You play to win the game
Two years since Toronto—and the goal is still the goal.
I wasn’t in the building when Cal hit the clincher. I wouldn’t say it’s a regret— because I was on my honeymoon. But it’s a weird feeling, to be on the other side of the world for an event you’d been waiting what felt like a lifetime to witness firsthand.
My approximation of that, in the personal pantheon of inner circle of sports memories, is game one in Toronto.
I was in middle school the last time the Mariners played a Postseason game. Before this one. They even turned on the games in some of the classes. It was wild.
For the opener of the 2022 Wild Card Series, smack in the middle of a workday, I went to the bar. Not a bar but the bar—the bar that you’re most likely to see some combination of the five O’Keefe siblings.
Leny’s Place.
It’s our bar, just as it is many others’—tucked on the mini-hip strip that is Tangletown, just up from Green Lake.
Obviously, this afternoon was different. For one, it was the afternoon. More specifically, it felt like…oh my god please bear with me because it is corny but…it felt like business.
It felt more like business than business.
I got a good deal on a Postseason hoodie that arrived just in time and rocked it with the “Safeway ‘S’” dad cap that is my staple. Something new, rising to the moment; something old, not forgetting what got us here.
I run on O’Keefe Time. Which is like Island Time, but an even worse affliction.
We were not missing first pitch here. No. We weren’t there early enough to get a great table, but it didn’t matter.
Leny’s has low ceilings and a big horseshoe-shaped bar. My wife says bars with the horseshoe bars are the best bars.
On the left, back above some tables with booth seating on one side, a windshield-sized Rainier logo—snow-capped Tahoma herself and all—is hand-painted on a wood panel wall that itself is thickly painted light brown. We sat at one of the tables by that.
If you combined the size of the two screens nearest—one a split-second behind and, thus, only for replays—you might get 75 inches. Not ideal but it didn’t matter. It was go-time.
It was watching baseball in a way I hadn’t watched baseball before. You don’t really follow baseball before you’re even a teenager in the way that you do when you’re an adult. Simply, you probably couldn’t consume baseball—all its storylines, all its moments, all its data and all its discourse—in 2001 the same way we do now.
There’s so much weight for every moment. Every pitch matters there and then, only in the present. The weight comes from the past, all that’s been building to it and everything that went the other way.
Julio quickly went down 0-2 but got hit by a pitch. A two-seamer that tailed up, in and off his wrist. We’ll take it. We’re off.
Ty did not hit into a double play, just a tapper to first base. That’s fine.
Then Geno. Ohhhhhh, Geno. We miss you, bud. The dude who was maybe the heart and soul of the 2022-2023 Mariners rips a slicing 103 mile an hour liner into the right field corner and the Mariners have their first playoff RBI since Ichiro drove in Carlos Guillen to trim the Yankees’ lead to 9-3 in the seventh inning of game five of the 2001 ALCS.
Then, our guy.
Cal went up there with criminal intent. Built for the moment already, he was taking what those in the biz call “daddy hacks” on everything catching any part of the plate.
First pitch, four-seamer up and in. Big rip, popped foul.
Then the two-seamer, not even competitive. Never a strike, it ends up in the dirt.
What’s wild is that pitch three, another two-seamer, this one in the hart of the plate—was not the worst pitch of the AB. Sheeesh.
I don’t know what broke Alek Manoah but he was pitching like a broken man here already.
Pressure, it turns out, is something more than you put in your tires. And it’s also not even that?
Anyway, hurling hittable pitches or not, Manoah had Cal at 1-2.
Aaaaaaand he spikes a change-up two feet in front of the plate.
In Manoah’s mind, his royal blue #6 jersey is firmly pressed against the ropes and he’s just trying cover his face with his hands and maybe make it to the bell.
And it’s still just 2-2.
This was his best pitch of the AB. Two-seamer away, about on the black…but still thigh-high. Cal fouls it back over the screen.
But Manoah doesn’t have it. Not consistently. Next one’s a 95mph four-seamer way up and way away. Non-competitive.
3-2.
He shakes off the first sign. It’s back to the two-seamer. Again, 95mph. But this one’s right down the dick. It’s gut-high and splitting the plate like he used a protractor.
Yahtzee.
This ball had a narrative arc to it. It was probably gone off the bat—I mean it was gone off the bat, but this thing was in the air a long time. This had more backspin than the rare 60-degree wedge that you hit just right.
And I didn’t hear it at the time because I was caught in some sports quantum superposition between pure stress and unfettered jubilation, but this sound of the ball banging off the back wall of the home bullpen is the best sound you’ve ever heard.
That’s as good as it gets. That’s as good as life gets.
I jumped up, I high-fived my brothers. I high-fived our friends. I yelled. I probably said “Let’s goooooo!” super loud because that’s all you can help but do in a moment like that.
That’s why we do all this. To have moments that are just that moment. I loved it so much.
We’re here and we’re playing for this game. We’re playing for this season. We’re playing for it all.
Pause and remember that feeling. The Mariners were playing to try to win a World Series. And you thought they could. Because shit, they could have.
Go back to game one of the ALDS. No, not the bad parts. And even like half of game two. This team could play with anyone. They could be the ones to do it—and that’s what they were playing for.
God, you can’t get enough of it. We certainly haven’t.
I was thinking about that watching this year’s Postseason, and then the Dodgers clubhouse celebration and parade.
We don’t watch this game—really, almost any game—to have winning it all and the October moments that lead to it only be some distant horizon. You play for that reality. You play to win.
You play. To Win. The Game.
This phrase first jumped back into my subconscious when I saw someone use it quote-tweeting a video of Barack Obama saying that he and the Biden administration sent checks to people, too, but they just didn’t put their names on them like DJT did because they were better than that or something. This wasn’t supposed to be some election allegory but if you’re into it, go for it. If not, don’t.
When I went looking for it again for this post, this line just vaguely in my memory, I honestly thought it was a Denzel quote from Remember the Titans because it was so concise and so good.
But no, it was the inimitable Herm Edwards.
“You don’t play to just play it,” he continued after his 2002 New York Jets fell to 2-5 with a home loss to Tim Couch and the Cleveland Browns. “That’s the great thing about sports—you play to win.
And I don’t care if you don’t have any wins. You go play to win.”
What’s the point of all this?
As we wade our way into another offseason rich in poverty and overdone discourse, I just feel it’s important to state again what the goal of all this is.
The Mariners will tell you they want to win sustainably. Or win the smart way. The right way. They want to build something. They don’t want to just win, but win consistently. Regularly.
Buddy, you got to win at all first.
And one playoff berth and zero division titles in two decades ain’t it.
There’s going to be a lot of talk this winter, especially once the moves start rolling in. Heck, this time last year, there were signs of another unambitious offseason but we had yet to hear about the ROOT situation purportedly messing with their budget.
When they start doing things, there will be a lot of talk on the reasons why they did it. From them, and from us. Hell, from this here blog even.
At least for me, though, and maybe why I’m typing this out is just so I keep myself honest, it’s about winning. That’s all that matters.
Add talent. Get better. Win.
The Mariners won’t be able to literally play for the here-and-now until March 27th against the Athletics. That’s 134 long, dark and damp days from now.
For Jerry Dipoto and this front office, though, ownership included—they’re playing for now. They’re playing to win.
And the moves they make over the next three or four months will decide whether we do tardily usher in a golden era of Mariners baseball, or likely see the crew we’ve followed for a decade shuffle on out.
Go M’s.