October is the time when baseball becomes a test of fan endurance. It's easy to spend a lazy July afternoon at your team’s ballpark with all of your worst drinking buddies. That’s entry-level baseball fandom. But are you willing to suffer the emotional trials of October, when your team’s games run into the wee hours and every pitch may as well be aimed directly at your left ventricle? What if you root for a team that NEVER wins in October? What if that team needed to win a decisive Game 5 in the LDS just for the chance to disappoint you on a grander stage?
Most importantly: What if the deciding game in question NEVER FUCKING ENDED?
Because on Friday night, fans of the Seattle Mariners—a team that has never gone to a World Series, much less won one—were run through this exact gauntlet. Fifteen innings against the Detroit Tigers. Five hours. Four hundred seventy-two total pitches thrown, each one more sphincter-clenching than the last. Seattle fans, dying to go to an ALCS for the first time in 24 years, braved the fire. They showed up to the park and stayed all the way through. As a result, their nerves were all over the telecast, as evidenced by the gentleman I’ve screenshotted up above. Look at our guy, assuming the classic worried man pose, joining his hands in prayer directly in front of his face and nose. One might call it the prayer eagle, as it will occasionally precede the surrender cobra. But let’s just call it the prayer face here, so that we don’t force the metaphor.
Friday night's Seattle crowd was awash in prayer faces, as the Mariners and Tigers combined to leave an agonizing 22 runners on base, the majority of them stranded in the extra frames. You could watch, in real time, as every fan in attendance suffered: fans in the pricey seats, fans in retro jerseys, fans who brought their kids, and one old lady with crazy hair. All of them watched, waited, and assumed the prayer face hoping the next pitch would bring them salvation. When it failed to arrive, they stayed anyway. And worried.
You too have likely covered your face when anxious or shocked. It’s a biological instinct. But only baseball is designed to coax this reflex out of you 5,000 times within the span of just a couple of hours. Fans aren’t made for this kind of shit. Hell, even the players aren’t. Let’s ask Mariners pitcher George Kirby how it felt to be put through the wringer like that: "From the eighth inning on, I had a massive headache. I am glad that game is over."
Ah, but the game WAS over eventually. Here’s how that happened:
That’s M’s second baseman Jorge Polanco ripping the ball into right field with the bases loaded in the bottom of the 15th. Tigers outfielder Kerry Carpenter didn’t even bother to field the ball, knowing the game was already lost. For five hours, and really for a lifetime, every Mariners fan at that stadium had been waiting for catharsis. When it finally came, they quickly shifted to another form of instinctive reaction: their arms reaching for the sky, their feet dancing, and their voices screaming joyful nonsense. They’d finally done it.
For this round. Come tonight(!), they’ll have to run the gauntlet all over again against the top-seeded Blue Jays in the ALCS. As for the National League, fans of the Milwaukee Brewers, who have also never won the World Series, had it “easier” Saturday night when their team did away with the Chicago Cubs in a tidy nine innings. Their reward will be an NLCS matchup against the defending champion Dodgers, who not only have more money than God but also hired God to bat first in the order. That means more games, more waiting, more headaches, and more prayer faces. We’re getting deeper into October now, and shit is getting frighteningly intense. Will YOU be able to survive it? These teams aren’t gonna make it easy for you to do so.
