At some point in my baseball fandom (likely from the start, I just couldn’t discern it yet) love for the game and love for the people tangled together into one big mass of feeling. And near the center of that tangle, inexorably interwoven, is Rick Rizzs and the Seattle Mariners. For 41 years, we have trusted him to author our memories, fickle, fallible, buggers that they are, ceding control of our own knowledge in a way that felt freeing and increasingly rare. My Mariners memories are, quite simply,
Rick Rizzs memories, and as I write this, after a season spent doing everything I could to forget this day was coming, those memories sluice through my mind like rocks over stone, individually impermanent but indelible.
Running up mountains, along lakes, down beige suburban sidewalks and on the shimmering asphalt shoulder of desolate two-lane roads.
Driving through the Badlands and Bitterroots, past Norwich and Naples, Canajoharie and Carlisle, en route to work, school, home (new) (old), the grocery store.
Making dinner for one, dinner for 12; eating with the radio on low, ears ever-pricked for the telltale cadence and tone to turn it up again.
Feeling droplets of water dry along my legs, lying utterly still; feeling beads of sweat trickle down my cheek, my back, hauling boxes in and out.
With my heart cracked open, my mind a mess; through the descent of nothingness, and back around once more.
Frequently on my own, but never alone.
The vast majority of these games didn’t matter in the record books, but they brought structure to my spring, gently molded my evenings, and shaped every summer.
When I was 22, I stood on the outskirts of a small media assembly outside Scott Servais’ door, craning my neck up and down the hallway for a glimpse of Edgar Martinez. Rizzs caught my eye and asked who I was looking for. Edgar, I explained, after recovering from the initial dissonance of hearing this radio voice brought to life. He was going to be the subject of one of my first freelance pieces. Rizzs lit up immediately, launching into a torrent of baseball history, memories and anecdotes. I scrambled for my recorder, which he graciously allowed, and by the time Servais’ door had opened I had nearly 10 minutes of gold and a vision for the piece.
If Rizzs’ enthusiasm for baseball has ever waned, we certainly have never heard it. Each game felt like a gift to him, and always sounded like one to us. I was reminded of that hallway run-in as I stood in the stands yesterday, listening to his farewell address. He was thoughtful, emotional, and endearingly, comically, perfectly long-winded. Working in baseball has incredible highs, remarkable lows and hundreds upon thousands of hours that simply do not mater. It’s a privilege and a churn, so it felt like one last gift to hear so explicitly how his exceptional career may be coming to a close but Rick Rizzs’ joy for the game is as palpable as ever.
I can’t wait to hear his speech in Cooperstown.
