Day One: Al Martin

Al Martin was a legit athlete (more about that later) who played some decent pre-analytics seasons with the anonymous Barry Bonds-less Pirates of the mid to late 90s. If you go to Martin’s Baseball Reference page you will see that he has a career WAR of like 7 or something. That’s about the same amount Mookie Betts has in a single year just for comparison. Needless to say Martin probably wouldn’t be a sleek advanced stats sign in the post post moneyball wasteland of 2020, but he was a good base runner with a solid contact bat on a bad team with a cool uniform and he wore eyeblack and hightop cleats. He was pretty cool. So when he got dealt for the stretch run from the Padres (who he was with for all of half a season) to the Mariners in 2000 I thought it might be awesome. I was both significantly wrong about that and totally right.

Martin played pretty awful in the dog days of the wild card push of 2000 but it didn’t really matter because the 2000 Mariners were a stacked ball club. It’s easy to forget how good that team was. They took the Yanks to 6 that year in the LCS and the 116 win squad couldn’t do that. So Martin’s poor play was not a sore spot and his jovial and friendly personality immediately endeared him to teammates and reporters (maybe not fans). Because Al was always down to talk some shit to reporters. And here’s the reason why I love Al Martin. And it’s much the same reason that I love Steven Seagal. Seagal has claimed that he was the first American to start an Aikido dojo in Japan, which was taken as fact for pretty much his entire career until someone checked up on it and found out that he had NEVER had a dojo in Japan. Seagal has also claimed that he is often called upon to authenticate rare swords (what a fucking cool thing to claim) which is absolutely untrue. So yeah, Steven Seagal is a liar, but wow they are sure interesting lies! Such a vivid tapestry of falsehood! Such audacity! Al Martin is cut from this same cloth.

In an interview after crashing into teammate Carlos Guillén, Martin said it felt like when he ran into Leroy Hoard while he was playing against the Michigan Wolverines while playing football for the USC Trojans. Great comparison! Great story! Solid interview! Leroy Hoard! However, USC did not play Michigan the year that Martin claims this occurred and Martin himself was playing BASEBALL in Atlanta’s farm system. The reporter reached out the USC to help clear up this dilemma and uh oh! USC has no record of Al Martin ever playing football for them. So pretty much Al just made that shit up and trotted it out to the reporter as a good little piece of trivia. The part that makes it “authenticating rare swords” good to me is that he uses someone like Leroy Hoard. A mid tier running back who never had much of an NFL career but not a nameless player by any stretch. That’s a really solid and well imagined lie! And the thing that makes it even more amazing is that Martin’s wiki page still lists USC as the college he attended. Maybe that is true? Idk! But it sure is interesting! He made it real one way or another. There are some less savory lies concerning multiple marriages that came out while Martin was with the Mariners that aren’t so cute, but that first Leroy Hoard collision is priceless.

The fact that Lou Pineilla and Pat Gillick wanted to replace Martin in 01 and couldn’t was a grim prognostication of Nintendo’s inability to spend dynamically that would doom the Gillick era Mariners to dissolve into 16 years of sadness and what better reason than that to have ol USC footballer Al Martin as the first Mariner a Day! 

(Originally done for Facebook 3/19/20)