I moved to Seattle in 1998, via Minnesota, via Florida, via Arkansas, via Michigan. I remember that the top story in the Seattle Times the day I got here was that the hot dog to be served at Seattle Mariners' forthcoming new baseball stadium was being redeveloped to have a toasted bun and a natural casing. Baseball was a childhood afterthought to me then. My passions were guitars, beer, and web development, in that order. There was a lot of spilled eye liner and even more urinating in alleys back then as I kept trying to find my place in the universe one rock band at a time. One ugly spring day in 2000, I took the bus to that new stadium so I could distract myself from another day of crushing weekend loneliness.
Baseball stadiums had changed drastically from what I had remembered. You could walk the concourse all the way around the field if you stayed behind the yellow line, and still see the game. The scoreboard flashed a goofy CGI hydroplane race around Puget Sound. Spicy peanut chicken, sushi, and garlic fries had made it onto the menu with the hot dogs. I bought the cheapest ticket ($5 at the time), settled into the center field bleachers, and tried to re-acclimate myself with the game.
In the second inning I saw a guy come to the plate who looked familiar. I didn't know the names of anyone on either team at that point, but there was some deja-vu going on with this batter. I glanced over at his statistics and saw that he was batting almost .400, which for those who don't know anything about baseball, is really good. It is amazing. I looked a little further to the left and learned his name: Edgar Martinez.
He then hit a double that looked like it was fired from a harpoon gun into right field. The sun started to break through the clouds, and in an instant, I understood why Edgar seemed so familiar to me that day.
Let the Good Times Roll
Back in the mid-1970s, the sunsets seemed to have a more orangey color than now. So did interior furnishings, clothes, toys, and most everything else I can remember from that time. I remember the sunsets and the sweetness of dusk, and the world exhaling in unison after another short cycle of getting by.
I was five in 1975. Twice a week my mom dragged my two older sisters and me to inconsequential city park baseball diamonds in the Downriver Detroit area. On those nights steel mill softball leagues met for brief intervals of past glory and the chance to witness, if only for a few fleeting seconds, the versions of themselves that would be playing that same night in the Major Leagues, were it not for a dent somewhere in their journeys.
Town baseball and softball games were so common in the summertime then, you could frequently spot one from a car window during short errands. It was cheap, accessible entertainment on which much of America still depended during the summer. If a friend was bicycling by and had a jug of some kind dangling from the handlebars, they were probably going to a game and would invite you along.
The players' families sat on blankets on both sides of the diamond listening to tinny strains of the Captain & Tennille, Van McCoy, and Silver Convention playing in AM transistor radio surround sound. Kids sipped Faygo Soda, and those that were in possession of a new candy called Pop Rocks postured for supremacy and favors from new best friends they had just met. This was the epoch before the urban legend about John Gilchrist’s exploding stomach made its way across the country.
I remember dirt dunes left over from an adjacent development at one of the parks where every week the same guy would show off on a green Kawasaki dirt bike, proving to the ball crowds that he knew how to let the good times roll. I have read opinions like this one about the somber attitude of post-Vietnam/Watergate America that supposedly influenced those ubiquitous brown, yellow, and orange color schemes. But, for those of us in the lily white suburbs of Detroit, the good times hadn’t stopped rolling. My parents were ardent Republicans and they towed the line under Gerald Ford as if nothing had happened.
My dad played first base for McLouth Steel (Trenton, MI). At that time he was a mill superintendent, and not a grimy-faced ironmonger that comes to mind with the term, "steel worker." But he did wear a hardhat to work, as well as those clunky boots with the metatarsal safety guard.
Then on game nights, he wore a full baseball uniform right down to the stirrups and metal spiked cleats, as did everyone else in the league. These were not "beer leagues." These games were not cavalier excuses to drink or socialize. These men all had dreamed of playing in the Majors and taken those dreams as far as they could. They had practiced their bubblegum card poses, and mimicked their favorite players, which in my dad's case was George Kell.
Now, with the sands running out on their bodies' best athletic years, they took these games very seriously. These guys ran out every ground ball as fast as they could and threw as hard as they could to nail tagging runners. They slid headfirst like Pete Rose. And they perfected their swings using Hit-a-way batting trainers before and AFTER each game. If they won their league, the trophy would be a nice conversation piece, but the true reward was the establishment in their minds that they had what it took to have been the best, if only. And my dad was not friendly to unions, nor were they to him. But on those select summer nights, they were the same person.
When my dad settled into the batter’s box, he was no poseur. There was no phony routine or mannerism copied from TV, but a quiet, deliberate mission to get on base. He walked into the box, crouched, and twirled his bat ever so slightly to time the pitches. Being patient and prepared, he waited until he saw the pitch he wanted, then cracked the softball into the outfield gap. That swing… the mechanics of it were as perfect as a person could demonstrate.
That same perfection is what I saw Edgar demonstrate on that day I first saw him play.
The other teams barely stood a chance against my dad. Although he (like Edgar) wasn’t a good base runner, one of those years he won the league batting title by hitting for an incredible .750 average. I soon played in Trenton’s Little League and started following the Detroit Tigers. Pilgrimages to Tiger Stadium were the highlights of my summers, as were warm late nights listening to Ernie Harwell call the games on WJR when the team was playing on the west coast. Fittingly enough, I got a kick out of the Seattle team that played in giant clamshell, and I had a Mariners faux-batting helmet that I wore when I played ball with my friends.
Living in a baseball wilderness
In 1982, my family relocated to Arkansas. The steel industry had gone to hell in Michigan but my dad landed a job as a project engineer at a new mill that would supply steel pipes to oil wells in Texas and Oklahoma. The only sports on TV or in the newspaper in Arkansas was about the Razorbacks. Back then baseball was about as prevalent there as synagogues or Pilsner Urquell. In fact, when I was old enough to scheme for beer, I learned to announce “I like both kinds: Bud AND Busch.” (I wouldn’t get the innuendo about that for years).
From my first day of junior high, it was clear that not assimilating into Southern culture was going to be a challenge. I liked who I was and where I was from, so it took all my stamina to keep from constantly inserting “y’all” into my sentences. I did, briefly, embrace the snuff-dipping side of that culture because mini-mart clerks used to give out samples of Gold River or Silver Creek for free. All one had to do was ask.
But there was very little baseball in Fort Smith, Arkansas in the early 80s, on TV or anywhere else. I watched the amazing 1984 Detroit Tigers win the World Series and wished I was still back in Michigan. By the way, Mariners Nation will remind you that the Tigers’ 35-5 start that year was actually at 35-8 start after a road series at the Kingdome.
So, my voice cracked, I got taller and learned to play guitar as I forgot about baseball. I wore Ozzy shirts for my school picture and casually discussed my agnosticism, which one day prompted a group of cheerleaders to walk past me while making crosses with their fingers. I discovered the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and other early punk, Suddenly there was a soundtrack for me to stick my middle finger up at the world. My dad must have looked on in horror as his only son forsook the white, protestant, patriarchal institutions that had benefited him his whole life, and that his politics girded to preserve. But he never once told me what I thought was wrong, and always stressed that I needed to exercise my right to vote. Discussions about politics were usually no longer than two sentences.
During those same years, Major League Baseball owners were engaging in the perhaps the worst scandal in baseball history. As Edgar was having his first short stints in the Bigs, owners were colluding to avoid competitive bidding for free agents, thus keeping players’ salaries deflated. The struggle for capital between the haute and the proletariat classes that had shaped my dad’s views about labor unions in the steel industry had played out in the baseball diamond. Conservatives love “free markets,” until they hate them. The owners' behavior during this time was described by baseball union leader Marvin Miller as "tantamount to fixing, not just games, but entire pennant races, including all post-season series.”
Paradigm Shifts, Big and Small
Edgar made the Mariners’ opening day roster in 1990 and then was a Mariner for good. He batted over .300 in his first three seasons. In another parallel of that same year, I was accepted to the University of Florida, and spent those years as an undergraduate.
UF somehow saw something in me and took me like a minor league prospect of sorts. There my politics took a left turn in the way that conservatives dread and makes them want to infiltrate higher education. In the lead up to Desert Storm, I saw two female undergrads standing on the busiest corner in Gainesville holding a sign that read “NO BLOOD FOR OIL.” They huddled together with the flag around their shoulders while passers-by shouted insults and obscenities. For me it was one of those paradigm shifts that only occurs a few times in a person’s life.
Suddenly I understood all angles about why those cheerleaders mocked me, why my dad had issues with unions, what Joe Strummer and John Lydon were really singing about, and the basis for why I had been flipping off the world; I was on Team Vidal, not Team Buckley.
I came home for summers from Gainesville and worked at the MacSteel plant with my dad in Fort Smith as part of the student program. My job was to deliver grease barrels via forklift around the mill and hook them up to Farval pumps. Another time I had to take apart the roof of a hydraulic house and pick dead birds from the filters.
During maintenance shutdown, I had to work in the ruthless 6-story “bag house” where all the lead-filled dust had risen from the casters and then filtered down through long canvas bags. It was 130 degrees inside, and I had to do it wearing a full Kimberly-Clarke paper PPE and a mask & goggles.
But, it was ultimately rewarding and taught me true perseverance in adversity more than school or any other wimpy job I had before. Every day I got to the mill I wanted to turn around and do almost ANYTHING else in the world, but I knew that I needed to pay for school and not make my dad look bad. I ended up doing that anyway by drawing an 8-ball on the side of my hardhat and writing “Shhh. No one knows I’m liberal” under it. I'm sure dad wanted to kill me for that one, but he never said a word. His phrase for this behavior was “letting my alligator mouth overload my hummingbird ass.” Fitting that I was a UF student at the time.
I graduated from UF in 1993 with a BS in Communications and a minor in English. I didn’t care for Florida outside of Gainesville, and I sure wasn’t planning to go back to Arkansas to look at Confederate flags and hear Travis Tritt in the grocery aisle. So, after graduation I joined a friend in Minneapolis. There would at least be the opportunity to see the Tigers play the Twins if I wanted to, but I still had lost the connection with baseball.
Meanwhile, the MLB Players Union were at war with the baseball team owners. The free agent salary deflation scandal was still fresh on their minds when the owners decided to propose player salary caps. I barely noticed when Major League Baseball went on strike on August 12, 1994. In the couple of years that followed, I attended a few Twins games at the old Metrodome, but the charm of baseball was still lost for me. This was probably due to the product that the Twins put on the field sucking like an angry, ugly baby.
But baseball rebounded in America. Cal Ripken got it started in 1995 by breaking Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak. That same year, Edgar and the Mariners made the playoffs for the first time in franchise history. Along with a cast of future hall of famers that included Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson, the M’s took down the Yankees in five games during the post season before falling to Cleveland. Edgar endeared himself forever to Mariners Nation when he hit The Double, which is still discussed and replayed frequently during Mariners radio broadcasts.
The Sound is Calling
By 1998, life in Minneapolis wasn’t going so great. I was sick of the cold, had few friends, and my first live-in relationship was coming to a sad end. So, I told a friend here in Seattle that I was coming then cancelled my Minnesota life. On September 8, 1998, the night before I left for Seattle, I watched Mark McGuire hit his 62nd home run of that season, breaking Roger Maris’ single-season home run record. The home run race that season between McGuire and Sammy Sosa is credited with “saving baseball” after the scandals and strike of the previous decade. But, others argued that baseball had actually been doing fine. And as we’d see in the ensuing years, the inflated home run numbers would have a pernicious effect on baseball.
That catches this story up to the first paragraph, where I rediscovered baseball on that day in 2000. I kept going to Mariners games and started listening to them on the radio and learned about strategies and small ball that I hadn’t considered. I watched a game on TV against Oakland at a bar in 2001 and had barely decided to stay before I saw Ichiro Suzuki make The Throw. The Mariners won an astonishing 116 games that season. I once heckled Raul Mondesi relentlessly when I sat by the right field foul pole. I also went to as many games as I could against Texas and New York so I could boo A-Rod. It was all the time of my life.
As the 2004 season wrapped up, Edgar said goodbye to baseball and finished with a .312 lifetime batting average. The annual award given to the best DH in the American League was renamed in Edgar’s honor. And on the other side of the continent that same year, my dad settled into retirement and decided to join his retiree community’s softball league. He could once again wear the metal cleats and perfect that swing. This was the impetus my mom needed to insist that a doctor check out an obvious problem with my dad’s expanding abdomen.
My dad never did play ball again. Instead, he would endure a decade of surgeries and doctor visits instead of clutch hits just inside the left field line and throws to beat the runner at first. At one point, before the AFA became law, his health insurance was threatened. From a hospital bed and with tears in his eyes, he lamented at possibly losing everything he had struggled and sacrificed for his whole life. It was not the time to prove a point about the cruel health care policies favored by the RNC, to whom he had donated regularly for decades. But, he did survive and endure with considerable complications.
On the plane back from that visit, I decided that I wasn’t going to get any clearer signs about fleeting life than the sight of him in that hospital. I bought my girlfriend an engagement ring the next day, and we got married by an Elvis impersonator in Vegas a couple of months later. I broke the news to my folks by sending them an unlabeled DVD of the ceremony. It was married, then house, then baby in three consecutive years.
Baseball Rediscovered, and Life’s Rituals
Baseball and the Mariners have been with me through good times and bad ever since. It’s not summer until I hear Rick Rizzs’ voice on AM 710. I keep expecting the Mariners to duplicate that magical 2001 season every year, but they haven’t made the playoffs since. But, the rituals every summer of buying peanuts from street vendors, singing “Louie Louie” during the 7th-inning stretch, and watching that inane CGI hydroplane race on the scoreboard have kept me going through debilitating work stress, imposter syndrome, and the sickening state of our polarized world.
That stadium that rescued me from crushing loneliness when I was single became part of my family’s story. My daughter discovered cotton candy and Dippin’ Dots at the stadium, and had her birthday party there on “Star Wars Day” one year. At Fan Fest, we met Kyle Seager and got to play catch in the outfield. My wife doesn’t like baseball but indulges me whenever I want to go. When we’re in the car and there is a game on the radio, it’s understood that the game will stay on.
When my daughter was a newborn I was playing in an adult softball league. That season I decided to track my stats and see what it would take to bat .750 like my dad once had. It was a grind and took all the beer league softball focus I had to get on base with rolling hits through the infield. On the last night of the season I was batting close to .700, and finished with a .686. I remember standing in the outfield as the last batter was retired, watching the rain drizzle down among the evening park lights in my own swan song to baseball glory. Washed in rain and the disbelief at my dad’s achievement thirty years earlier, I headed home to my young family.
I once asked my dad why he didn’t pursue baseball after that championship high school season. He said he’d weighed the pros and cons, but decided that a life of poverty on buses and in crappy towns in the minors wasn’t for him. He said he didn’t have any regrets, and I believe him, but I still wonder if he imagined himself winning the World Series in ‘68 with the Tigers. Having been the earnest, noble person he was, I picture my dad talking sense into Denny McLain the way he could with everyone else who looked up to him.
I woke up on January 1, 2014 and something told me my dad wasn’t going to live out the year. By November it was clear he wasn’t going to get the best of his health issues any longer, and my mom told me to get there on the next plane. I made it in time and rode with him to the hospice center, and it started to sprinkle as he was taken out of the ambulance. I took off my Mariners cap and placed it over his eyes and head so the rain wouldn’t get in his face. “I want that hat back,” I said to him jovially as they wheeled him inside. Shortly after he was checked into the room at hospice, the nurse administered the first dose of morphine. He was lucid, tired and scared, but persevering. I wondered what he could be thinking through the fog… was he reliving past glories or maybe wanting to admit to something he never could before.
I concluded he needed one last dose of his beloved Detroit Tigers, and used my phone to play audio of the ‘68 Tigers’ rally song, and of Ernie Harwell’s farewell. The weakened gape left his face, and he smiled wide as he and I made one last father-son connection, over baseball. In the farewell, Ernie says “God has a new adventure for me, and I’m ready to move on!” I’m not a religious person, but I like to think that this gave my dad added comfort before the morphine took over completely. A day and a half later, I woke up early in the morning and went over to his bed. I leaned down to hear a few faint breaths still being drawn, then turned around to get something to wipe his chin. When I turned back around he had stopped breathing, and his long season of life had registered the final out.
The Post-Game Show
For 15 years after Edgar retired, he watched and waited as he was passed over for admission into the Major League Baseball Hall of fame. His legend in Seattle grew, and a section of left field at the Mariners’ stadium was named after him. But in 2019, Edgar was finally voted into the Hall in his last year of eligibility. His speech was, like my dad, earnest and noble and like he has been to Seattle. Mariners Nation swooned. In fact, I started writing this essay two years ago and planned to post during induction week, but it took me another two years to compile what I really wanted to say.
The 5+ years since my dad died have been my hardest. My life is really easy, comparatively speaking. But challenges with home, work, health, and the world are taking a toll even on my appearance. My dad never had any regrets. I however am consumed by them and my mistakes, and also mired in unforgiveness for those with whom I have grievances.
Yesterday I went to a Mariners game for the first time in two years. I sat directly behind home plate for the first time, ever. Spectres of seasons past haunted my thoughts as I remembered what life was dealing me at the time. But I swear I could see my dad and Edgar on the field, giving signals back and forth to me, telling me that every day above ground is a good day… that I have many more at-bats to prep for. And, for a few hours, the world was as it should be while I watched the Great American Pastime. Maybe this will be the Mariners’ year, and mine as well.
My team and I will both keep preparing, but changing our routines when the game calls for it, for the love of baseball, my dad, and ‘Gar.
And, yesterday I finally stopped being so cheap and finally bought a proper Mariners jersey from the team store. It’s an Edgar Martinez #11 Cooperstown Edition.