Time: 9:10 Central
Weather: Sunny, roof will be open, 79°
Opponent’s hoppin’ SB site: Lookout Landing
TV: Twins TV. Radio: Only another 1164 miles from Sturgis on I-90, Gladden
Tonight’s Mariners starter is RHP Bryce Miller, who was promising in his rookie season, stellar in 2024, struggled with control last year and is stellar again this year. Turns out he was playing through elbow inflammation most of last season, and his arm’s good now. He throws a 96-ish fastball, a split and a slider; all of which are well above-average pitches. He mixes in a handful of other things too just to eff with you.
Apparently in 2024 he did regular “social media” posts about a tagged shark
and the places it swam. They looked like this because all of the world watches gunky-looking videos now:
The Twins playing in Seattle brings back a lot of memories, some good, some bad. We’ll start with a bad one.
I knew something was off when my mom called me at work.
She knew I worked 2-10, and got home around 11:15. Which was 9:15 in Oregon, where she lived, and she was a night owl herself (since she’d worked graveyard at 9-1-1 for 19 years). We frequently talked on the phone about books or movies or whatever after I got home. So, to call at work, it had to be something major.
Then, when I picked the phone up and asked “what’s up?,” she said “Jamie…”
And I screamed “F**K!” and threw the phone against a wall.
A co-worker asked me what was wrong. I said “my fu**ing mom’s got cancer.”
How did I know? She’d didn’t call me “Jamie” very often at ALL. And… well people who know each other very well can just sort of tell from the sound of their voices. Mom’s was nervous about how to tell me something. So I knew it was very bad. And more people die of cancer than any other disease, so…
She’d lost her health insurance when she was fired from 9-1-1, along with every other worker who’d been there since the company began. The company, the first privatized 9-1-1 in the country, was formed after years of 9-1-1 problems had caused the county to explore privatization options. The lady who owned the company had once been a single mom trying to make ends meet, herself. So she sympathized with people like my mom, who’d never had a “real” job before. Many of the other original hires were single moms, as well.
But, eventually, the lady who owned the company got older, and retired. She sold the company to a different company. And that new company, the new owners, saw several original employees who were on the verge of getting pensions after working 20 years.
None of them got pensions. One after another they were fired. If you’re determined to fire someone from 9-1-1, it’s easy to do. Take somebody with an excellent work record and start writing them up for this little infraction of the employee manual or that one. It’s a very high-stress job, mistakes will be made.
My mom had been calling me worried sick about this. As one employee after another was shoved out the door. She knew she was gonna get fired, it was a matter of time. And she still had my youngest brother to look after. What was she going to do?
Well, skipping her medical appointments after she lost her insurance was one way to cut down on the bills. And when a growth in her stomach got larger, and larger, and larger, she ignored it. She didn’t tell us older brothers about it (we all lived in different states). Finally, one of the older brothers was visiting Oregon on vacation, saw how huge Mom’s stomach was, and got her to the V.A.
Yeah — she’d spent four years in the Air Force. (Where she’d worked in communications, that’s how she sold herself as a 9-1-1 operator.) So she could have gone to the V.A. all along! It would have saved her life if she had, a doctor later told me. But, sometimes when you’re hugely stressed, you don’t make the most logical decisions. And, she had bad experiences with the V.A. before. When my dad was in-and-out of V.A. mental wards (which he was for several years). Those places were not adequately funded in the 1980s. They smelled like pee and had screaming people like in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (made in Oregon, by the way!).
So, it was bittersweet when me and the future Mrs. James visited Oregon, and she got to meet my mom for the first time. She was sick, and was not gonna get better. Still, there were some good sides to the visit. My mom loved the future Mrs. James — they could trade stories about dumb things I’d done, and bond over how much each loved Northern Exposure. We got to visit the town where Northern Exposure was made (it’s not too far outside of Seattle). And we got to see an MLB ballpark that wasn’t the Metrodome for the first time.
Safeco (or whatever it’s named today) is really lovely, especially at dusk. Across Puget Sound, you can see the Olympic Mountains, which back then often had some snow on the top (I doubt they still do today). On a bright day, in the summer, the Olympics look very cheery, like someplace Bavarians might be hoisting beer steins while dancing in lederhosen. On an overcast day, or in winter, they’re spooky-looking; they doubled quite nicely as Siberian mountains for the ominous opening of The Hunt For Red October. And at dusk, no matter the winter, they kinda look like the mountains around Moria, away across the darkening waters.
Safeco also has train yards right next door (the bus stop is on the other side of them, or was back then), which gives the whole thing a neat Jack London or Jack Kerouac or 30s movie about hobos hopping freight cars feel. And, during the game, who doesn’t love hearing the occasional train whistle? (It was fun at Midway Stadium, too.)
Overall, though, it was just neat walking to our section and seeing green grass on a stadium field for the first time. You really get why people call MLB stadiums “baseball cathedrals.” (The Metrodome was more of a baseball tent-revival church.)
I don’t remember who the Mariners were playing. We simply enjoyed the experience. All except this one annoying kid behind us. Our section was pretty empty (WAYYYY up behind home plate), and there was a youngish couple with a child of about eight or so three rows behind us. Well, the child came down to the row right behind us and pestered us with attention-seeking questions for an hour. Not questions about the game, which I’d have happily answered. Questions like “would you like to hear me count backwards from 1000?” or “do you know the names of my favorite TV shows” or “do you want to hear about all the books I’ve read this summer?” To which we’d always says “no thank you” and the child would do it anyways.
We finally just moved to a different empty section. I hadn’t wanted to, as it might seem insulting to the parents of Annoying Child, but as future Mrs. James pointed out, those parents were so wrapped up in their own yuppie perfection that they didn’t notice their kid was pestering strangers. They weren’t gonna notice the strangers moving a section over. She was right, and they didn’t.
Keep in mind, that child is about 30 now, and Seattle is a big tech hub. So the kid is probably an executive at some company that provides algorithms for hiring software, that reads resumes and weeds out everybody above 40. (Illegal, but they all do it.) I’m sorry, America! I created this kid that hates grownups!
(Now I have to beat that hiring software to find a new job at age 50+, or I will lose my health insurance… at almost exactly the same age my mom lost hers. Fun!)
At the game, it got late, and we got tired — we were still on Central time. So we left when the game went to extra innings, and I listened to it on the radio on the bus. Eddie Guardado came in to pitch at one point! I don’t remember how he did. And we visited the Northern Exposure town the next day. And then it was time for my brother’s wedding, the reason we were in town in the first place.
Actually although most weddings bore me, that turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. My dad was invited, and he tried sitting with the groom’s side of the family. Which made my mom very upset, but she’d never been good at confronting him. So the future Mrs. James went straight to the mean ol’ jerk and explained to him that he could sit with all the other guests who weren’t asked to sit up front. (Which Mom liked very much indeed.)
The funny thing was, it wasn’t until my mom kicked my dad to the curb that I found out she liked baseball. She just couldn’t stand watching it with dad in the house. Because if his team started losing, he’d blame her for coming in at the wrong time and jinxing them, or jinxing them by saying the wrong thing, or making him miss an important moment by distracting his attention. He did that to us kids, too. It was awful.
But after he left the picture, she’d put on Mariners games sometimes. She wasn’t a huge fan, yet she enjoyed the rhythms and the sounds of it. She’d grown up listening to Milwaukee Braves games on the radio (she lived just a little ways outside of Eau Claire, which oddly now is an indie folk/rock hub). In fact, she bore a grudge against the Atlanta Braves all those years later — “they stole our team away.”
And, she bore a grudge against the Yankees, too — simply because all baseball fans outside the Bronx should. So it was fun, in 1995 when I was on/off living back at home, to watch the playoffs together, and see the likes of Jay Buhner, Ken Griffey Jr., and Edgar/Tino Martinez extend the suffering of those poor Yankees fans (who hadn’t had a championship in 17 whole years, how awful!).
Weird to think, at that time, that she’d be dead just 11 years later. Before she got to meet any of her grandchildren (there’s five of them now, not counting my love child with Carrie Brownstein of Portlandia). But I’ll always remember how happy Mom was about our visit, and my brother’s wedding. And the look of disgust on her face when Dad tried to swerve in on the seating section, and what a help future Mrs. James was. At the reception afterwards, I got to help, too. There was free champagne, of course, but… “James — be a good son and go buy your mother a REAL drink. I need one.”
Here’s to moms who like baseball, and know when it’s time for a REAL drink.
