Mariners Moose Tracks, 4/30/2020: Mariners ticket refunds, HOF induction, Don Mattingly, Maggie Nichols

Hello and welcome to Thursday links. It’s also somehow the last day of April, which seems impossible? How was March ten thousand years long and April passed in the blink of an eye? Quarantime is so weird, you guys.

In case you missed it, New Zealand ended their lockdown the other day, which meant that McDonald’s, which had been closed in the country, was allowed to open back up. People responded enthusiastically, with lines hundreds of cars long that began forming at midnight the night before restaurants reopened. In the town of Rotorua, despite having enough stock for five days, all three branches sold out of food yesterday and were forced to temporarily close. I appreciate that the pandemic has really cut to the quick of what people value: Big Macs.

In Mariners News:

• Braden Bishop has started a new coffee company, Cognition Coffee. Bishop is a long-time coffee enthusiast who became even more enamored of the beverage when he found out that there is a link between coffee consumption and a reduced risk of cognitive decline, dementia, and Alzheimer’s Disease, the disease that took his mother Suzy. $1 from every purchase will go to Bishop’s 4MOM foundation to continue the work in fighting for the first survivor of Alzheimer’s.
• In adorable content, Tim Lopes’s wife Amber posted a vlog of her telling Tim that he’s going to be a dad. It’s pretty long so if you’re pressed for time skip forward to 8:30 for maximum heart-warming (with a special guest appearance by the Bishops and the Fraleys), or to just before the 12:00 mark for the true highlight of the video.
• These are fantastic letters; also, check out the signature on the Mariners letter, from Randy Adamack, who has been with the Mariners for over 40 years.

• The Mariners have announced a plan for a ticket-refund process for both single-game tickets and season ticket holders. Note that this applies only to tickets purchased directly from the Mariners; those who bought from third-party sites will need to go through those sites in order to obtain a refund.

Around the League:

• The people who have to play the players want 10 rounds and the people who have to pay the players want 5. Color me surprised.

• Not a huge surprise but still a huge bummer. I was really looking forward to the outfits Larry Walker was going to bust out over the weekend.

For many reasons, good thing Edgar got in last year, huh? It would have been particularly cruel if he had waited all that time and then had to wait another year to actually be inducted (not to mention cruel for the fans who carried a torch for his HOF induction all those years).

Speaking of Edgar, Breaking T has a new shirt celebrating The Double. We helped choose the text on the shirt! We went with “it just continues” as that’s an underrated part of the iconic call and also kind of speaks in a bigger way about Edgar’s legacy. If you purchase from this link, we get a little commission which helps us do things like pay for our podcasting platform and maintain subscriptions to sites like Baseball America and the Athletic and other things that help us bring you the best Mariners content possible, so if you have a little extra cash and want to help out the site and get a cool t-shirt out of it, consider ordering one! We would be so grateful.

• We might not know how old Don Mattingly is, really? All I know is he better trim those sideburns, hippie.
• Yay A’s, who were the only MLB club left that hadn’t announced this.

• In times of great uncertainty it is truly reassuring to see the Astros’ consistency in maneuvering into the heel position in any given transaction.

From Amanda, our gymnastics correspondent:

Maggie Nichols has been described as “the Michael Jordan of college gymnastics” and sadly, like so many other athletes, won’t have the opportunity to make the headlines she deserved to this season. Read about Nichols in this story from the Athletic and watch her rack up perfect 10s in every event in this compilation: