(Hello reader! I thought it would be polite to forewarn you here a bit. This post is far, far less about the Seattle Mariners than it is about me, my experiences, and my current status as it concerns feeling things about the team. It’s also fairly long. If that’s your kind of thing then by all means proceed. If not feel free to skip it entirely.)

*****

“I heard the music of true forgiveness filling the theater, conferring on all who sat there, perfect absolution. God was singing through this little man to all the world, unstoppable, making my defeat more bitter with every passing bar.”

Growing up I never wanted to be much of anything. Kids are always supposed to say they want to be a doctor, or an astronaut, or President or an Olympian or some such. That was never me. People would ask me what I wanted to be and, like a good product of Baptist Sunday School I would analyze them for a few seconds and say whatever I figured they wanted to hear. (You can’t literally “be” Jesus but I’m pretty sure I used that a few times, and often to good enough effect to get a smile and be left alone.) I was, and still am, a very polite young man.

A childhood spent being just nice and good enough to get what I wanted hit a speed bump when I was cut from the high school baseball team my freshman year. I came home angry and determined to work hard to get better. I went for a long run that day and took a hundred swings in the backyard, and then never did it again. My athletic career stalled, but that mostly gave me more time to goof around with friends from youth group, so I didn’t mind too much. 

I was pretty good at the piano by and large because I grew up pre-internet, we owned a piano, I spent the vast amount of my childhood at home, and my brain liked the puzzle that was solving musical notation. I was never much for “musicality” but I’ve always been a good reader, and notes on a page are just another book. So I read them, and learned them back to front. It seemed good enough for most people I played for, and that made it good enough for me.

A high school friend got into music one day and took off with it. I mean just took off. I could read music better than him but this guy was writing songs, forming bands, and learning a million different instruments and styles. He would write three punk songs on the way to school, casually rip through an afternoon in jazz band as a soloist, then learn how to play the trumpet in the evening. He was something I’d never really encountered before: A true talent. Someone with something that could not be faked, that people weren’t just happy to be around, but earnestly sought out. Something beyond what we could fake or smile our way through. He possessed something both so real and solid you couldn’t be around him for 30 seconds without seeing it, and so ephemeral that it turned to mist the second you tried to reach out and touch it yourself. He was exceptional. He still is.

*****

“All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing… and then made me mute. Why? Tell me that. If He didn’t want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire? Like a lust in my body! And then deny me the talent?”

The Mariners are a franchise happy to tell you what you want to hear. If you want a smile and a good sales pitch newly-promoted President of Baseball Operations Jerry Dipoto is definitely up to the task. Anyone looking to spend a lazy afternoon in a beautiful space watching a wonderful sport could do a hell of a lot worse than T-Mobile Park. If you want timelessness and romance well friend let me tell you about a Mariners team in 1995 that was 14.5 games back of the Angels on August 24th before Ken Griffey Junior hit a walk off home ru……..

They’re often pleasant, cheery, familiar, and rarely (at least in the grand scope of billion dollar enterprises) truly awful. What they are not is excellent in any way. They are a team built off of a 45-year tradition of please and thank yous and eating just enough of your vegetables that mom and dad pretend not to see when you feed the rest to the family dog. They have in nearly half a century of baseball provided exactly four seasons with a playoff berth, or slightly less than one out of ten. They are so starved for true, honest-to-god success that the mere thought of it at some vague point in the near-to-mid future was enough to extend the management responsible for the last six years of failure. That such a decision may have in fact been the best they could do is not something to feel particularly good about.

As this has continued on seemingly in perpetuity every other baseball teams has had lightning flashes of brilliance. The Rays have been to two World Series. The Rockies, a Focus on the Family Infomercial masquerading as a baseball franchise, have been to one. The Dodgers have won their division the last nine years, been to three World Series, won one, and give off the impression they are completely dissatisfied with those results.

We see other teams turn scrubs into stars, and graduate prospects into superstars. There are franchises where winning a division is a mere afterthought, the beginning of the *real* season. These are the teams whose fans pass their love of the sport onto their children with freedom and joy, a prized heirloom. They are the greatness beyond our capacity to comprehend; something so awesome and terrible we never considered trying to be it.

*****

“I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint. Mediocrities everywhere… I absolve you.”

The truth is the Mariners are what most of us are, and I definitely have been: A mediocrity bound to the whims of fortune and forces beyond our control, but also so afraid of them that the focus is always on the floor, never the ceiling. That such a fate has grown increasingly intolerable to me is partially on the Mariners, but moreso on me. They are still very much the team I fell in love with as a child – one full of possibility and unwritten stories, heroes to be made and loved, incredible goofiness and pratfalls to laugh and remember – but it is I who have changed. 

 I can see the spectrum of possibility for the next 2-3 seasons with my waking eyes; from a marginal success to a failure so emphatic that the team starts over yet again. I can hear the same back and forth over unproven prospects, run differential, and who gets credit for whose success, all in an ever-increasingly factionalized space. Those exercises are not inherently bad or valueless but they represent a life I’ve lived and conversations I’ve had about this team so many times I can see the time-worn creases both in them and myself.

The past 20 years of Mariners fandom has been begging, pleading, longing desperately for a postseason game. Any postseason game. We’ve seen Félix Hernandez, the most beloved pitcher in franchise history, waste his entire career in such a pursuit. What I’ve come to realize recently is that, whether it happens this year, the next, or ten years from now it won’t be enough. At least not for me. The mediocrity has gone on too long, and it may have broken how I see this team and my relationship with it. 

There is no “enemy” with this realization. I do not blame anyone. It’s merely the cubed mathematics of “years X age X averageness” that has me more drained than I can ever remember. The added factor of realizing that the broader world has emphatically shifted from decades of nothing happening to years of decades happening further emphasizes the feeling that giving time and energy to a play I’ve seen so many times before is just playing it safe. And after 40 years of living I’m pretty tired of playing it safe.

Mediocrity isn’t a crime, it’s a common trait. For most of us it’s where we’ll spend most of our lives. The question is whether we accept it or strive for something greater, even if we know we may never get there. I’ve settled for mediocrity for a long, long time and I’m trying to be better. The Mariners aren’t, really, and that’s ok. Most likely life will wash us ashore near each other regardless of how hard we each swim.

I grant them the peace that passeth all understanding. I absolve them. It’s time to work on being someone who can meet them with joy and gratitude again, as opposed to exhaustion and cynicism.

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