Baseball is designed to break our hearts.
Even the best batters fail to get on base at least two-thirds of the time. Even the best pitchers can give the tiniest errant wobble to a 95-mile-an-hour throw that allows an opponent to hit a home run and drive in enough base runners to steal a victory.
Unlike other sports where the clock determines when the game is over, it is never certain when a baseball game will end. Even in the ninth inning, with your team behind in runs, with two outs and two strikes against your batter, the next pitch could produce a base hit, or even a home run, that could lead to a win, or at least extra innings. Because of that, hope never completely dies until it is crushed by a brutal finish.
The strangest variable is the way teams perform when confronted with a set of circumstances that, in some ways, are very much the same, inning after inning, game after game. Some days, a team will seem destined for the World Series, as the Mariners did in their first two victorious games against the Blue Jays in Toronto. Then, a few days later, with the American League Pennant only one victory away, that team of destiny can sag, choke and give the other guys a win that evens things up and sends the whole thing to a seventh fateful game.
There are many broken hearts among Mariners fans after their team fell so tantalizingly short of finally getting to the World Series for the first time. Yet, it was a remarkable, entertaining run from spring training to the thrills of October. After too many lackluster seasons, the current roster of players took the team further than the Mariners have ever gone. One pitch thrown differently or one bat swung more precisely in Game 7 could have sent Seattle’s boys of summer to face the Los Angeles Dodgers in the Fall Classic.
Yet, though we can be grateful the Mariners came so very close, it is hard not to despairingly wonder how many more years it will take to go all the way to the pinnacle of the game, the only place in baseball where there are no broken hearts.
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