How to visit a stadium that doesn’t exist

Is it still a home game if the team won’t call it home?

Maybe you’re like me—a Mariners fan who doesn’t live in Washington. Maybe you live in a city with a team. Or a city that’s suddenly hosting a team. One that doesn’t want to be there. One that won’t even admit it plays in your town. And when people mention your city they only do so as a punchline to a sad joke.

But you are recently married and bought a house in this city, your first house, and you plan to stay there for many years. Maybe you hope to have kids you can force to be baseball fans. How should you feel about this division rival moving into your backyard?

Fandom can be conflicting.

Your mom calls you and asks if you’re an A’s fan now. You tell her when you watched Moneyball you rooted against Brad Pitt. But she hasn’t seen it and asks if that means yes or no.

Even your friends think a team playing in your minor stadium in your minor city is a bad idea.

“...Sutter Home Park (that’s what I’m calling it now and I’m not changing it) is not an MLB-caliber field. It is a minor-league field, and tonight the Mariners played a minor-league game there, complete with inexcusably bush-league bad umpire calls, rowdy beer batter fans, and extra-innings hijinks…” – Kate Preusser, Lookout Landing

The only way to know for sure how you feel is to go see for yourself.

You decide to wear the shirt you were given with your ticket. This will cause some confusion for you and everyone who meets you. A greeter will tell you to enjoy the game, and then say, wait, no, I thought you were an A’s fan. Recognition of your own internal conflict. The greeter doesn’t know whether he wants you to enjoy the game.

Inside you notice that there are a lot of people not wearing team colors. This makes sense. Why buy something from the team store that refuses to include the name of the city? If someone is too embarrassed to be seen in public with you, you shouldn’t wear a shirt with their name on it.

And as you walk the concourse you can’t help but notice subtle reminders that the stadium is different from other stadiums.

Something about the concourse feels a bit abstract.

Like it was designed based on descriptions of a ballpark someone heard on the radio.

The food, too, seems to be dressed up as something it is not.

The only difference between the pub and cantina, is one sells hotdogs and a pastrami sandwich and the other sells hotdogs and a burrito.

With every place selling the same hotdog, you think it must be good.

At least the view is nice. Every seat seems close enough to have an informed opinion about the umpire’s sightedness.

Someone to your right tries a chant: ”Let’s Go Oak-Land” clap, clap, clap-clap-clap.

Behind you, a response: “Let’s Go Sac-Town” clap, clap, clap-clap-clap.

Those that repeated one glowered at the others. You sensed the split you had felt in yourself here in the stands. Where was the team from? Who could claim them?

You busy yourself by keeping score in your scorebook.

For the next few innings the thought that you were in a minor league stadium gives way to the familiar rhythm of the game. You find yourself watching Jacob Wilson and Tyler Soderstrom with new eyes—how easy they would be to root for, you think. Your wife beside you has adopted Soderstrom because his name resembles the most annoying appliance in your house. She cheers for his success and by the third inning you find his country-pop walk up song triggers in you an involuntary head bob. You worry that in the last at bat, you hoped he would get a hit so your wife would cheer.

You decide to take a tour of the grass hill in the outfield to round out the article. From a certain angle, you can forget that there is a baseball game happening. You sit at one of the picnic benches and eat fries and listen to the buzz of conversation beneath a canopy of leaves.

Behind you, a dad and his son are playing catch with the baseball he caught from the A’s bullpen arm.

Do you want to go back to our seats? Your wife might ask.

Instead you want to see what the game is like from the grass. You stretch out and close your eyes. Wind off the river rolls through the leaves overhead. You hear the bark of the pretzel guy and smell cinnamon from a churro.

You open your eyes in time to watch the right fielder rocket a ball from the corner into the cutoff. You realize how lucky you are to be able to stretch out on a lawn on a warm spring night and watch the best players in the world, and Donovan Solano, play your favorite game.

It reminds you of Concerts in the Park when you were a kid. How you once watched an 80’s cover band on the lawn of the Puyallup Public Library. Spread out on blankets and beach chairs under trees just like this. Some danced to the music. Others rolled onto their forearms and worked on a crossword like your wife is doing now.

You understand then that this experience is minor. Without the production and scale of a major league stadium, the game feels personal. For the first time you are struck by the distinction between a baseball stadium and a baseball park. You once saw Nickelback at the Tacoma Dome with its pyrotechnics and spectacle seen in one-second delay on massive screens. What you are watching now is Nickelback on the Puyallup library lawn. A huge performance in a small place.

You find your desire for a definitive answer to your dilemma easing from your shoulders.

Around you, no one seems out of place.

The game on the field shrinks to its proper importance. The outcome matters, surely, but not the point. The point instead seems to be listening to the music with your neighbors even if your opinion of the songs differ.

But your line of thinking is interrupted when you see yourself.

You, not yet able to see over the fence, rapidly forming an understanding that baseball is the supreme good and your team, the team in your town, is the protagonist of the world.

You feel a sudden jolt of sympathy when you remember that the anonymous A’s are destined for Las Vegas. It pains you to see such an attachment forming to something that won’t last.

And you can’t help but remember the Kingdome. Watching your team play the faceless, anonymous enemy in a stadium no one liked, about to be ripped down. There was no guarantee the Mariners had a future, either. But that only made you appreciate it more. Cling tighter. This was the team that was here when you were starting to understand what mattered.

You wonder what these kids will think when the team leaves in three years.

Sometimes it can be hard to let go of something you cared about.

Even if what you cared about wasn’t that good to begin with.

Even if you felt forced to celebrate things no one else would find special.

Because those hard times you shared created your strongest bonds.

If your life as a Mariner fan has taught you anything, it’s how to enjoy the game for itself. A lifetime of loss has a way of either crushing you or teaching you what to care about.

On your way home to the house with the yard that needs trimming and the mortgage you can’t really afford, you mutter to yourself the sum total of your experience. A sentence so profound you nearly lose control of the wheel.

“What did you say?” your wife asks.

“When you’re here, you’re family,” you say, pleased for having unraveled one of life’s hidden depths.

She nods in contemplation of the profound truth. Understanding now that you can live with the doubleness: a team here and not here, a fan of your hometown and your home, a minor park containing something major.

She squeezes your arm. “Isn’t that the slogan for Olive Garden?”