Copyright The Oregonian
I have long carried with me the memory of Alfonso Soriano’s walk-off home run to beat the Mariners in the 2001 American League Championship Series, sending Kaz Sasaki’s pitch over the head of Ichiro, over the glove of Mike Cameron, over the wall of old Yankee Stadium. Over, just over. I still feel visceral pain for my teenage self as I remember sitting on the carpet of a living room floor, watching the ball sail into the right field seats. Time reduces memories to moments rather than the long intricate journey of the actual experience. A months-long season of magic becomes one pitch, one swing. A single snapshot. Now, imagine my surprise this week when I was messing around online and discovered that Soriano’s home run did not in fact send the Yankees to the World Series as I had long remembered. Instead, that moonshot merely gave New York a 3-1 series lead. It wasn’t until the next night, when the Yankees cruised to a 12-3 win, that Seattle’s incredible, indelible, invincible 2001 season officially came to an end. Three wins short of the World Series. All these years later, here the Mariners are again, victims of a towering blast at the worst possible moment. The ball came off George Springer’s bat Monday night at such a rate you might have thought it would tear a hole in the roof of the Rogers Centre. Instead, it only ripped through the hearts of patient M’s fans. It has been 24 years since I could credibly identify as one of them. Thanks to regional cable that made Mariners’ fandom something of a prerequisite, I, like most of us in the Northwest who are now approaching middle age, grew up watching Griffey and A-Rod. But it was the 2001 Mariners that I first truly loved. For much of the M’s run to 116 wins, I was in Alaska. My dad had bought a small fishing cabin on the Kenai River several years earlier after he and my mom had divorced. For a decade, I spent much of my summers on the banks of the Kenai, casting for salmon. Catching, cleaning, cooking salmon. Dreaming about salmon. It was the last truly analog period of my life, a personal Last Frontier. For most of the years I traveled to the Kenai, we had a turn-dial TV with an antenna that picked up stations from Anchorage 100 miles away. I woke up early most morning to the crackling sounds of the morning fishing report on AM radio. The cabin had plywood floors and a wood-burning stove. I slept on a bunk bed and read John Grisham novels with the midnight sun. On good days, we would wrap up fishing by the late morning, limited-out with a boatful of fish. On bad days, we wrapped up early, too. You always know when there ain’t no fish. I filled the rest of those long days whittling on the front steps, practicing my slingshot or skipping stones. My dad and I played cards every night and kept score over the course of the summer and before I flew home, the overall winner earned a pizza. My dad always paid. It’s all mind-bendingly quaint at this point. My own personal Andy Griffith Show. To my memory — imperfect, as we have established, but all that I really have — 2001 was the year that we had a satellite dish screwed into the cedar siding of our little cabin. Dad wanted to watch CNBC and the news. I, having come into my teen years, just wanted to watch TV. We discovered the Mariners together that summer. After the nightly news, we would find our way to what was then Fox Sports Northwest. It was Ichiro’s first year. We came to call the players by the nicknames the broadcasters used. There were Cammy and ‘Gar. Booney was my favorite. My dad and I didn’t have what might be considered a typical father-son relationship with regard to sports. He was never the kind to turn on a game. He was a sportsman more than a sports guy. He didn’t have teams he cheered for or games he planned his days around, other than the ones I played in growing up. That summer was the one time in my life when I felt like he and I truly bonded through watching sports. It was mere happenstance that it turned out to be what had been, or might still be, the greatest team in Mariners’ history. Those games, so many of them wins, filled our evenings. We still played cards, but it was as we listened the great Dave Niehaus chatter away in the living room. At our favorite fishing spot each morning, a quasi-secret location beneath a bald eagle’s nest that we called the Grassy Bank, we would kill hours discussing the previous evening’s game. I remember frozen Snickers bars in the cooler. The shriek of the fly reel as a sockeye took off with a mind for Juneau, a 10-pound silver flash somehow stronger than a 14-year old kid. Wasn’t it absolutely bonkers that a team this good could blow a 12-0 lead on a Sunday in Cleveland? And don’t you just know that Edgar Martinez would have hit a walk-off grand slam if his bat didn’t break? Those conversations would lead to my dad telling me about playing baseball as a kid growing up in New Jersey. Playing first base because he was a lefty. Playing with a kid named Bunny Loree, memorable only because his name was Bunny and that seemed to so perfectly capture the 1950s. He talked about going into New York and watching the Dodgers and the Giants and the Yankees play. Stories by Bill Oram Portland’s first WNBA head coach is 30, British and just might change basketball forever Panda Express founders pushed to remain part of winning Blazers bid Ed Orgeron is interested in Oregon State job? Beavers should geaux get him | Bill Oram Did you see Willie Mays? Did you see Jackie Robinson? DiMaggio, Mantle, Berra? Oh yeah, he said. I saw them all. I had been home from Alaska for a couple of months by the time the ALCS rolled around. I remember where I sat. How it felt. It all came rushing back on Monday night. I lost track of the Mariners as the years went on and losses piled up. I adopted the Mets from afar. I moved to Los Angeles and kept an eye on the Dodgers. But for the most part, I stopped following baseball in any consistent way. Then in recent weeks, the Mariners sucked me back in. I loved seeing Martinez and Dan Wilson in the dugout. I loved seeing Safeco Field – I know, I know – full again. I loved knowing that the Big Dumper might dump one into the seats at any moment. I knew that there were thousands of fans who had suffered the pain of 2001, but unlike me stuck with the M’s for the next 24 years. I wanted the catharsis for them. My wife and kids watched all 15 innings of the Mariners’ thrilling Game 5 win over the Tigers. And the ALCS became appointment viewing. When the ball left Springer’s bat on Monday night, I swore and my wife said, “Oh, no.” I did not get to enjoy the entire journey of this latest Mariners’ season, from spring training on. I didn’t ride the highs and lows of all 162 games. I merely got swept up in the thrill at what turned out to be the end, just like I suspect many, many people did. I’m an admitted bandwagoner. Late Monday night, a follower on BlueSky asked me, “You think Eugenio Suarez’s grand slam will be remembered now?” And my answer is that I desperately hope so. But I know that I didn’t remember Mark McLemore’s bases clearing triple in the Game 3 win of 2001. Shoot, I didn’t even remember there was a Game 5. Time. Memories to moments. But what a shame it would be if in 20 years all someone remembers of this Mariners’ run, this approach right up to the very edge of history, is that one mighty swing from Springer. The greatest loss would be to let all the incredible mileposts that created a moment of such significance, whatever they may be for you, slip away. How many Mariners’ seasons since 2001 have not been memorable? How many ended with neither joy nor pain but just a thud of finality and the passage of time? I checked in on my dad Tuesday morning, curious if by some chance he had tuned in for Game 7. He is 85 now and had not been following baseball. It’s been a long time since he has. “I don’t know anything about it,” he said. We reminisced briefly about Ichiro, then I asked him to double check the spelling of his schoolmate Bunny’s last name. Then he launched into a story about a time a teacher put Bunny in charge of the classroom and he rapped my dad’s knuckles with a ruler and my dad stood up to fight. “He smacked me in the mouth in seventh grade,” he said. Then he chuckled. “Knocked me flat.” Mariners fans, the real ones, know that feeling this morning. Someday, I promise, this too will be a sweet memory.
