If your Twitter feed includes many Seattle sports fans, Wednesday night was a scroll through Hell.
In the moments after the Oklahoma City “Zombie Sonics” Thunder advanced to the NBA Finals, the anger came in a flood. And those are tweets from professional writers! As you can imagine, those from regular folks were even more colorful. Happily, at this bleak moment, our town’s baseball team–if you’ve forgotten, they’re called the Mariners–look like they just might be emerging from a decade of irrelevance.
In a nine-game road trip over the last week-and-a-half against three of the best teams in the American League, the Mariners went 5-4 and scored 66 runs. A 21-8 romp over defending AL champs Texas was the highlight, the most runs scored by a team all season. (The Mariners also had a perfect game pitched against them this year, so they own the best and the worst team offensive performances in MLB. Baseball is weird!) The happy portent of the road trip wasn’t just that so many runs were scored, but who scored them–the outburst was powered by the Mariners’ young hitters. In the nine games:
–1B/DH Justin Smoak had 3 homers.
–C Jesus Montero had 12 hits.
–3B Kyle Seager drove in 10 runs.
–CF Michael Saunders hit .487.
–2B Dustin Ackley scored 9 runs.
None of these guys is older than 25!
The last 11 seasons of Mariners baseball have been ugly. No playoff appearances, six last-place finishes, two 100-loss seasons. Not to mention the off-field problems: disastrous trades, horrible drafting, awful free agent signings, and plummeting attendance. Still, there have been glimpses of competence. The Mariners won 88 games in 2007, and 85 games in 2009. But that success wasn’t sustainable. The best hitters on both teams were older than 30–expensive veterans whose salaries were rising as their production was diminishing.
In 2012, the Mariners’ best hitters are young. They’re getting better and they are under team control–that is, they aren’t eligible to become free agents–for several more years. The future, for the first time, seems bright. Cue Jimmy Cliff.
Saunders especially seems to have turned a corner after being one of baseball’s worst hitters last season. Check out these charts USS Mariner ginned up, showing how successful Saunders has been at that toughest of all batting skills, hitting the ball to the opposite field.
This weekend, Saunders and the rest of the Mariners get to measure themselves against baseball’s best team. The Los Angeles Dodgers come to town for the first time since 2000, for a three-game, Friday-to-Sunday series. I’m going Friday night–seems like a better idea than sitting at home thinking about the Thunder.
Sometime next week, the 45-year-old franchise that was the Seattle Supersonics will compete in just their 4th NBA Finals. The man who took the team to Oklahoma City could well end up hoisting a championship trophy. For Seattleites who rooted for the team in their 41 years here, it’s a tough pill to swallow. Here’s hoping the resurgent Mariners can make it go down a little more smoothly.