There were only 37.
He was sure of it. One, two, three, four- he was sure of it. Well, maybe 35 or 39, as he tallied the former players who’d clustered across the field. But definitely not 50. It was a weak group, too. There were the obvious names, the guys who always showed up to these things because they had to, the price of legacy, no doubt. Griffey was mingling with the executives, Buhner was holding court, Félix was taking pictures, Ichiro and Edgar and Wilson in uniform preparing for the game.
But the names he’d hoped to see, to reconnect with — Paxton, Haniger, Zunino, Cruz, Canó — hadn’t bothered.
A pang of regret, perhaps embarrassment, suddenly washed over him. He’d shown up only because he didn’t want to be the one who didn’t. He thought it the right thing to do, to be there, to wear the shield, not for the team but for the fans who would otherwise speculate on his absence.
He’d thought of those fans when he accepted the invite way back in February. He envisioned the raucous crowds from last year’s playoff run, the ones he’d always hoped to play in front of but never had the chance. It was the first baseball he’d watched in years, unable to stomach it since he walked away. His initial reaction was jealousy, indignation, FOMO — he found himself rooting for the Blue Jays — but these were traits he’d come to recognize in himself as ugly, and ones he’d worked to push down. He was surprised by his reaction to Geno’s slam, not the tears necessarily but the amount of them, and the number of days they occupied. They only seemed to intensify with the end of Game 7, an overwhelming sense of nostalgia, or regret, or maybe even pride. This was his team, the only one he’d ever known, and he wanted to be part of it again.
But the crowd today was sparse. Well, a bit more than 31,000 isn’t sparse, but the atmosphere was sparse. The Mariners on Aug. 8 were in the middle of a six-game losing streak and two games below .500. They were still very much in the playoff picture, just four games back of the ascendant A’s and Nick Kurtz’s dash for the single-season home run record, already closing in on Raleigh’s mark of 60 from last year. But it was becoming increasingly difficult to imagine this group rattling off 10 or 15 straight wins to pull back into the race.
It wasn’t quite catastrophe that brought them here. Sure, Bryce Miller had yet to debut, working on his second attempt at a rehab stint in Tacoma. And yes, Rob Refsnyder continued to sit on the sidelines, having torn his esophagus on a late-night Seattle dog (he didn’t know how to describe it, but the cream cheese threw him “off”). No, it was a season all too familiar: The same boring, tepid failure of so many teams of the past; of his past, even.
The Mariners won a lot in April, not that it was ever easy. Julio trailed only Kurtz in homers, his greatness no longer limited to the second half. And Cal wasn’t far behind while leading the league in walks. But the rest of the lineup lagged, and the pitching was still off.
Narrow 4-3 wins turned to agonizing 4-3 losses as the calendar flipped to May. A walkoff wild pitch, an inside the park grand slam, a called strike three with no challenges remaining. A doubleheader sweep in 40 mph winds in Chicago carried into a three-game rout in Houston — the types of losses that build and hamper and demoralize.
By June, Mike Cameron was in the locker room burning sage, anything to cleanse the vibes. Randy Arozarena’s line was underwater; another manager might have benched him for walking to a ball in the left field corner. Wow could Cole Young get a bunch of power out of that little frame, but twice he booted in the go ahead run. Dominic Canzone was back in Tacoma, as opponents learned to attack the holes in his swing. Luke Raley was DFA’d in favor of the Patrick Wisdom and Miles Mastrobuoni platoon. The depth of the roster seemed to consume itself, a sea of imperfect players in less than ideal roles.
It was the pitchers who slumped in July, as the weather got warm. It was 18 consecutive games before a starter made it through six innings, only for Logan Gilbert to implode in the seventh. The bullpen was taxed and out of order, each game turning up a situation for a reliever who wasn’t available. Leo Rivas pitched more innings than Andrés Muñoz in the week leading to the All-Star break; Rivas’ FIP was now lower than Jose Ferrer’s.
He wasn’t sure why he knew all this. He wasn’t sure why he’d let the team suck him back in. He wasn’t sure why he’d given up his principled stand, his right to say, “I told you so.” He wasn’t sure why he was now staring up at the rafters, at the banners with so much space in between, reliving the pain that-
“- and that’s the thing about the game these days,” a voice cut through, “the pitchers, they gotta learn how to establish the fastball. Too many guys are pitching backwards. I don’t like it. Back when I was pitching, right, and I came up in 1983, Nolan Ryan- he threw all nine innings, you know? We didn’t have all these statcasts, we didn’t have all th-”
He couldn’t help but smile. Some things never, ever change.
