In First Meaningless Game of the Season, Mariners Beat Athletics 2-0

“Until it disintegrated, I admit it meant nothing to me”

There are fundamental elements of baseball as a viewing and fandom experience that baseball fans know separate it from other sports. Part of it is the length and quantity of the season - 162 games, plus a few more if you’re lucky. Part of it is the way this sport, more than any other, highlights, shares, elevates and exposes the individual. Part of it is the inherent goofiness and silliness and humanity of the sport, brought to the forefront by the sheer amount of time that baseball takes up that isn’t active sport - we get to see them just be people more than in other sports - hanging out with their friends in the dugout, in the bullpen, on the basepaths, even. Part of it is the familiar rhythm of a year of baseball, from February to October, spring training games with 20 different batters on one end to the World Series at the other.

It adds up to a deeply, uniquely emotional connection between fans and their team. It’s that special sauce that baseball fans feel and know in their hearts to be what makes baseball, and being a baseball fan, singular.

The cynic in me also says that it’s something intentionally capitalized on by the organization to build brand loyalty and ultimately increase revenue - think of the between-inning videos of Taylor Saucedo and Andrés Muñoz talking about their favorite Yu-Gi-Oh cards or whatever, or JP and Bryan Woo serving donuts at the local Krispy Kreme. A lot of media is produced in order to deepen that emotional connection, to make you want to buy tickets, buy jerseys, engage.

Maybe that’s too cynical. But that’s where I’m at right now, and I suspect I’m not alone.

The nature of that emotional connection is why I have had what is by far my least-engaged season of Mariners fandom since I was 10 years old. I’m willing to bet that several of my fellow LL’ers had thought that I had disappeared into the ether or had a grand piano dropped on me in the big city or something.

It’s not as if I simply couldn’t handle the disappointment of another soul-crushing Mariners season - I probably watched or listened to, like, 130 games in 2013.

Instead, I found my emotional capacity overloaded by life, good and bad. I got married to my best friend, and planned the vast majority of it ourselves. We had to have my beautiful dog Edmund’s back right leg amputated to avoid cancer, and nursed him back to health through 2 weeks of 24/7 crying, pain and confusion, but got to watch him learn to walk again, and eventually to see him continue to be his precocious, mischievous self. I finally got officially diagnosed with (“severe”) ADHD, and got medicated, but in a way that made me visibly and noticeably dead inside, to the point that co-workers I don’t see in-person or even by Zoom noticed.

This year, for the first time, I didn’t have the emotional energy to give to something that has never seemed intent on giving anything back to me. For a religious Mariners fan, this year was apostatic.

It’s fitting that my first recap in far too long comes the day after a lame duck elimination. I’ll consider covering the first truly meaningless game of this season the beginning of my atonement. A meaningless, painless, tidy 2-0 win over the even more-wretched Oakland Athletics.

In the post-game TV spot, Mitch Garver revealed with the cadence of his answer that shift that we are all used to by now, once the games have been stripped of their potential and portend nothing.

“The way our guys are…still going out there to compete…”

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It’s not that the game wasn’t, in a vacuum, a good game of baseball.

Mitch Garver and Cal Raleigh each provided highlights with home runs driven out to left field, giving us our 2-0 scoreline with a pair of solo shots from a pair of catchers.

Garver’s recent power surge gives you a little hope that he might earn his contract next year as a solid back-up catcher to Cal.

Speaking of…

This home run gave Cal his 91st career home run, putting him just one behind Mike Piazza (92) for most home runs by a catcher in his first four seasons. That feels good.

It also felt good to watch Bryan Woo dominate his hometown team, again. He threw an electric five innings, striking out eight and allowing zero runs. His two-seamer was sharp, his slider and sweeper both worked, and he ran it all up for 10 whiffs on the night, never really appearing to be in danger.

It was also exciting to watch the continued ascension of April-Frog, September-Mariner Troy Taylor. The 23-year-old with the name of a former-boy-band-performer-gone-solo-artist earned his first career save after letting a runner reach third on a double and a wild pitch. The Mariners apparently have an IVB University in their farm system and Taylor is a graduate with honors, sporting a rising fastball and a gnarly sweeper that froze several hitters in the ninth.

Manager Dan Wilson (still not used to that!) said, “[Taylor’s] journey is pretty epic, coming from Everett to start the year, and then ending up getting his first big league save in a 2-0 game.”

“He’s been given some higher leverage situations, and he’s been able to handle them, and you got to love that from a young kid. If he has any fear, he doesn’t show it. He loves to attack the strike zone.”

So, again, it’s not as though this game was lacking in juice or excitement…in a vacuum. In fact, this would have been a pretty excellent game to watch and cover, if it weren’t for the fact that what could have been a monumental late-season win is instead relegated to be nothing more than another footnote in another losing season. The anticipation and butterflies of a potential nail-biting, scoreboard-watching playoff hunt instead sucked away by the vacuum of mismanagement and apathy from those same people who shrewdly help forge and encourage your emotional connection to this team, without a care to how it ends.

Maybe I rambled a lot, and only talked about baseball just a little, but let’s be real, we didn’t even have to put up a second game thread tonight. I don’t think you all are looking for the play-by-play here - I think we’re all here for the wallowing. But at least we’re here and wallowing! I wasn’t even around to wallow most of this year.

So we will be here, wallowing, until next spring, when, despite all of our collective promises to our individual selves, we’ll find a way to care again about this team. And the way we’ll do it is the same way we always have: the love of this group of 26+ weird, entertaining, exciting talented people, combining to give us something special: baseball.