This smells like suffering
The Mariners are 42 games into this fourth season in which they're building for a better tomorrow. Pardon me while I throw a temper tantrum in the backseat because I'm currently sick of this journey.
My childhood vacations started with a 675-mile car ride, which my father insisted on making in a single day.
We’d leave Klamath Falls, Ore., by 7 a.m., loading up the four-door family hatchback, parents in front and three kids in the back. We would proceed at a reasonable and unrelenting pace until we arrived that night in Montrose, Calif., the small Southern California hamlet where our Pop grew up.
My father was generally silent through the first few hours of these journeys, and while I used to think this was dread on his part, I now believe he just had a marathoner’s mindset. He knew he needed to save himself. Our mother functioned as the cruise director, packing coloring books, toys and stickers in an effort to slow the pace of her children’s devolution. We became increasingly feral over the course of a day. She usually had enough of us by the time we got to the Grapevine, which is the canyon that Interstate 5 follows through the Tejon Pass. By this point, my father’s mood had lightened because he knew we were closing in on the destination. This uptick in enthusiasm on his part was viewed as an affront to the rest of us, who felt he should have the decency to be as miserable as we were by this point in the trip.
That’s how I currently feel about Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto. I don’t want to hear him talk about the road ahead. I don’t want to hear his well-reasoned assessment or his estimate of when we’ll get there. I absolutely don’t want to hear even a hint of enthusiasm about the way things are going because right now I am acting like my 8-year-old self in the back seat of one of those drives to California, using an annoyingly nasal whine to ask, “How much longer is this going to take?”
Seriously. I was one of those who believed that this team was going to be capable of picking up where last year’s team left off. Yeah, sure, the Mariners were unsustainably good in close games a year ago, but they were also a young team that could be expected to improve. Not only that, but the Mariners traded for a couple of veterans this offseason, adding third baseman Eugenio Suarez and outfielder Jesse Winker. They spent some money to put Richie Ray at the front of the rotation, and now, it’s not even to the end of May and this team is underwater and I’m worried the bubbles are about to stop coming up.
I’ve been patient for the previous three seasons. I’ve hunkered down in the back seat, knowing it was going to be a long ride. I’ve kept an eye on the minor-league development of top prospects, I’ve ignored this team’s tendency to be held hitless. It happened twice in 2019 and twice last year. I’ve kept telling myself that all of the contemporary discomfort will be outweighed by what it will be like once we get there, but after watching the Mariners lose six of the final seven games on that last road trip I feel as sick and tired as my mother by the time we reached the final two hours of one of my childhood road trips.
Don’t tell me about the one-run victory over Oakland on Monday night. I’ve decided I’m absolutely miserable right now.