When I first came to this blog on January 4th, I presented myself as the “resident optimist” of Late Summer Swoon. I feel like a lot has changed in this last year. I feel like the 2008 Mariners have changed my outlook on baseball. They have turned me into a skeptical person, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I started out this season with high hopes, not caring what the naysayers said about my optimism. “No, Carlos Silva will be good for us”, I said. MAN was I wrong. It’s interesting to look back to that January post, where I talked so much about moves the Mariners had made, and ones I thought they should make (Cliff Lee? Remember when the Indians were supposedly shopping him around for cheap? Man, that’s crazy).
Nonetheless, I went on with my optimism. We went through our “Awesome Predictions” (personal favorite: Wladimir Balentien: AAAwesome), and we were all looking up. Not even thinking the team would be good, necessarily, just that we had baseball again. Then the season started, and spring was upon us (even if we were being hailed/snowed on in the left field bleachers). We won on opening day, and then shit hit the fan. J.J. went down first. That was the first bad omen. The bullpen collapsed shortly after, and before you could say “Sit baby, sit!”, the season was gone. The season was slipping away only a few games into the season. Some people (myself included) said that we could get out of it, but deep down in everyone’s hearts, we knew it was done.
The postings around this site became few and far between not too long after, with our “end of the game” posts seemingly turning into “end of the week” recaps. Then, on May 8th, I pronounced the time of death of the Seattle Mariners 2008 season. I couldn’t bring myself to keep writing about all the games. It was too hard for me in this inaugural season of the blog. We all kind of got wrapped up in other things, and the blog took a backseat. To the best of my knowledge, I think it can be said that between the three of us, we saw at least half of every single game this season. We just couldn’t keep up the pace that we once had at the beginning of the year. But there’s always 2009.
For as bad as the 2008 season was, it served a lot of purpose for me. There were a lot of things that happened from the end of 2007 to the beginning of 2008. A few personal crises to work through, and the feeling of knowing that life was about to change forever (high school ending, going off the college, my brother getting married). I needed baseball, and baseball was more than willing to be there for me. It was the first fully involved season of baseball for me. We had had a sixteen game package for years, but it was always more time i spent with my family than anything else. This year changed that. It turned more into a part of me, not just something I went to a couple times a month. I kept an attachment to this team, for better or for worse. And It’s that attachment that will bring us back in 2009.
It’s like my brother said in one of the first posts here:
“We’ll still be there next year, back in our home-away-from-home green seats, bowing to the massive Jumbotron as stats and facts are spewed from above. October has never been a totally happy time to be a Mariners fan, but April certainly is.”
We will always come back for more, because the Mariners are our team. For better or worse, these are our guys, and we are behind them. And with this upcoming offseason, we can look forward to the Mariners (hopefully) going in a new direction. If they do, we will bathe in the glory of victories. But if they don’t next year, we’ll be there thinking about the next. There’s always another spring on the horizon. Mariners fans know this better than most.
