Rabid Mariners Fan? Not Yet!

Well, we grabbed a reuben tonight from the 74th Street Ale House in Seattle, and had the pleasure of watching the Seattle Mariners spank the Angels 11-3. Tasty food and fun, fun, fun.

A couple things I should explain as a lifelong resident of Seattle, only slightly older than both the Seahawks and the Mariners:

Seattle enjoys its sports, but for most folks sports aren’t the “be all and end all” of the world. I mean, there’s just a lot going on out here in the Pacific Northwest besides pro sports. There are sports fans, though few I’d qualify as the truly “rabid” type seen in other cities.

Now the Mariners are an interesting outfit. Forget the changes in ownership, stadium and player controversies, and up and down seasons. Here’s the skinny: for most of their existence, the Mariners haven’t been worth squat.

I met my first “lifelong Mariners fan” when I was in college (circa 1993) and I’ll tell you, I was pretty blown away. First thing you have to understand is that this a team that didn’t register its first winning record till 1991...that’s about 20 years of less than .500 seasons. Pretty tough to get excited about a team like that.

Sure, as a child I had the plastic blue M’s helmet and my family would go to a ball game or two every season (in the King Dome no less). Heck, my dad was even a baseball player himself (well, softball at least) when I was growing up. And both my brother and I did the Little League thing.

But there are extremely few Seattleites (at least those living here since the 1970’s) that would profess to have much faith in the Mariners. That’s not really what they’re here for.

Some folks (especially recent transplants to Seattle) may disagree with me on this, but I can speak from a bit of authority on this one: at least in Seattle, baseball is a pastime. Not truly a competitive sport, and certainly not much to get worked up about.

Safeco Field is a beautiful stadium, and a damn sight better than the old King Dome. I’ve seen both soccer matches and Mariners games in it, and I can tell you there are few places I’d rather hang out on a sunny day with a group of friends drinking beer and eating hot dogs. We chew the fat, we yell at the refs and players, we belt out the National Anthem and Take Me Out when the 7th inning stretch rolls around. We laugh and recline in the gorgeous Seattle weather (July through August is the warmest, beautiful time of year one could ask for). But are we counting on a Mariners win? Not hardly.

So it’s always fun to watch our players play well. Ichiro is a phenomenon and will probably end up with a street named after him, just like Edgar Martinez, should he finish out his career in Seattle. Young Felix was a little shaky tonight coming off his injury, but he’s still shaping up into a heck of an Ace. And of course, it’s fun to hum along with Raul Ibanez every time he takes the plate.

But take the Mariners seriously? With all the funny and gimmicky TV commercials they do? And with the way they’ve collapsed over and over again as the season continues?

Last season, they ended with the same record as the Oakland A’s...except the Mariners lost every game they played against the A’s and the A’s won. That’s ridiculous. Even a split would have put them both square in the middle of the pack. Instead, the mediocre Athletics went on to get whipped in the post season.

When Piniella skippered the M’s, we had a fairly competitive team...but Piniella has long since gotten out of Dodge so to speak, and the M’s despite their heavy talent, have failed to pull it together. The team has simply not had the same composure since Piniella left in 2002.

But all this is the ranting of your average Seattle sports fan...let’s talk astrology.

Sports teams, just like people, have horoscopes...birth charts that is...based on the date and time they were established. Even cities an countries do; most astrologers concede the United States of America to be a Cancer with a Gemini Ascendant based on the date and signing of the Declaration of Independence, for example.

However, determining the “birth date” of a professional sports organization is a tricky think. Is it the date that the franchise is awarded to a city by a league commissioner? Or the date and place of the team’s first game (regular or pre-season)?

I prefer to consider the date and time that a team’s name is chosen. Until a team is named, it is simply an abstract concept...kind of like an unborn child waiting to draw breath. You know the potential is there, but it’s not until you choose a name that you can begin getting a sense of the thing’s potentiatlity.

An example: according to wikipedia, the Seattle Seahawks’ name was announced on June 17, 1975. I was consider this to be the proper date of birth for the Seahawks team, when the team was first presented to the fans and citizens of the city that birthed it. ‘Course I don’t know the time of the team’s announcement, so it’s pretty difficult for me to rectify the team’s Ascendant sign, but I can see that while being a Gemini sign, the Seahawks final signature (for the location of its planets) is Cardinal Air...what might otherwise be called “Libra.” The Seahawks, as I will be addressing in depth later, is a team that relies on harmony more than anything else...the team needs to get along and function as a team. More than some teams in the NFL, the Seahawks don’t do especially well with grandstanders or superstars. But again, I digress.

Tonight, we are talking about the Seattle Mariners, and unfortunately, I have no idea what date the team’s name was announced, let alone what time. Lots of on-line articles have the date of the M’s first game, but that’s not really what I want, and I’ll probably have to do some research at the local library to figure out the Mariner’s proper “date of birth.”

Still, I can definitely tell the date of birth for the city of SEATTLE, which might go a little way to explaining our relationship to pro-sports (and everything else, actually):

November 13, 1851

The founding of the city is generally dated to the date of arrival of the Denny party on Alki Point (there is even a landmark in Alki showing where the party landed and stating the date of the city’s foundation).

This makes the city of Seattle a SCORPIO. As such, the folks here have a tendency to be a little closed/distrustful of new experiences, including sports teams, until they’ve proven themselves...so to speak. A true Scorpio pitfall; we resist being transformed into something new (though possibly exciting) until it actually happens. Then, of course, we can’t get enough of it. This includes being transformed into sports fans. This can be seen fairly easily with the city’s relationship to the Seahawks (more on this in a later post), but it may be a bit tougher to discern with the M’s.

See, the M’s haven’t really proven themselves yet. Oh, they came close to converting folks to True Believers in 1995, but they failed to follow-up the next year. Or the year after. Or the year after that By the time 2001 came around we were just happy to have a little (Scorpionic) revenge at the expense of Alex Rodriguez, but the disappointment wasn’t nearly as great. As the saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you...” but Scorpios don’t get fooled a second time if they can help it.

So for many of us long-time residents of the city, the Mariners simply take the role of a pleasant Spring-Summer pastime...lazing around a luxurious ballpark while watching an athletic ballet un-fold is about all we can expect out of the M’s. And that’s just fine. It’s nice to see they’re over .500 this year, and it’s immense fun to watch them kick ass on the Yankees or the Angels or the Athletics...all those teams that seem to come back and bite us in September. But Scorpios can be shy and skeptical, and it’s going to take a lot more proving by the M’s to make some of us into believers, let alone “rabid fans.”

Then again, maybe I’m only speaking of myself. Coincidentally, I happen to share the same November 13th birthday as the city in which I live.