Oh, the tangled webs that sports fandom can weave. I can’t believe I’ve found myself in a “cutting off the nose to spite the face” situation, but it cropped up at the end of last baseball season in Seattle and has carried through to this year.
Honestly, I shouldn’t be complaining about my Mariners – they’re above the five-hundred mark (!), they’ve got one of (if not the) best bullpens in baseball (!!), and pitcher Jeff Weaver made the American League’s best team, the Boston Red Sox, look absolutely foolish on Monday night (!!!). Shouldn’t that be a recipe for fan happiness?
Well, it would if there wasn’t a notion that the whole thing could come crashing down at any moment. The Mariners’ success is more prone to injury right now than Junior Griffey, and there is a severe feeling amongst Safeco Field faithful that this team is overachieving in spite of itself.
Two men are responsible for this feeling: general manager Bill Bavasi and manager Mike Hargrove. Bavasi doesn’t inspire much confidence after an offseason where he got rid of young, cheap players in exchange for much more expensive, marginally better alternatives. Of course, trading one of the best young setup men in the game, Rafael Soriano, to the Braves for glass-armed starter Horacio Ramirez was hardly a strong move either.
If the man running the show in the front office scares fans, the man in the dugout is just as bad. While Hargrove gets many calls right – calling squeeze plays in the series against Cincinnati was a stroke of genius – he’s also capable of making bad lineup choices, most notably refusing to rotate players for left-handed opposing pitchers.
And if current evidence isn’t enough, consider Hargrove’s track record with the Mariners’ mid-90s nemesis, his Cleveland Indians squads that were amongst the most stacked lineups of all time. While they made two World Series and were two outs away from victory in 1997, they clinched neither title (with the 1997 loss directly blamed by some on Jose Mesa, something Mariners fans can relate to).
Compared to the star-studded lineups that filled the Kingdome in the late ’90s, and aside from perennial all-star Ichiro Suzuki and young ace Felix Hernandez, the franchise lacks a real direction. Free agent deals for Richie Sexson and Adrian Beltre typify the current organization’s situation: Big stars with other teams, both of whom have reputations as big sluggers but have come up short (or, in the case of Sexson, in streaks) when playing at home in Safeco Field.
Welcome to my dilemma, then, as a fan: This team seems to be constructed so poorly that I want them to lose in order to get a better GM and manager installed; however, they keep winning, which makes the side of me that checks the AL West standings happy, but it’s also rewarding and securing the jobs that I want changed.
Hence the bi-polarity when watching Fox Sports Northwest this summer.
This year’s Mariners are a Jekyll-and-Hyde enigma wrapped in a bizarre sort of logic. Wins on the road against a few of the better teams in baseball – including the Indians, Chicago Cubs and San Diego Padres? Sure.
Swept in a series right after that by one of the worst teams in the National League, Houston?
Mariners baseball: My, oh, my.
All I can hope is that this topsy-turvy season leads to a wild card berth, and that the management can keep the services of Ichiro, who will be a free agent after this year. Otherwise, the Mariners – lacking a big-name all-star and with an overachieving rag-tag crew – could sail into an anarchic obscurity and become the Cleveland Indians circa “Major League.”
Welcome to the paranoid fandom of a Seattle Mariners diehard.
Fear and loathing in Mariner-dom
Daily Emerald
June 26, 2007
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