Is it bad that I want my baseball team to lose?
Ken Griffey, Jr. Edgar Martinez. Randy Johnson. Jay Buhner. Alex Rodriguez. Tino Martinez. Felix Hernandez.
Those are some good players... Players that I grew up watching and loving. Talk about an offensive juggernaut that resided in Seattle throughout the 1990's.
I went to my first Mariners' game on Little League Day of 1989. I remember this day well because it was the day that I fell in love with baseball. I was seven and was playing my first year of Little League. I remember that I wasn't very good at all. I might have had a couple of hits all season... But then I experienced a big league ball game for the first time and I was all in. They played the Yankees that day and I distinctly remember a rookie by the name of Ken Griffey, Jr. hitting a hard line drive to center field. Roberto Kelly could have played it on the hop - that was the safe play. Instead, Kelly tried making a play on the ball. He dove for it and it bounced in front of him, crushing him in the face. The ball ricocheted high in the air and by the time it came down, Junior was rounding third. It was an easy inside-the-park home run for the rookie center fielder who would turn out to be childhood hero.
It has never been easy, though. This team has never won a World Series and has only a small handful of playoff appearances in their 35-year existence.
Our owner is a Japanese businessman who has never seen his team play - not even when they opened the 2012 season in Japan. Our two Front Office goons, Howard Armstrong and Chuck Lincoln, are not baseball men. They are businessmen who only care about turning a profit. Producing a winning team has always been a very distant second to them.
I find myself wanting them to lose now for the first time ever. Some people might cringe at that, especially M's fans. I just can't stomach anymore of the current regime and the falling attendance numbers at Safeco Field should be a big enough indication that the team is losing their fans. I am one of them, therefore, I want them to lose so changes can take place before it's too late.
I now have sons of my own... My oldest is two and my youngest will be born in August. I often wonder if I want to introduce them to the Mariners because they would just end up in the same boat as me - rooting for a losing team and having your heart broken year after year. I could never claim another team as my favorite, but for the sake of my boys, I often wonder.
Losses will be the only thing that (eventually) makes some heads roll.
I am now 31, so for 24 years I have loved this team and the notion of me wanting them to lose speaks volumes on the current state of this team. I know we will most likely lose Felix Hernandez when he hits free agency or before. We don't deserve a talent like him right now and have literally wasted seven years of his career to this point. Eventually, despite him saying all of the right things to the media, he will grow tired of losing, tired of having his starts wasted. He can't get the mileage that has been put on his arm back, so why would he want to waste more time pitching for such an inept organization?
Time is of the essence with a lot of things. Losses piling up might be the quickest route to some real change. Me hoping for losses won't do anything to alter the M's fate - for the time being, they're going to lose anyway because they do not have a collection of talented big league ballplayers. They just don't.
Time for heads to roll. We're working on a decade of absolute futility right now and the fact that so many of these goons in the Front Office still have jobs in laughable to me. Problem is, sometimes when you laugh, it hurts.
That's the torture of being an M's fan.