The Mariners Just Need Someone to Believe

The Seattle Mariners are exceptionally bad. Spectacularly bad. Supernaturally bad. They are one of six MLB teams never to win the World Series and the only team to never even play in it. The Chicago Cubs, famous for a 71-year curse cast by a scorned billy goat owner named William Sianis, have won the World Series and the Mariners have not. We don’t even need a curse. We can lose on our own. 

The team is known for two things: this relentless mediocrity and its dedicated fanbase. Of course, every city says that about its team. Here, they say in New York and Chicago and Boston and Philly, it’s different. This team means everything. And perhaps that’s true. Perhaps every baseball team in every corner of America is so special, so interwoven with the lives of the people that it becomes the team. Thus, the Seattle Mariners have always felt like the center of the universe to me. 

It hasn’t always been hopeless, either. Ask a Seattlite to summarize the major historical events in September 2001 and they might say oh my God, the Mariners had a great season that year. Indeed they did. Despite everything, this little team that couldn’t skyrocketed into baseball history with 116 wins in a season, tied for the most (with the Chicago Cubs, go figure) in a single season. 

My parents recall this summer with a kind of reverence. They were a couple of teachers in a new city with a young child and a few free months to kill. Seattle felt huge—all hilly streets and the first batch of tech executives chatting on their Bluetooths, fresh out of San Francisco. The bars were packed with UW grads in their Patagonia fleeces and Birkenstocks. The sun set over the glistening Pacific at 10 o’clock at night and you could see it from every corner of the city. It was one of those places you just had to be.

My memory returns to one night over and over again. My parents drove up from their suburban home in Olympia, Washington, in the Subaru. Back in the day, they said, there was no traffic at all. You could make it all 60 miles from Olympia to Seattle in 60 minutes flat. It was beautiful. They had no plans that day, just to catch the game at a sports bar that evening. 

Seattle summers will melt your brain. Clouded by nine months of relentless, eternal winter, the first drops of sunlight hit the city like a mirage. As a child, I believed the most beautiful place in the world was the Emerald Queen Casino off exit 135 bathed in June sunlight. Its technicolor walls sparkled like the Emerald City, so I must be Dorothy. The billboard advertising the all-you-can-eat buffet on Sundays and Pat Benatar in May was like Times Square in all of its exuberance. It marked the halfway point between Olympia and Seattle, signaling something big ahead. Maybe it’s still the most beautiful place in the world. 

Dazed by this summertime sickness—where everything is wonderful and everyone is kind—my parents spent their day roaming the city. They wandered around Capitol Hill, the cool gayborhood, replenishing cups of coffee and laying out in the grass while the youth soccer team kicked a ball around them. Slowly, they ambled toward the stadium. My dad remembers even hours before the game a wall of flickering TVs turned on as they walked—everybody in the city was huddled together listening to the voice of Dave Niehaus as he prepared the city for battle. 

It was a big game. Nobody can ever agree on who played—Dad thinks Boston, Mom thinks New York. The point was that it was a big, East Coast elite team with old-money funding and pumped-up egos. A hundred years of consistent winning versus our little nobody team in the corner of a little nobody state. And there my parents were outside the stadium, beers in hand at an outdoor bar when a couple approached them. 

“We can’t make the game tonight and we just really want somebody to enjoy it,” the woman said. Two free tickets. It was a voice directly from God. 

“And the game was five hours long,” Dad recounted in grocery stores, car rides, parent-teacher conferences. “But nobody left. We all just stayed there, you had to. We knew it was history. And guess what?”

“What?” my brother and I would chant in unison. We knew our lines. 

“It was thirteen innings. And the Mariners won. You should’ve been there.” 

Dad’s been grouchy since I was a little kid. He’s a high school principal who gets up at the crack of dawn to run before heading to a 10-hour day at the school. He’s surrounded by high school kids all day and high school parents all night, I get it. But the Mariners bring out a different side in him. He’s been a tortured fan since he was a kid. Their wins and losses are his wins and losses. 

“You know, the Mariners remind me of myself,” he told me once after I called the team hopeless. “I was a small kid growing up, nobody expected me to be any good at anything. My tennis coach never believed in me. When I wanted to join the team, he made me play every single player to earn my spot. And—”

“You did,” I finished. I knew this story by heart. 

“Of course I did.” 

He tells this story religiously. He tells it in May when the new daylight promise of spring rolls around. It’s early in the season, anybody’s game. This year the Mariners are going to be the scrappy team that wore rags to practice and still came out on top, above the chatter. This year, every year, had to be different. By the end of the summer, he’d change his tune, but this was his annual Opening Day speech. 

“I believe in those Mariners. And I’ll be there when they win. They just need someone to believe in them.”

I imagine the early days of Dad’s baseball love story. That small kid with big ears poking out from underneath a dusty blue cap. He’s the child of a first-grade teacher and a wheat farmer in Eastern Washington, so naturally, Dad spent every summer pulling rye in the fields with his brother and sister. Unlike those sparkling Seattle summers, Eastern Washington is suffocatingly hot. It’s known for its draughts, fires, rolling fields of wheat, and no water. Dad revels in this misery. 

One summer it was a hundred degrees every day. The harvest was suffering because of it. Dad and his older brother Dan were already sweating by the time they pulled on knee-high socks under long, loose trousers to guard them from the sting of the crop. From the time he was ten, he worked all day out there. Pulling weeds with his bare hands, picking out thistles from his palm. 

“Don’t cry,” his father would chide. “We’ve got a long day ahead of us if you’re going to cry.”

It’s easy to get lost out there. In that mass of swirling yellow and gray when the sun in the middle of the sky feels like it could eat you alive. Just hours upon hours of walking through the same old nothing. It used to make their eyes sting with all the unbearable sameness. Nobody believed in SPF, Dad’s skin would get red, leathery, and tight around his arms, sometimes peeling back to reveal raw flesh. He’d watch beads of sweat cascade over newly formed freckles. All yellow and red—his siblings just little dots of color somewhere in the distance. 

Sarah, his sister, had a talent for avoiding farm work. She’d put her life on the line for the cause. Once, she laid her pink Kohl’s jacket on the ground and fell asleep peacefully beneath the wheat. It was shadier down there, she reported. It took hours to find her. Their father wondered aloud if she had been snagged by coyotes or stung by rattlesnakes. The family imagined her lifeless body cold and limp concealed by rolling bushels of wheat. She reappeared at the end of the day. 

Another time she kicked off her shoes and proclaimed them lost and she was sent home—walking, of course. 

Dad’s respite was the ball game. KIRO 710 on AM radio would flicker on and his father’s truck would pull away as they watched. Dad and Dan would clamber on top of the old barn, Dan pulling him up by the skin of his elbows when he wasn’t strong enough. The chipped red paint faded with years of harsh sunlight, a dilapidated, old thing. From this angle the wheat looked sort of beautiful, finding its gentle rhythm in the wind. It rolled for miles and miles, safe, soothing, and gentle.

They counted their earnings, paid to them in pocket change and crumbled dollar bills from their father. This time they’d taken Sarah’s too, she was too little to know better. Even over the static and the pennies rolling against the gutters, the sounds of the crowd carried like the ocean. They imagined the stadium, spotting the players from the high seats and deciphering their jersey numbers from blurry squiggles. Hotdogs and pictures with mascots. A faraway dream. The crack of the bat was so crystal clear. It was like they were right there. 

Just before Dad turned 18, Grandpa got sick. It was a mysterious illness that first turned up as the flu, then pneumonia, and then something even darker. Dad remembers all the light draining from Grandpa’s face—leaving his once rosy cheeks gaunt and pale. He was too weak to withstand the heat at the farm, too fatigued to check the Wall Street Journal for the stock report, too tired to yell. 

Grandpa and Dad had been at each other's throats for months. Dad had modest dreams of using his summer paychecks to pursue an education degree out of state. Grandpa thought this was a waste of money, there was work to be done on the farm. Dan had fulfilled his role, studying Agri-Business at Washington State University and becoming the president of Phi Delt. Now it was time for Dad to step up. And then the sickness. 

In Walla Walla, the sickness is known. The mysterious illness that plagued my grandpa was regional. He grew up in a tiny town called Prescott (pronounced Press-kit) where he met my grandmother and everyone else he’d ever know. The town has a community pool, a restaurant called the Tuxedo, a debilitating fear of outsiders, and a nuclear waste power plant. Other Prescott residents would be plucked off one by one by a disease that decimates the lungs and kidneys.

So for three months, my grandfather was confined by the walls of a Seattle hospital, a four-hour drive from the family home. With Dan thriving at school, Dad took it as a sign from the universe. He enrolled at Walla Walla Community College and agreed to stay with Sarah, alone, while his parents ventured into the night in hopes of better care. 

Everybody in town lived in big country farmhouses with a healthily sized backyard. Neighbors were close but nights were lonely and the driveway was long. I imagine these nights too—Sarah and Dad and the steam rising off their TV dinners as they flicked on the Mariners game for some reprieve from the silence. At one point, five people had lived their lives boisterously in that house. Dan the partier, Dad the overachiever, Sarah the rebellious dreamer. Now, it was just the two of them, side by side, watching the game. 

Maybe Dad thought about his childhood overlooking the sprawling fields of wheat with his brother by his side, his father half a mile down the road. Maybe everything was as it was supposed to be—not to be messed with. The way the sunlight glinted off the rolling fields of expansive wheaty nothingness was the kind of paradise you weren’t supposed to give up for anything. Maybe he had wanted too much. 

I’d heard the story of the tennis team a thousand times growing up, but this one only once. The story of grandpa in the hospital and how they’d never turn off the TV because they hated the sound of nothing all night, the occasional sound of ambulances blaring past striking a nerve. The ambient buzz of the crowd filled the silence—white noise, but a little friendlier. The tail end of summer means the soft hum of hungry insects and a truck full of teenagers blaring bad country music. Miles away from the family home, the wheat still rustled in the breezy night air, tended to only by an understanding neighbor who drops by every once in a while. The nights can be blissfully still or unbearably quiet. Far away, the crack of a bat makes it just a little easier for Dad to sleep at night. It’s easier to pour uncertainty into a fierce pitcher’s battle than the fate of your father. I see Dad hunched over, shoveling plasticky cheese from the TV tray into his mouth, not daring to take his eyes off the screen. Maybe he’s on the ottoman of his father’s favorite chair—an aging leather armchair that carried a distinct woodsy odor. To this day, that’s Grandpa’s chair, nobody else’s. 

One night Sarah turned to her brother and with wide eyes asked,

“Do you think Dad’s gonna die?” 

It was a question he pondered seriously and frequently. What if that door never swung open ever again? Dad was supposed to be the forgotten middle child. He was supposed to be the one who got out. He had imagined his life somewhere on the East Coast—he imagined dragging a suitcase full of his only earthly possessions down a cobblestone side street in Boston. But what if that all went away? 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, instead. “Dad’s coming home.”

And they would eat in silence letting the Mariners do the talking. Dad would wonder whether his father was propped up in his hospital bed, cursing at the same pitcher who couldn’t throw a strike to save his life. The updates were infrequent and not always positive. Grandma didn’t want to worry her children so instead she receded from their lives completely while Grandpa was recovering. 

The house was impossibly big and Dad felt impossibly small. 

Grandpa did get better though. He lived another 30 years with the sickness.

Sarah got sick slowly and then all at once. One summer we drove down the coast of Oregon to stay in a quiet beach rental like we did every year. Grandpa was long gone by then, commemorated annually by glowing lanterns that we set gently out to sea and then retrieve the next morning once the ritual was complete. A practice he would’ve found shallow and strange, but we do it nonetheless. 

It was the day Felix Hernandez pitched a perfect game. My brother, Sam, cried. So did Dad, for different reasons. 

We got word that Sarah had plowed her family car into the side of a Safeway on the other side of town. Dazed, she stared at her hands like they had acted on their own accord. It was like her memory had been erased, for a split second she had been ejected from her body, hovering above the shoreside grocery store in a dream. I wondered if her mind went completely blank, maybe it was peaceful, maybe it was horrifying. 

For the rest of the trip, she huddled under a blanket on the beach. It was like the family thought the salty ocean waves could heal her ailment—something out of a Victorian novel. Ah I’ve been to the sea, she would say, and my hysteria has dissipated. No such luck. Still though, she grasped clumps of black sand between aching fingers and let it pour between her toes. The rest of us took turns slowly approaching her, nervous, unsure. We’d sit in the silence watching and waiting. 

Alzheimer’s they eventually said. Sometimes people can live another 20 years with the disease. Mostly they die after five. The journey is always bleak, always depressing. A person is forced to grapple with their own mortality as their brain begins chipping away at the sanity they once had. 

Sarah was once an adventurous girl with ambitions far beyond Eastern Washington, too. She hosted Kurt Cobain (before he blew up) at a basement concert while her parents were out of town. A bunch of small-town kids rioted so hard all the picture frames in the house were smashed to pieces the next morning. Sarah was so elated with the success that she couldn’t lie about what happened. She was known for her long, jet-black hair that cascaded over one shoulder. She shaved off half her head before it was trendy to do that. With her meager earnings from the farm, she took off for Europe instead of using it for university. I’ll come back when Mom and Dad aren’t mad anymore, she told my dad. She stayed in Turkey for ten years and barely spoke English when she made her return. 

And now, once again, she was that little girl alone in the house with nothing to do but watch the game and hope for better days. 

Dad watched the game with the ocean crashing outside. Two different worlds just barely grazing one another. Perhaps they both thought about those long nights they spent together when the rest of the family was away, letting the low babble of TV do the talking. Dad talked about Felix’s win and who the Mariners might trade to rebuild for next season (they are always rebuilding). Sometimes I’d catch his gaze lingering at the window, imagining Sarah’s world an ocean away. 

EMI GRANT  is a Brooklyn-based writer who recently graduated with her MFA in nonfiction writing from the New School. Her work examines the intersections between pop culture, social justice, and identity. She has written for publications such as Polyester Magazine, The Film Magazine, and Magnetic Magazine. You can read her work at her blog, https://bonkemoji.substack.com.