Tell John McLaren You Saved Him a Buck or Two by Dialing 1-800-COLLECT

They may be called the Mariners, but the only seafaring this year’s team invokes is a Viking funeral--a stillborn voyage sadly adrift and ablaze on the open seas, doomed before its launch by the annual disbursement of a large chunk of change to a handful of has-been and never-were free-agent busts. Bill Bavasi’s strategies are as underwhelming and stale as 50 Cent’s latest public feuds, and thus the season’s suspense now lies in whether the team will have a slugger whose RBI outnumber the team’s losses (Go Raul!). The current pace says no: the M’s project to 103 L’s, while Ibanez projects to a measly 98 RBI.

Nevertheless, there can still be fun for a fan in a season of futility. (Not necessarily in watching young players develop; Jeff Clement has been sent to Tacoma because it would be disrespectful to deny paying customers the pleasure of watching Jose Vidro.) It's just that, in a season like this, fun must be found in less conventional ways. I’m not quite sure how, but here’s a story that might give a creative fan an idea or two.

It was the halcyon days of 1997, when the Mariners lineup featured a murderer’s row (Griffey, Rodriguez, Martinez) of Cooperstown-caliber sluggers. On this night, though, the M’s were sadly overmatched by their adversaries from Milwaukee, then still an American league club. My friends (among them Weekly filmmaker Jason Reid) and I had lucked into second row seats above the visitors’ bullpen. Remember, this was in the Kingdome, where the bullpens were located in slivers of foul territory beside the outfield and where there was next to nothing separating them from the front-row fans.

Where it all went down

Because of the lopsided nature of the game, the seats in front of us quickly cleared out, enabling us to upgrade one row. Jason came equipped with a pen and post-it notes, which he employed to comic effect, papering the Brewers bullpen bench with a rather explicit running narrative of closer Bob Wickman’s putative sex life. It was fun to watch the players read the notes and suppress their giggles. There was a lot of snorting and guffawing. It’s not often one gets to see a big league ballplayer guffaw.

But the real fun came when the bullpen bench began to empty and I noticed that the bullpen phone was well within my reach. I picked it up and held it to my ear. A gravelly, old-man voice on the other end said, “yeah?” I panicked. I’m not sure what I expected, but I didn’t have anything prepared for a pitching coach or manager. The fallback was a Beavis impression.

“Errrrrggghh, my nuts itch!”
“What?!!”
“My nuts itch!!”
“Goddamnit!”

The guy on the other end hung up. My friends didn’t believe that I’d talked to someone until we saw an old dude walk out of the Brewers dugout and stare in our direction. As should have been obvious to us all along, we had a direct line, Commissioner Gordon-style.

As the game wore on, the various pitchers shifted around on the bench, making it difficult to access the phone. But sometime around the 8th inning, as Doug Jones was warming up and bullpen coach Bill Castro talking with him, I saw an opening. Jones had what was probably a misshapen wad of chew making a lump in the back of his pants. I grabbed the phone.

“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I grumbled. “This is Castro.”
“Yeah?”
“We got a problem with Jones.”
“Yeah, what?”
“It’s his hemhorrhoids.”
“What?!”
“Yeah, they’re really flaring up. We’re gonna need some more medicated pads.”
“Goddamnit!”

Again, the old dude walked out of the dugout to look for the culprits. Somehow, neither the relief pitchers nor the surrounding fans had noticed or seen fit to contact security. Thus, when the ninth inning arrived, I figured it was time for one last call.

“Yeah?”
“Yes, I’d like a large pepperoni pizza with a side order of twisty bread and a 2 liter of Surge Cola.”
“What the fuck?!”
“You don’t have Surge—?” My question was cut off by the clank of the phone being slammed down on the other end.

When the game ended, I waited for someone to come looking for us. Sure enough, that same old guy, Milwaukee’s pitching coach, the late Don Rowe, came storming out of the dugout. He stationed himself by the bullpen, arms akimbo, and surveyed the crowd through squinted eyes.

“Hey Rowe,” I yelled, having learned his name from reading the back of his jersey. “Where’s my pizza? I thought you guaranteed thirty minute delivery.”
“Come on down here!" He yelled back, spreading his arms wide. "I’ll give you a fuckin’ pizza, you sonofa...” He continued with a stream of profane threats that would make Earl Weaver proud.

Don Rowe

It was a sophomoric display by all parties, and it underscored how different the ballpark experience was back then. The Kingdome is to Safeco Field as people say 1970s Manhattan is to today’s--a cruder, coarser, more interesting experience than its sanitized successor. We used to toss paper planes from the bleachers; now you get tossed for kissing another girl, or maybe even for wearing a shirt that says “Yankees Suck”.

I say this: we paid for their stadium and we've played by their rules. We’ve held up our end of the bargain, but they haven’t held up theirs. I’m not advocating a riot, but perhaps it’s time for a little civil disobedience. Mr. McLaren, you have a call.