet here I and we are: writing, reading, sometimes laughing and, increasingly often, fighting about the Seattle Mariners, a 1.6-billion dollar vanity project/appreciation machine owned by a billionaire whose success or failure has precisely zero material effect on any of the various traumas and horrors of our times. Games like Wednesday’s, played under a sky so ominous ol’ John of Patmos probably would have said it was “too on the nose” for Revelations, simply further heightens the absurdity of sports in 2020, and our choosing to assign emotional capital to them.

In these circumstances there is, to the reckoning of this humble blogger, a relatively binary choice: The first option is to simply go on as many always have and treat baseball as an escape from real life. I will spend a good portion of the rest of this article arguing against this option so I want to make sure I acknowledge that, in many ways, this is very valid! Sports are, at heart, recreation. They are a chance to make little plays in those “green fields of the mind” and watch them play out. That for Mariner fans those plays often end as tragic comedy makes little difference, because the stakes are so low. And that’s good! We need to, even and especially now, find escapes. 

For those who have chosen this option, I bless you. Go in peace, and most likely do not continue reading so as not to be mad at me and/or start thinking about things that may ruin your outlet. Go ahead and close this tab.

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Close it.

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(Seriously go take a Harry Potter Sorting Hat Quiz or something it’s not gonna get better after this.)

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The second option asks a lot more of you, and is frankly a lot less fun. It asks that you don’t just consider baseball players beyond what they do for your fantasy team. It asks that you see the player as a human being first, and get down in the mud to grapple with how you feel about what Major League Baseball’s various labor practices do to that person. It asks you to consider MLB, and thus the Mariners, in the full context of 2020’s various crises, and the ways in which they have sought to use them as leverage for crushing the sport’s labor.

It doesn’t get better from there. You’re going to have to face the fact that the Mariners’ President was promoted after settling a sexual harassment suit. The quick (and very opaque) MLB investigation into Lorena Martin’s accusation of racism and misogyny, and wondering why we never really heard any follow up to all that, is going to linger in your mind. It’s going to ask you to consider why, months after that investigation, the Mariners parted ways with almost every high-profile player of Latin descent on the roster. 

This is the choice you’re making then: you are choosing to love something while acknowledging its flaws. If, like me, you grew up a baseball fan this is not unlike a crisis of faith. At a certain point the things we inherited from childhood must be carefully, critically examined, and either kept or cast aside. By doing this to baseball, and the Mariners, you’re going to have to be ok with the fact that a lot of things about them contain the same grime and filth as everything else in our world.

It’s a process to do this, and it takes time. There will be moments when you think it has ruined the game for you. You may be annoyed with yourself when your first reaction to Jerry Dipoto saying Marco Gonzales is a top-20 MLB pitcher isn’t “Wow!” but “I bet I can prove he isn’t!” It will certainly make interacting with fans who took the first option outlined here…….a bit fraught. 

“Why do this?” is in fact a very excellent and pertinent question, so I’m glad you asked. This is not dissimilar from being asked (in normal circumstances where it’s possible) why I don’t leave America if I have so many problems with it. 

The short answer is that you don’t leave something you love just because it’s not perfect. The Mariners have been tied to my life as long as I have memory. Through them I have experienced communal joy in a way almost nothing else has provided. If I were to get married again tomorrow, by my side would be so many people I’ve met through watching, talking, and experiencing this team. 

Something this core to experience cannot just be cast aside, and so, for myself and others who make that choice, we instead push for it to be better. I want the Mariners to win, yes, but more so I want them to represent the best of what we can be communally. I want them to pay their minor leaguers a living wage. I want their upper management to step up and go to bat for entry-level employees facing layoffs. I want them to not use a pandemic as a flimsy reason to layoff scouts.  I want them to take a real stand against injustice, not just aiming their sails to catch whatever wind happens to be blowing.

I want them to do better, not just on the field but off it. Knowing that is unlikely does not change how much I care about them, or that desire for improvement. It’s a wrestling contest between idealism and realism, and I’m ok with that. Living with incongruity is part of life, why should sports fandom be any different?

*****

Being critical and aware of the Mariners is hard, because they’re not the romantic thing we fell in love with. Like anything though, flaws do not make something unlovable, they just make that love more work. Only we, in that mysterious and seemingly incompatible individual-and-collective way can decide if that’s worth it. When I watch a journey like the one Dylan Moore is on, or look at old pictures of friends laughing at the ballpark, I still think it is. I think the shit we put up with to find it makes it all the more lovable. That’s enough for me. The choice to love a broken thing and call it mine. Ours.