[cknox0723]

Originally Posted by cknox0723

We did sneak into the playoffs as a wild card, where we faced a team that finished all of one game worse than Cleveland. Why you'd bet on a team that had burned out brightly three months before is anyone's guess. You'd have to be crazy to do something like that.

Crazy...crazy like a fox.

Seattle had won 289 games the last three seasons, losing in the World Series three years ago, the AL Championship round last year, and the first round this past season, falling to the eventual World Series champion all three years. Their 95 wins this season included a remarkable 51 on the road, and this 85 win wild card team that was below .500 on the road wouldn't seem to pose much of a threat, soaking wet in the Seattle rain or otherwise.

I think I fell in love with this team and have written so much about them largely because they were just so laughably bad when I started, then managed to turn a decent showing out of nowhere, and decent turned into more, more turned into a miraculous showing as one of the top four teams in standing in the American League.

I still haven't filled out my six foot frame, so I'm hundred forty pounds soaking wet, and if you could collectively gather this entire Pale Hose squad into one lump of baseball talent, that's about what they would have weighed on October sixth in Seattle.

You're not going to win many fights at 140 pounds soaking wet, take that from someone who's tried it, but if there's one guy I would want to go swinging with as 140 pound baseball team trying to fight to keep their season alive, it would be Mark Buehrle. Well, actually it'd be Bob Gibson, but if I had to pick from the Pale Hose roster, I'd take the guy who pitched 242 innings, went 17 and 8 with a 2.79 ERA, the guy who had won 15 and 16 with two terrible teams the two years previous, the one pitcher who I looked at upon taking the team and said, "He's got to stay." After he'd won 15 in that first awful, laughable year, I was faced with a choice - pay him or let him leave. I stuck with my gut, the very first thing I had thought about him, but it came with a price, an awfully hefty one. $50 million over five years, something that might look brilliant right now when he's 28, but maybe not so brilliant when he's 32, 33, and his left arm's got a thousand more innings on it.

You can get yourself in a lot of trouble by saying this too much, especially when you're looking at a fake baseball team, but why worry about five years from now when you're not there? You've got today, and if you want to win today, there's few guys who can shut down one of the best offensive teams in the American League like Buehrle. Like the mythical ace should, in our first playoff game in years he does just that, working out of jams against the core of Seattle's lineup in more than a few frames and shutting the bottom of their order down one-two-three in a triumphant sixth frame, leaving with a two-nothing lead courtesy of a two-run home run by third baseman Eric Munson in the top half of the frame. Seattle wouldn't manage a hit over three frames against relievers Akinori Otsuka and Joe Roa, and just like that we have the first punch on the Mariners, up one-nothing in the series.

Our second punch comes about as quick as it could, in the first inning of the next game. It came not with one huge blow but in the form of one two-out double immediately followed by another, giving us another lead before we'd even given up a run. Backup utility man Wil Cordero would lead off the next inning with a long ball over the left field fence, increasing the edge to a two-nothing advantage that had apparently quickly become comfortable, because #2 starter Esteban Loaiza (13-9, 3.33 a year after losing 16 games) would proceed to pitch perhaps his best six innings of the season. His struggles the year before and throughout his career would come from battling to command his fastball in the strike zone, especially the upper part of it, and when he'd come unglued Loaiza wouldn't dare to try to hit the strike zone with anything with much gusto on it. Call it a defense mechanism, I guess, but one that only the offense would appreciate.

Staked to that early one-zip and then two-zip lead, Loaiza was as glued as a first grader with his hand in a jar of Elmer's, keeping his hard slider down in the zone, which carved up the Mariners but a pair of singles slapped just out of the infield. The slappiness occured in seperate innings, so did no damage on the scoreboard.

The first sign that the baseball gods might be intervening in this one occured in the top of the seventh. Veteran first baseman Frank Thomas, who had been with the club for seventeen years and had hit his five hundredth home run the previous year, came up to bat with one out bearing a season batting line of .163 and clubbed a double that with his numbers could have quite literally been described as the one hit he'd been saving up for months, a year, for that one shot in the postseason that had materialized out of...at this point, it looked like the heavens. Backup catcher Miguel Olivo, the guy who months before had hit that home run in the 13th to finally win a game for that ragtag 3 and 13 bunch, stepped in and hit a ball hard and far into right-center field, maybe about as hard and far as you'd expect a guy who slugged .489 to hit one. Trouble is, those outfields in Seattle are about the biggest in the American League, and right center in particular is partially patrolled by the fastest man in the league, the 93 base thief who could probably just go by the moniker Ichiro and be recognized in somewhere expansive and empty like Siberia. Ichiro materializes out of nowhere, makes an incredible diving catch, and doubles the 300 year old Thomas off of second. Just like that, inning over.

Massive, powerful first baseman Adam Dunn leads off the bottom of the inning with a hard-hit single to right, the first Seattle hit with any gusto on it since the day before, maybe since the regular season since they really hadn't done much besides dinking and dunking against Mark Buehrle. Ichiro steps in and you couldn't write a script like what was to follow, not if you were a Mariners fan that had suffered as much disappointment as a three-year division winner could really give you, not even if you were a disciple of Jonathan Dorf. Esteban Loaiza had gone the first six innings without really a blemish at all, but one base hit and one hanging slider later, the home crowd was insane, bat**** crazy insane, because the cult of Ichiro had taken hold of the game, and seeing as the guy had hit .344 and stolen 93 ****ing bases during the season, it was about to swell up Jim Jones style. I mean, you can just imagine the buzz, 5'5" sportswriters salivating about this little 5'9" guy that didn't really hit home runs but ****ing ran and dove across the outfield and slid into bases and got all dirty and went from run-saving catches in the top of one inning to a game changing home run in the next half -- even though his uniform had grass stains on it! The articles would write themselves, the quotes unable to truly describe the impact this guy had on the game, running and running and running and never getting tired. His team hadn't scored a run all game, hadn't put up anything except zeroes the day previous, but Ichiro had just saved a run in the field and then brought home two with one swing of the bat. If he looked threatening with a big stick in his hands, maybe it would seem less like ten runs, but because he's all dirty, it's like some twisted game of pinball, at least from the other end.

So, looking at things not through Ichiro colored glasses, you've got two choices...drink the kool aid, or head out to the mound with an industrial sized tub of glue.