To be honest I didn’t expect my 40’s to bring so many tears. Not tragic crying – my life remains by and large a very charmed one, graded by the curve – just crying. Phone pops up with a photograph of my kids as babies? Tears. Some lame movie dropping the emotional hammer it made hamfistedly clear was coming two acts ago? Tears. Stopping the frenetic motion of daily life for just a moment and having the raw, unfiltered force of four decades of memory and experience slam into your brain? Brothers and sisters you know that’s some tears.

The feeling is overwhelmingly one of knowing how much is gone and never coming back. I’m hopeful I have many decades of good health and fruitful living ahead of me but that’s no guarantee. I’ve lived about half a modern adult lifetime now, and that’s a lot. There’s so much I’d do differently if I could, and nowhere else I’d rather be than the atoll I’ve been spit up on. Gratefulness and regret, pride and shame in equal measure. That’s the day-to-day.

I assume this is just middle age. I keep reading articles by folks around my age* that make me feel it’s not just me. Four decades in the past is big enough to haunt, and the future is potentially small enough to loom (both for us as a generation and more broadly in terrifyingly existential ways for our species). All we’re left with is this, right now, today.

And speaking of haunting pasts (***professional transition alert. I am A Writer***) let’s gear down and finally bump this article into the topic you’re actually interested in: The 2023 Seattle Damn Mariners. The protagonists of our story find themselves in actual, real, not-fake-news-go-tell-your-uncle-the-one-with-the-fake-leg first place in the division here on September 1st.  The last time such an occurrence, uh, occurred you could visit an American airport and just walk right up to the gate, no questions asked. I have a good buddy who brought an actual sword as a carry-on in early September 2001. We barely had iPods. There was a lot of Mark McGrath. Tips had never been nor would ever again be so frosted. It was a different time.

More than just their position in the standings is that the Mariners appear, by all measure and reason, to be that rarest of Seattle baseballing substances: An Actually Good Team. They have allowed the fewest runs in Major League Baseball. Since July 1st they are tied for the highest wRC+ in baseball, and have no fewer than 11 players hitting at an above average rate over that span. As always you should keep the fact that I am a big ol’ dummy front and center in your calculation, but near as I can tell if you pitch better than anyone and hit as well as anyone you are probably, again, Actually Good at baseball.

Still, as much as the joy and thrill of watching a baseball team spend week-after-week carving through interior competition is, it offers no guarantees. Both this season and the organization’s future are contingent upon fickle things like foot nerves, backs, elbows, hearts, and minds remaining healthy and whole. Not to be too much of a doomer but one thing 41 years has been pretty emphatic about is that none of those things are going to stay healthy and whole. Not forever.

The 2023 Mariners could win the World Series. They could miss the playoffs entirely. This season could serve as another point in the timeline of what is rapidly becoming one of the best eras in franchise history. It could also be the high-water mark as the team sees injury, underperformance, and organizational miserliness cut a potential golden age off in its infancy. We don’t know. That’s kind of the thing about stuff that hasn’t happened yet.

So we have these 29 games. We know we get that. We – a fractured and at times venomously-catty little family (but still a family) of baseball fans – and them – a group of three dozen or so players and coaches. We’ll march forward into the last guaranteed month of the best season we’ve had in a generation arm-in-arm. We know too much about the past, and we know the future may contain too little. We know we have today. We know we have now. We know we have it together. 

I know I’m probably going to cry.

Goms

*Both of these articles are regretfully not free to read, but then they are the byproduct of skilled craftspeople plying their trade. I believe that has value and deserves financial support. You can do so by subscribing to Defector and Channel 6 if you agree and/or have the means. I think it’s worth doing.