Mariners Ruin Otherwise Lovely August Afternoon

There are days where you just want to go back to bed. That wasn’t yesterday because yesterday’s game started as the workday wound down. Instead of a nice relaxing evening jaunt through Arlington with Rick Rizzs, we got a crap cherry on top of our day. But hey! After the emotions and the sadness and the morose Shakespeare tweets with your feet in the kids’ pool at least you get to go to bed right away.

Today there isn’t any such relief. You will sit down at your desk at 11am. You will log on to freakin’ FACEBOOK to watch a stupid baseball game against a bad annoying baseball team. You will watch Marco Gonzales labor his way through five slow, hot, sweaty, humid innings. You will listen to some former Rangers player whose name I am not going to bother to look up because he is not worth the time and was probably definitely terrible spout constant tired cliché’d tripe, at one point identifying Curaçao as the Netherlands... “if you will.” I won’t.

You will listen to all this, and watch it, and labor through it all, and at the end it’s still the middle of the day and you have to put it out of your mind and push through with your ordinary tasks to the end; do the dishes; figure out some sort of plan for dinner (forgot to thaw meat again... good luck pitching out of this one); have a gin and tonic to forget the heat; have another to forget the Rangers; read something and go to bed and try it all again tomorrow.

Ordinarily, I would go with that tone for a game like this. It’s baseball! Get ‘em tomorrow. Many more games in the season. Just give it some time. I don’t have any silver linings like that today. You will read a lot of hot takes about this team that blow off a lot of steam. Some of them will be by me. None of them will be based in reality, but reality feels less real than my emotions right now. Rationally I know it’s all true; this team got red hot for a reason earlier in the year and of course they could do it all again tomorrow.

But right now they won’t. They got two runs off Yovani Gallardo. Félix Hernández is permabroken. Marco Gonzales is past his innings high for his career and showed it today. The offense can neither hit the ball hard nor hit it weakly to a lucky spot, 7th inning notwithstanding. We lost Sam Tuivailala to what is probably necrotizing fasciitis (or a strained Achilles, whatever.) Kyle Seager has forgotten how both his hands and the rules of baseball work. This does not feel like a team that can pull out of this right now, every bit as much as they felt like a team that couldn’t lose in May and June. Don’t take this personally, Mariners: right now, it sucks. Baseball sucks. I don’t like watching you, especially on facebook, though I admit the vapidity of the platform fits what I just watched and heard. Go away and leave me alone.

I don’t know where they go from here. I do know they’ll need to find a deep, deep well of resilience to stick this out and to turn this season around. I also know that every member of this roster has displayed that resilience, because none of them would be where they are—from Andrew Romine to Nelson Cruz—unless they had it inside them all along.

Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.

—E.B. White