When I moved to Seattle way back in 2001, I decided that I wanted to be a Seattle everything fan because I was never going to leave and this was my home now. That didn’t exactly end up happening that way and I was gone by the end of 2002. I moved away, have never returned since and the only vestige left from my time there is my fandom of the Seattle sports teams. The Sonics left, I realized football was the worst thing on earth and all that is left is the Seattle Mariners. They’ve been pretty bad since I left, the Brewers were good, I had a Brewers blog that ended up making me sick of baseball for a couple of years and I kind of forgot about them for awhile.
Until last season when I decided to try out the MLB At-Bat app and started listening to games on my days off.
I can’t remember ever listening to games when I lived out that way, but there is a weird sort of comfort it gives me. This season I decided to take it up a notch and sign up for MLB.tv so that I could actually watch the games as well. This has actually worked out great with my work schedule as the games are usually starting right when I get home and I’m usually up late trying to find something on Netflix anyways. It’s gives me something to watch, they are pretty good this year and it’s fun to like baseball again.
Of course, since I started watching and listening to the games on a regular basis they’ve had a disastrous month. They’ve seen a ton of pitchers get injured, the Rangers overtake them for first place, the Astros overtake them for second place and their record dip below .500. It hasn’t been fun. The worst part of all of this is their run differential which is currently +46 and sits ahead of the the Rangers at +39 and the Astros -1. Their record should be 41-32 while the Rangers record should be 40-32. In reality, they are a nearly insurmountable 11 games back in the division. In fact, their run differential is currently the third best in the American League which should have them shoe-ins for the playoffs. Instead they are 3.5 games back of the second Wild Card with three teams in between. Baseball is so not fair.
Still, I think they are a pretty good team and I like being invested in them. I like coming home from a soul sucking serving shift and watching a game. I pretty much have no nostalgia over my time in Seattle except for the few Mariners games that I went to and seeing Ichiro~! in his prime so it feels good to dip into that a little bit. I think I might even make a trip down to Chicago to see them play the White Sox. Being a fan is cool.
Watching and listening to these games has also made me realize that I still want to end up moving back there some day. It has enough of the things that I like about Wisconsin with the added bonus of being much cooler and having more of the outdoors-y stuff that I think I’d like to do. (No NBA though. *infinite frown emoji*) Who knows if or when that happens, but it’s fun to think about. Just like it’s fun to like baseball again.