By Tom
We’re a Mariners podcast now. At least until the end of their season.
Seattle is my second favorite baseball team. I have a penchant for loveable losers, they make for great underdog tales. They didn’t make it easy, like their former president Kevin Mather saying some insane shit about his players and the quiet part out loud about manipulating service time.
But I still love them. I always liked their jerseys, I liked their field, and I liked their players. Ichiro Suzuki burst on the scene in 2001, won a batting title, Rookie of the Year, and an MVP. He batted .421 in 10 postseason games and then didn’t taste another playoff series until he was a Yankee eleven years later. Felix Hernandez pitched 15 years with the M’s, won a Cy Young, hurled a perfect game, and compiled almost enough counting stats to put him in the Hall of Fame–and frankly, maybe he did–but he never pitched in the playoffs, he was four years too late.
The Mariners didn’t make the postseason for 21 years. Their drought was the longest in North American sports. I’ll probably do a piece on all the history they may have missed during all that losing, but for now a lot of great players came and went and never tasted the joys of October.
So if you want to join the Mariner bandwagon with us, and bask in the weirdness of a team so profoundly human then I recommend watching this documentary by Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein.
About Last night
Josh and I went and watched Tom Segura at the Fox last night. It was pretty good. I had seen Tommy Buns earlier this year in Las Vegas, which sucked. The whole show sucked, but it wasn’t Tom’s fault. It was Vegas. I’m pulling this from my ass, but I doubt many performers love Vegas. It’s just a stop and some easy cash that casinos love to piss away. You’re performing in front of the worst people there; touristy slobs. A woman got hammered and heckled the show about how she wanted to fuck Tom; it was funny. Well she wasn’t, we all wanted her to die, but it was funny that Tom hated her and the show. After one particularly bad heckle, he laughed, looked down at his phone to check the time and said, “I only have to do this for 5 more minutes to meet my contractual obligations.” It was hilarious, I feel like we’ve all been there in some regard.
But this show was lively and great. He fed off the energy of the room and didn’t miss a beat. Great time, mucho fun. I’ve not been the biggest fan of Segura’s podcast, mainly because they devoted way too much time in the past ragging on trans issues that made me feel, how I should put it, gross. Honestly if you want a better take on the subject, read this interview with Tim Heidecker.
Tommy doesn’t really transfer that into his standup. It was a great show.
Oh yeah there was something else.
They made me want to vomit
After the show we rallied the troops and went to Up-Down. It’s a two-floor barcade with an outside bar. Really good shit, great pizza, tons of chics, bro. Whenever I work in St. Louis or come up here to see friends, we usually hit up this venue. We play X-Men or fucking NFL Blitz; there’s so many arcades you couldn’t play them all within a week. They have mixed drinks named after 90s cartoons and references, like a Daria which is basically their take on a white Russian. The whole place feasts on millennial and Gen-X nostalgia, a excellent sales strategy.
They also have pizza, damn good pizza, the good shit. I’m talking grease, that’s the mark of a good fucking pizza. So much grease you have to dry its little hiney off with a bath towel. You can get a whole pie or by the slice, and they’re big-ass slices too you don’t get cheated. This isn’t some Detroit style poverty piece, this is bar pizza at its prime. Up-Down knows what the people want.
We were watching some random baseball game when a guy behind us, braced against his friend, started stumbling toward a trash can. I turn around and catch this dude puke not once, not twice, but three massive pumps of bile and intestinal lining. A cartoonish display of vomit, I swear to God I thought it was a bit until the smell hit me and even then I gaslit myself into believing that Q and the boys were gonna run out and start laughing.
He barely got any in the trash can. He missed the first two pumps. Just bleck and then splat. Luckily we’re outside otherwise he would have been beaten to death by everyone else. His friend is patting him on the back and just shaking his head like it’s no big deal, trying to save face for his guy. I respect that but he kept saying, “It was the pizza. Pizza made him do this.”
There are no chunks of pizza in any of that, sir. I see not a single crumb, pepperoni, or paper plate from the ravenous nature Up-Down’s pie by the slice causes. Your boy simply drank too much, I don’t know why you have to blame it on the pizza like you’d blame a fart on a dog.
Just a Disgusting Display
Anyway, this guy threw up and we went back to our lives. The baseball game on the TV is getting a little more exciting, almost immediately after that dude lied about Up-Down’s pizza, one of the teams–whose offense had been anemic all game–started to get some momentum and get some runners on. They had their two best hitters up too, that’s usually a pretty good sign something’s about to happen.
Josh and I are a couple of jokers, so we start shouting that this rally was all because of the guy who threw up his blood alcohol level. “RALLY PUKE” got trending at Up-Down. At first, the people were taken aback. I understood their hesitation, but we didn’t mean to mock the man who just ruined his, and the surrounding tables’, night, instead we sought to immortalize him. SHINY AND CHROME.
Baseball is a very superstitious sport, you’ll find a litany of various idiosyncrasies that players engage in before, during, and after a game to maintain their ju-ju. The big stuff we see like not talking to a pitcher in the middle of a no-no or perfect game or the fans doing a rally cap. Then there’s just the weird shit, like Justin Verlander eating precisely three crunchy taco supremes, a gordita crunch, and a Mexican Pizza early in his career. No tomatoes. What a weirdo, keep this man away from children.
So it wasn’t out of the purviews of baseball decorum to start a rally chant immediately after an offensive rally started right after a guy just puked. At first the bar was against us, but their desperation soon set in. And the whole venue was eventually on board with RALLY PUKE. We were, like, so cool. We got free beer and pussy all night. It was the only way to get the baseball team’s offense going, by engaging in something beyond the reaches of scientism, but something deeper and more profound than the inner files of our thought cabinet could discern. The puke had power.
Time for Some Unncessary Cruelty
Nope can’t think of anything.
Not at all. Not sure what happened in the baseball world that would be so important to spend an inordinate amount of time shitting on another franchise. The Blue Jays did that mightily, they held an 8-1 lead over the mighty Mariners before relinquishing that lead and losing on an Adam Frazier–a man with a .612 OPS this season–corner double. This choke job by the Blue Jays was so great it probably overshadowed another intense choke-job, in another league even!
Seattle’s best hitters were so good when they needed it too. I know that Seattle doesn’t have two, let alone one perennial MVP on their team, that would be kind of crazy don’t you think? If you had two of the very best hitters in the league on your team you’d be an offensive juggernaut in the league, you could confidently believe your team could beat any team in the postseason, like the Phillies!
Seattle’s no. 3 and 4 hitters combined to go 8 for 17 with a home run and 5 runs batted in. We’re not talking about guys with Hall of Fame numbers and potential, we’re talking about Eugenio Suarez and Cal Raleigh. Geno and Big Dumper posted fWARs of 4.1 and 4.2, very good seasons for two guys making a combined $12 million this year. That’s a literal steal when you think about it! Imagine if the no. 3 and 4 hitters on your team, who are also MVP front-runners, combined to go 1 for 15 in a postseason series while making over $57 million for the season. Your veggies might be a little steamed about that!
Seattle has a super bullpen too! They’re top 10 in ERA, K/9, and LOB%, metrics you really look forward to. They did have an epic collapse earlier in the season against the Royals, but they’ve been solid enough in their 2 game sweep against Toronto. Paul Sewald had a 4-run blowup after relieving Matt Brash who relieved starter Robbie Ray who also gave up 4 runs. But Sewald’s hiccup aside, the Mariners surrendered just 1 run in the final 4 innings of their 10-9 comeback victory, they kept their team in it and didn’t piss away the lead when they had it. It sure would be embarrassing to have that happen to your team, like the Blue Jays or maybe another team, who may or may not have won their division.
Anyway these are all just hypotheticals.
The Mariners play their division rivals the Houston Astros next in the ALDS on October 11th. Join us in rooting for the best team left in this terrible, terrible postseason!
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