The M's first act, or my hands are going numb and it's not even the bottom of the third inning
I tend to look at life in three act structure, and wrote a blog about a year ago how the baseball season lent itself perfectly to this: the first act runs from April through May, the second from June through August, and the third act from September through October. The first act unofficially ended yesterday, on May 31st, and it has been an exciting one for the Mariners, but not for all the right reasons. The stars of the production have been awesome with Nelson Cruz doing so much better than even an optimist would have thought that it is a wonder to watch, and King Felix is, well, King Felix, on his way to a 20 win season. I'd say the biggest problem the M's had in a sub %.500 opening was with the secondary cast, or what I'll call last year's team. Aside from Cano and Felix, the Mariners were a bunch of no ones last year, who played over their heads, but not too over their heads to have a real sense of reality to them. Last year's squad got hits when they needed to, and the relievers were out of this world, the best in baseball, though I can barely remember a name, and helped win or hold onto marginal leads night after night.
I could be a boring stats man and rattle off all the differences between this year and last year, but that's not writing. This year's team feels like a movie with a big cast and quite frankly it seems to have dwarfed the smaller or less significant members of the team down to nothing, so it's not a good movie, but a fun messy one kind of like the "Cannonball Run" series. The M's lose a lot of games by one run but they are not often 1-0 affairs, or 2-1, so the exciting part is they lose in new ways that promise greatness, but don't seem able to deliver it. Personally, I've gone up and down with this club, and have simultaneously thought they have no chance of winning a pennant to if they could only get their shit together they could win the World Series (the World Serious). The truth probably runs somewhere in the middle, and might be closer to the "Cannonball Run."
This is a fun team, but not for all the right reasons. They rarely play boring games, and though listening isn't exactly a pleasure, it is hard to figure out what team is going to show up from day to day, though they seem to play up or down depending on the opponent. I have no faith they are going to win or lose any game, and like many fans here hope they just hang on long enough at about %.500 to make it to the middle of the second act, the all star break, and then maybe the lesser known actors on the team will gel with the stars, who are all having banner years, and will make this a team, rather than a hodgepodge of stellar individuals, but that's hoping for a lot. I was ready to write this piece on Friday night after listening to Taijuan Walker pitch a great game, a key to the M's success, and thought for sure they'd survived a tumulut opening, and were on their way to being the team they promised to be at the outset of the year, when hope bloomed in March, like the daffodils and the cherry blossom trees in Seattle. Today, I looked at the box score and saw the M's lost the next two games over the weekend, and my heart sank again, realizing this club just doesn't have what it takes.
The hardest part to all of this is that the M's seem so right on paper, that it is hard to know what to pinpoint as the problem, and the announcers have no idea, either. The most obvious point is that the bullpen isn't that good, and yet the feeling seems to sink deeper than this, to something very intangible, that is hard to put a finger on. It's almost like they have no leadership, or no core to the team. The stars don't seem like leaders nor does anyone from the 'no-name' set from last year, and if someone from the 'no name' set was a leader, than he has taken a seat in the blazing light of Cano, Felix, and Cruz, who seem to have teamed up together, and taken it upon themselves to carry the M's to the pennant, but ultimate victory is going to take more than three players. Obviously, this is all speculation because I've never spent a day in the clubhouse, but it is a feeling I get from listening to game after game on the radio, with the neverending season pounding into my brain like a song until every word has been memorized. I wish I could say the 2015 M's were bipolar like last year, but I really don't think the psychological stigma applies, because they are never up for long enough, or down for long enough, to fill one with hope. They've got way more talent on this club than last years team, and I'm afraid that has taken away some of the bipolar magic of last year, that took a unified squad to maintain, because there was a real group sync. This is just a discombulated blockbuster, that may or may not come together, and may show at midnight for years to come if Nelson Cruz sets some records, or Felix wins the Cy Young award.
*Just listened to King Felix give up a grand salami to the Bronx Bombers, and Rick Riz was too terrified to tell grandma to get the rye bread and the mustard out of the cupboards. What a hypocrisy, what a lie the 2015 Mariners have been. This team sucks!!!!!!
** I'm sorry Iwakuma's career may have ended this season. He may have been the spiritual center of the Neptunean M's, and I'm glad I got to see him pitch, when he still blanked the opponent. A coworker pointed out that it was a cruel irony that Iwakuma's first big promotion, bear claw hat night, occurred a few games after he went on the DL, perhaps never to return.
*** 6/2 It's the next night, and a sense of defeat was sinking into everyone, including Ric Rizzs and Aaron Goldsmith, not to mention Shannon Drayer in the post game, analyzing the fuck out of every nuance in an attempt to give the educated fan a ray of hope, but it never works, like a bad politician unable to get a vote. The M's have little to no history as a ball club, and what little they do has to do with defeating the Yankee's in the playoffs of '96, their greatest moment as an organization, and when they became Yankee killers. The rivalry sustained until 2001 when the M's played the Yank's for the AL championship, and even though the M's had beaten the ALL-TIME record for most wins in a season from what I want to say were the '27 Yanks, the Neptunean wonders flailed in the post-season, when the chips were down, and America was under attack. The Yankees came in to save the day.
History wasn't so momentous on June 2nd, 2015, but it was a weird game that the Yankee's either stole from the M's, or that the M's gave to them, and it's getting hard to tell. Rodney could have saved it in the top of the 9th but walked the lead off batter and gave up a run. The Yankee's capitalized in the top of the 11th with 3 runs and put the M's to sleep. Not even Lloyd McClendon's insane theatrics in the 3rd when he got kicked out of the game for protesting a check swing, could ignite the team. These M's are dead, and the sharks can smell blood.
The faltering first act looks like it's going to lead to a complete collapse in the second act, when a movie defines itself. This season is a joke.
**** 6/5/15 The joke continues, or the 'jokus,' as my great baseball friend Jonathan MacKinnon dubbed it. The great J. Huff was pitching for the M's, their only positive surprise, and I'd throw Nelson Cruz into that category except that he was already a star and was expected to excel, and he has up to now, but I see him cooling off, and as frustrated as many before him who give their all to the Mariners only to succumb to mediocrity, and ripped of all hope, or that's how I feel, like the hide ripped off a baseball, with the stitching unraveled.
I was listening to the game tonight, and my car died in the sixth or seventh inning, with the game tied 0-0, and I knew the M's would lose. The feeling was worse though because I really knew the season was over in early June, way earlier than the analysts, pundits, and observers predicted. I shouldn't be surprised since the Mariners are one of the most pathetic major league teams in the history of baseball, one of only two to have never made the world series, and yet the fan base is ravenous. It could be that there is nothing else to do in Seattle since grunge is dead, and Amazon rules. Whatever the reason, this club just can't get their shit together, and even though the M's did something great 'for once in their life' according to Courtney Love, and had the most victories of any time ever (including the '27 Yankees), but they couldn't do the obvious and win the Series, or even get to it. The Yank's beat them in a post 9-11 world and when W. called for baseball to save the Nation, and how fitting for an ex-owner of the Texas Rangers.
The M's buckled under the pressure of leading the Country through a post 9-11 malaise, and I really think this is a point EVERYONE in the city refuses to recognize, and why I'm starting to hate living here like an exile gone to the great Northwest, where there are no Jews, but worse the white supremacist compound Hayden Lake is not far away in beautiful (no joke) Couer D'Elane, Idaho, and you can feel the bad vibrations out until Elliot Bay overlooking the Olympic Mountains and the Puget Sound. At the same time, Seattle is a city with a proud labor tradition, and Sawant and the socialists are starting to take over the city, and I hope to go to Town Hall tomorrow to hear Jill Stein, who ran as the Green Party presidential nominee, four years ago, and Kashama Sawant, maybe the most successful socialist in America, wreaking havoc on the city council.
These Mariners are neither revolutionary socialists, or stodgy conservatives. They are a team without an identity, or a house whose structure proved to be faulty a year after some poor fuck went into debt buying it. I don't know who this team is but I know the unbelievable performance they got from the superstar Nelson Cruz in the month of April when he was homering every eighth at bat is over. Don't get me wrong, he should be considered for the MVP just for that, but unfortunately he's not a team leader. What did the cursed M's do with Cruz's super human performance? They played under %.500 baseball (ouch.)
Guess what, Cruz doesn't give a fuck anymore, and 'Robbie' Robinson Cano, the Dominican named after Jackie Robinson, can't handle the Hayden Lake vibe of Seattle, nor can he articulate it, being to new to the city, and is losing his mind. That became clear to me early in the season against the Dodger's in what's now seeming like a pivotal inter-league series (I don't like those), against the L.A. Dodgers in Chavez Ravine. The M's were swept in extra innings two of the three games (if memory serves me well), and in one of them Cano walked home on a walk even though the bases WEREN'T loaded, and was out at home, costing the Mariners the game. I know we all make mistakes and life is not perfect, but I've watched a lot of baseball in my life and something this boneheaded only happens once in a life, like Jim Marshall for the Vikings running a touchdown the wrong way, and giving the opposition a TD.
My car died tonight, and so did the M's. I looked at the box score and they lost 1-0, and are on a five game skid. I'm sorry dear Mariner's fans and my heart bleeds royal blue and gold for you. I know it's a long season, and things can always turn around, but this has been a motherfuckin' bummer. To be more intellectual about it, I'd say the M's had a surprisingly bad first act, that may have gotten some laughs from the audience, but not for the right reasons, and now the second act is coming into focus, and I hate it. I'm afraid the fun is over and Cruz's home runs will let him arbitrate for more money, but his spirit is gone, and so is this teams. They are truly lost, and Lloyd McClendon knows it. He thought he was going to be the next Lou Pinniela.
I could be a boring stats man and rattle off all the differences between this year and last year, but that's not writing. This year's team feels like a movie with a big cast and quite frankly it seems to have dwarfed the smaller or less significant members of the team down to nothing, so it's not a good movie, but a fun messy one kind of like the "Cannonball Run" series. The M's lose a lot of games by one run but they are not often 1-0 affairs, or 2-1, so the exciting part is they lose in new ways that promise greatness, but don't seem able to deliver it. Personally, I've gone up and down with this club, and have simultaneously thought they have no chance of winning a pennant to if they could only get their shit together they could win the World Series (the World Serious). The truth probably runs somewhere in the middle, and might be closer to the "Cannonball Run."
This is a fun team, but not for all the right reasons. They rarely play boring games, and though listening isn't exactly a pleasure, it is hard to figure out what team is going to show up from day to day, though they seem to play up or down depending on the opponent. I have no faith they are going to win or lose any game, and like many fans here hope they just hang on long enough at about %.500 to make it to the middle of the second act, the all star break, and then maybe the lesser known actors on the team will gel with the stars, who are all having banner years, and will make this a team, rather than a hodgepodge of stellar individuals, but that's hoping for a lot. I was ready to write this piece on Friday night after listening to Taijuan Walker pitch a great game, a key to the M's success, and thought for sure they'd survived a tumulut opening, and were on their way to being the team they promised to be at the outset of the year, when hope bloomed in March, like the daffodils and the cherry blossom trees in Seattle. Today, I looked at the box score and saw the M's lost the next two games over the weekend, and my heart sank again, realizing this club just doesn't have what it takes.
The hardest part to all of this is that the M's seem so right on paper, that it is hard to know what to pinpoint as the problem, and the announcers have no idea, either. The most obvious point is that the bullpen isn't that good, and yet the feeling seems to sink deeper than this, to something very intangible, that is hard to put a finger on. It's almost like they have no leadership, or no core to the team. The stars don't seem like leaders nor does anyone from the 'no-name' set from last year, and if someone from the 'no name' set was a leader, than he has taken a seat in the blazing light of Cano, Felix, and Cruz, who seem to have teamed up together, and taken it upon themselves to carry the M's to the pennant, but ultimate victory is going to take more than three players. Obviously, this is all speculation because I've never spent a day in the clubhouse, but it is a feeling I get from listening to game after game on the radio, with the neverending season pounding into my brain like a song until every word has been memorized. I wish I could say the 2015 M's were bipolar like last year, but I really don't think the psychological stigma applies, because they are never up for long enough, or down for long enough, to fill one with hope. They've got way more talent on this club than last years team, and I'm afraid that has taken away some of the bipolar magic of last year, that took a unified squad to maintain, because there was a real group sync. This is just a discombulated blockbuster, that may or may not come together, and may show at midnight for years to come if Nelson Cruz sets some records, or Felix wins the Cy Young award.
*Just listened to King Felix give up a grand salami to the Bronx Bombers, and Rick Riz was too terrified to tell grandma to get the rye bread and the mustard out of the cupboards. What a hypocrisy, what a lie the 2015 Mariners have been. This team sucks!!!!!!
** I'm sorry Iwakuma's career may have ended this season. He may have been the spiritual center of the Neptunean M's, and I'm glad I got to see him pitch, when he still blanked the opponent. A coworker pointed out that it was a cruel irony that Iwakuma's first big promotion, bear claw hat night, occurred a few games after he went on the DL, perhaps never to return.
*** 6/2 It's the next night, and a sense of defeat was sinking into everyone, including Ric Rizzs and Aaron Goldsmith, not to mention Shannon Drayer in the post game, analyzing the fuck out of every nuance in an attempt to give the educated fan a ray of hope, but it never works, like a bad politician unable to get a vote. The M's have little to no history as a ball club, and what little they do has to do with defeating the Yankee's in the playoffs of '96, their greatest moment as an organization, and when they became Yankee killers. The rivalry sustained until 2001 when the M's played the Yank's for the AL championship, and even though the M's had beaten the ALL-TIME record for most wins in a season from what I want to say were the '27 Yanks, the Neptunean wonders flailed in the post-season, when the chips were down, and America was under attack. The Yankees came in to save the day.
History wasn't so momentous on June 2nd, 2015, but it was a weird game that the Yankee's either stole from the M's, or that the M's gave to them, and it's getting hard to tell. Rodney could have saved it in the top of the 9th but walked the lead off batter and gave up a run. The Yankee's capitalized in the top of the 11th with 3 runs and put the M's to sleep. Not even Lloyd McClendon's insane theatrics in the 3rd when he got kicked out of the game for protesting a check swing, could ignite the team. These M's are dead, and the sharks can smell blood.
The faltering first act looks like it's going to lead to a complete collapse in the second act, when a movie defines itself. This season is a joke.
**** 6/5/15 The joke continues, or the 'jokus,' as my great baseball friend Jonathan MacKinnon dubbed it. The great J. Huff was pitching for the M's, their only positive surprise, and I'd throw Nelson Cruz into that category except that he was already a star and was expected to excel, and he has up to now, but I see him cooling off, and as frustrated as many before him who give their all to the Mariners only to succumb to mediocrity, and ripped of all hope, or that's how I feel, like the hide ripped off a baseball, with the stitching unraveled.
I was listening to the game tonight, and my car died in the sixth or seventh inning, with the game tied 0-0, and I knew the M's would lose. The feeling was worse though because I really knew the season was over in early June, way earlier than the analysts, pundits, and observers predicted. I shouldn't be surprised since the Mariners are one of the most pathetic major league teams in the history of baseball, one of only two to have never made the world series, and yet the fan base is ravenous. It could be that there is nothing else to do in Seattle since grunge is dead, and Amazon rules. Whatever the reason, this club just can't get their shit together, and even though the M's did something great 'for once in their life' according to Courtney Love, and had the most victories of any time ever (including the '27 Yankees), but they couldn't do the obvious and win the Series, or even get to it. The Yank's beat them in a post 9-11 world and when W. called for baseball to save the Nation, and how fitting for an ex-owner of the Texas Rangers.
The M's buckled under the pressure of leading the Country through a post 9-11 malaise, and I really think this is a point EVERYONE in the city refuses to recognize, and why I'm starting to hate living here like an exile gone to the great Northwest, where there are no Jews, but worse the white supremacist compound Hayden Lake is not far away in beautiful (no joke) Couer D'Elane, Idaho, and you can feel the bad vibrations out until Elliot Bay overlooking the Olympic Mountains and the Puget Sound. At the same time, Seattle is a city with a proud labor tradition, and Sawant and the socialists are starting to take over the city, and I hope to go to Town Hall tomorrow to hear Jill Stein, who ran as the Green Party presidential nominee, four years ago, and Kashama Sawant, maybe the most successful socialist in America, wreaking havoc on the city council.
These Mariners are neither revolutionary socialists, or stodgy conservatives. They are a team without an identity, or a house whose structure proved to be faulty a year after some poor fuck went into debt buying it. I don't know who this team is but I know the unbelievable performance they got from the superstar Nelson Cruz in the month of April when he was homering every eighth at bat is over. Don't get me wrong, he should be considered for the MVP just for that, but unfortunately he's not a team leader. What did the cursed M's do with Cruz's super human performance? They played under %.500 baseball (ouch.)
Guess what, Cruz doesn't give a fuck anymore, and 'Robbie' Robinson Cano, the Dominican named after Jackie Robinson, can't handle the Hayden Lake vibe of Seattle, nor can he articulate it, being to new to the city, and is losing his mind. That became clear to me early in the season against the Dodger's in what's now seeming like a pivotal inter-league series (I don't like those), against the L.A. Dodgers in Chavez Ravine. The M's were swept in extra innings two of the three games (if memory serves me well), and in one of them Cano walked home on a walk even though the bases WEREN'T loaded, and was out at home, costing the Mariners the game. I know we all make mistakes and life is not perfect, but I've watched a lot of baseball in my life and something this boneheaded only happens once in a life, like Jim Marshall for the Vikings running a touchdown the wrong way, and giving the opposition a TD.
My car died tonight, and so did the M's. I looked at the box score and they lost 1-0, and are on a five game skid. I'm sorry dear Mariner's fans and my heart bleeds royal blue and gold for you. I know it's a long season, and things can always turn around, but this has been a motherfuckin' bummer. To be more intellectual about it, I'd say the M's had a surprisingly bad first act, that may have gotten some laughs from the audience, but not for the right reasons, and now the second act is coming into focus, and I hate it. I'm afraid the fun is over and Cruz's home runs will let him arbitrate for more money, but his spirit is gone, and so is this teams. They are truly lost, and Lloyd McClendon knows it. He thought he was going to be the next Lou Pinniela.
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