The Dirty Little Secret Every Fan Knows

I was going to continue our baseball lessons by writing about arguing with the umpire. But this week, I’m compelled to tell you the truth. I haven’t been totally honest with you, Girlfriend. I’ve been telling you that baseball is a great, mystical, magical game that is fun to watch. But I’ve been withholding the dirty secret that every long time baseball fan knows. And now it is time for you to know, too.

Sooner or later, baseball will break your heart.

There is no getting around it. The team you love stumbles, falls unconscious, needs life support. Your team suffers the indignity of an inning where the other team scores 8 runs and the final score resemble the football scores of your MOFF (when you were More Of a Football Fan) days. Your team may, as my dear Mariners did recently, lose seven games in a row. Your team may have, as my dear Mariners currently have, the worst record of both leagues. Your team of promise may not only be in a slump, as my dear Mariners were earlier this week, but may in fact be rolling around facedown in the gutter with a bottle of ripple in their hand.

Why do I share this dreary news when I seek to help you like the game of baseball? Because if you watch baseball, you will some day find that your team, yes, your dear team that you have been developing a passion for, learning the batting order, and starting to recognize the players, will have streaks, slumps, bad mojo, debilitating injuries, and undefined malaises that seem to roll in and hang on like a fog over Seattle’s downtown. And it can be painful. When your team has a winning streak going, it’s like the momentum of a fast train. The planets line up, the hits are clockwork, and the game goes like velvet. It is easy to be a fan then. I witnessed a great streak of the Boston Red Sox when during one game, four batters hit home runs in a row and all the pitchers could do (a relief pitcher came in but he couldn’t stop the train) was stare in disbelief while BoSox fans screamed, jumped up and down, and just about collectively wet their pants. It was an unbelievable high.

But when your team’s rushing current of luck hits an eddy and starts working against you, you have to hold on and keep rooting for your team. That, my little bratwurst, is when they need you to believe the most.

Because there is another thing unique to baseball that will keep fans going. Baseball teams play a lot of games in their season -- 162 to be exact. In playing those 162 games, the team with the absolute best record in the country still loses about a third of its games and the team with the absolute worst record in the country (which would be my Mariners) still win a third of their games. So no matter if a team is the best playing the worst, the not-as-good team will probably beat the better team a couple of times in a season, often at least once in a three game series.

Except last weekend when the Mariners played the New York Yankees in their last games played in the current Yankee Stadium. The first two games were a blood bath and the last was a heartbreaker. Close, ahead for the majority of the game, but they couldn’t pull it out.

And when the Mariners went back to Safeco Field in Seattle to play the Boston Red Sox who won the World Series last year and I found myself sitting next to The Boyfriend and Red Sox Fan on the couch, I still had to find it in myself to root for my team. That great play by Ichiro, catching Jason Varitek’s slammer over his shoulder and throwing it back in time to hold the runner at first almost negated the heartache of losing the seventh game in a row on Monday. But not quite.

You have to have a bit of a thick skin and a slight dose of “devil-may-care” attitude when your team enters this black hole and can’t seem to find their way out. This especially comes in handy when your team is losing to the favorite team of someone you know. Like Joanie the Softball Diva and Terminal Yankees Fan. During the weekend rout, after cheerfully declaring, “my boys are spanking your boys,” she actually tried to be kind, saying she hoped my team started winning. “But not until Monday,” she clarified, because her team was in its own slump and they needed to “sweep” the series with the Mariners to improve their record. The Boyfriend was a little more competitive. His compassionate response of the Sox pounding the Mariners that first game was more like “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

But remember the odds. Even when your team has the worst record in baseball, they are still going to win about a third of the time. And on Tuesday, the Mariners broke that losing streak with a dramatic bottom of the ninth inning line drive that brought in the winning run, thus lifting the spirits of every fan at Safeco Field. (Our power went out in bottom of the eighth inning, so we ended up eating ice cream bars and listening to the rest of the game over our battery powered radio which I highly recommend everyone do at least once this season.)

Catcher Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.” No one really knows which fat lady he was referring to, but it has come to mean, don’t lose hope. Remember, there are 162 games in all. And it is still only May.