9.30.00 ANAHEIM ANGELS vs SEATTLE MARINERS

Appropriately enough the season ended for me where it began, at Edison Field. On the next to last day of the year I met Damore for one final round of Bag On the Angel/Dodger Fan. A brilliant Saturday afternoon with the barest hint of California autumn in the air. The Angels, their season long over; the Mariners, embroiled in a three-way battle with the A’s and Indians over a division championship and wildcard spot the contingencies of which nobody even pretends to fully understand. They’ve all got to win, is the long and short of it, and with Alex Rodriguez slumping the M’s have been struggling of late to keep up with Oakland atop the AL West.

A-Rod’s slump would not last much longer. He got ahold of a Tim Belcher mistake in his first at-bat and sent it sailing far into the stands behind the bullpens in left field to give the Mariners a quick 2–0 lead. It was one they would expand upon in every subsequent inning save the fifth. An RBI double in the second off the bat of Mark McLemore. A John Olerud single in the third, scoring Stan Javier from second, and chasing Belcher. The Angels countered with a two-run homer in the bottom of the third by Troy Glaus, his 47th and final of the season, to cut the Mariners’ lead to 4–2, but the M’s came right back with two more in the top of the fourth off RBI singles by Rodriguez and Olerud.

The score was still a reasonable 6–2 when the hapless Kent Mercker came on in the sixth and surrendered singles to Mike Cameron and Javier followed by back-to-back home runs by A-Rod and Edgar Martinez, and another homer two batters later by Jay Buhner, making it 11–2. The sun tilted in the late-September sky. We would not be going anywhere soon. The Angels sent nine batters to the plate in the bottom of the sixth, putting up four runs; the Mariners returned the favor in the seventh, exercising their entire order and netting five runs for the effort. By the end of the eighth the score was 17–7, and yes, that was the Angels and the Mariners, not the Rams and Seahawks, out there.

It was the longest nine-inning game in Angels history. And as the afternoon wore on and the light turned golden and Damore and I continued to give each other shit as we had all year, something wonderful happened. A feeling came over me, a sensation I’d experienced before, in college during finals-week all-nighters, or on tour during non-stop, 2000-mile drives. It was the feeling of having somehow slipped into an eddy in the flow of time; of being ensconced in a sort of polyp, a world within itself, a reality separate from and unaffected by anything outside of itself; a perfect, infinite, timeless moment. In freaking Anaheim this happened, no less.

It’s several months later now, as I write this. I am surrounded by out-of-state license plates. A strange, powdery white matter covers the ground. The world of ballgames and sunny afternoons seems to me as distant and remote as the moon. And yet that perfect moment is still right there, as easily summoned as my spaz kitten, Arthur (after M’s reliever Arthur Rhodes; how was I to know he would cost them a trip to the World Series?). I better understand now why I felt compelled to keep this diary, though, for that is what baseball is for me. It is its own diary. It is a time machine. A repository for hope, and joy, and disgust, and scorn, but most of all, for memory. And as I hunker down for the long winter with my crappy Target slippers and this laptop and a glass of decent scotch and call to mind these afternoons and evenings in California and Montana and Arizona and New York, one thought comes to me again and again: Goddamn I love baseball.

FINAL SCORE: MARINERS 21, ANGELS 9

MEMORABLE HECKLE: What can I say? You had to be there.