For the home team

My friend Pat and I routinely obtain tickets to at least two -- more usually three -- Mariners baseball games each year.  We buy them from one of my former co-workers, who buys two season's tickets each year, and sells off the ones she doesn't want at cost.  As you might guess, she's something of a baseball fanatic -- I don't know if she still sits in the stands with pencil and paper, scoring each game, but I know she did for many years.

Call it prescience -- or coincidence, if you will -- but this year we only bought tickets for one game -- tomorrow night's game.  Most years, we have some hope, however fragile, that the season will work out to Seattle's advantage, if only in terms of moral victory.   They've rarely been an outstanding team, but often a pretty decent team.  Twenty-one years ago, they managed a 116-46 record (.716) -- tying a record set by the Cubs in 1906.  (But still lost the American league title to the Damn Yankees in a 4-1 series.)

This year is not 2001.  Although the local newspaper keeps finding grounds for optimism.  This morning's headline in the Seattle Times sports section read "Winker's two-run double backs stellar outing by Ray."  The game was a 2-0 victory over the Orioles, a team that after that loss now shares a .461 season's record with the Mariners.

But, unlike Baltimore which is last in its division, Seattle still ranks ahead of one other team in its own division.  That team would be the Oakland A's, with a .329 average, a team that's a distant 22½ games out of first place.  And ten full games behind Seattle.  And at this point in the season, boasts the worst record in Major League Baseball.

Who do we play tomorrow?  Oakland, of course.  A game of interest to the baseball world only should Seattle be humiliated.  And not much, even then.

Do I care?   Not really.  Going to a baseball game -- especially when it's only once for the year -- is a ritual totally satisfying in itself, regardless of who wins or how.  Neither Pat nor I are the kind of fans who score each play.  We're the kind who chat about our lives and catch up on each other's doings while we watch the play on the field.

We buy our ceremonial hot dogs and chips before the game, at booths outside the stadium.  We have set times for buying our one beer between innings, for getting a cup of those little ice cream chips whose name I forget, for cheering the scoreboard's inter-inning hydroplane races, and for rising and singing during the seventh inning stretch.  Both of us are retired, so we don't have to panic about work the next day if the game goes extra innings.  Leaving the game, we head home in opposite directions on the light rail, enjoying the atmosphere in the packed cars, whether loud and jubilant or silent and resigned.

Summer wouldn't be summer without at least this one game.  

"Feed me on peanuts and cracker jacks...."