- BEN VANHOUTEN/SEATTLE MARINERS
- Notable non-Seahawk Robinson Cano just finished a moderately successful first year in Seattle.
Ah, the bye week. The one week of the year when we say bye to NFL football that we care about and say, “Hello, week without Seahawks football.” (I assume that’s how bye weeks got their name, and I am uninterested in learning more on the subject.) A bye week for the players is a chance to rest their bodies. For the fans, a bye week should be a respite from feeling things about sports. No such luck this weekend in Seattle.
See, while the Seahawks were spending the last month setting out on their Insufferable Journey to Rewinnining the Super Bowl™, the Seattle Mariners went out and decided to make baseball things interesting by quietly hanging around the AL Wild Card race. You may not have noticed (I’ve seen the attendance numbers and TV ratings), but this year the Mariners put together a baseball team that can safely be described as “pretty good,” and more dangerously described as “a borderline contender.”
Then, just when it looked like the team had Seattle Mariners’d hard enough to knock themselves out of the race, they went out and beat the league-leading Angels a couple times, setting up a Sunday afternoon game with real stakes. If they won that game, and the A’s lost their game against the Rangers, those two teams would have to play a one-game playoff for the right to play a one-game playoff with the Royals for the right to play in the baseball playoffs proper. And once you’re in the baseball playoffs, you’re just a five-game series, a seven-game series, and one more seven-game series away from being the World Series champions! (Baseball takes forever…)
Unfortunately, the A’s went out and won their game against the Rangers, short-circuiting the whole World Series hope moment I had allowed my frontal lobe to conjure up. The Mariners will again not play playoff baseball, as they have not played playoff baseball every year since 2001. The team does look much improved, and the advanced statistics show that the team’s improvement is meaningful and may well carry over into next year. This is in contrast to the last couple times when the Mariners showed some metaphorical green shoots, only to come out the following year and take off their metaphorical bandages to reveal those green shoots to be the early symptoms of a metaphorical organization-wide MRSA outbreak.
So we Seattle sports fans got to feel feelings without the Seahawks playing, and most of them were positive and blah blah blah, let’s get to the point. The point is that Mariners relief pitcher Tom Wilhelmsen celebrated the end of the season like this:
Turn Down For What is a rhetorical question to which the implied answer is “nothing.” When we watch Wilhelmsen’s body thrust and contort, are we seeing a man moving with reckless abandon, a man who himself will turn down for nothing? Or are we watching a man who knows the real truth: We are abandoned. The universe will not turn down for us. We are that which will not be turned for.
We are the nothing.
And so here we are. What do we have to look forward to?
The answer of course is Seahawks football. No more bye weeks. The Seahawks play every week through December and hopefully all the way into February. Next week is a Monday nighter against the Washington Racial Slurs, so let’s all relish being the good guys for reasons other than our regional biases. I’ll be taking the game in at Hugo House’s Monday Night Football: The Throwdown event featuring Against Football author Steve Almond.