Day Seventeen: Jerry Reed
Jerry Reed had an above average major league career as a heavy innings bullpen arm. He played for nine seasons and had a career WAR of 5.0. That is actually pretty good for a guy who wasn't a starter or an elite closer type. He appeared in tons of games for the Mariners from 87-90, he was basically a constant presence on the mound in the years that I was awakening as a Mariners' fan. He appeared in 46 games in 88 and 52 in 89. He ate up innings and actually, now that I am looking at his statline for the first time in many, many years, he was pretty fucking consistent. His ERA for a guy pitching tons of games with runners-on, in shitty situations, was around 3.00 in all of his peak seasons. That is excellent. Especially considering that those Mariners lineups of 87 and 88 in particular were really bad. And this is where the important and topical history of Jerry Reed comes into play. Where his career 5.0 WAR and innings eating attitude fall by the wayside. The teams he played for were awful.
It is easy to think that for those of us that came into our fandom in the late 80's were immediately regaled with Griffey catches and Buhner homers and so many other things that made the 1990's a great time to be a Mariners fan (and it really is true), but there is also a reason that many of us, children usually born between 78 and 82 let's say for the sake of this story (and because those are the years my sister and I were born respectively) remember Alvin Davis as Mr. Mariner, and think fondly of the names, Jeffrey Leonard and Darnell Coles. That's because, no knock particularly on any of those three guys, the Mariners pre-1989 are pretty insufferable. But we loved them anyways.
In a town like Seattle, there has always been a lot of wealth. At least as long as I have been alive there have been people who could afford to go to professional basketball and football games. Certainly in the 80s and 90s very different monied people went to the Sonics and the Seahawks (a story for another day to be sure), but the fact remained, if you wanted to go to either of those attractive sporting events played by teams that had been to the playoffs and even won a championship then you needed to pay. The working class of Seattle was never represented at either of these venues. There have always been city fans of the Sonics, but like most NBA franchises, those were never the people who went to Sonics' games. The Seahawks were a different beast and they certainly are more popular with a wider audience these days than they were in the old days, but you're still committing to a huge chunk of money to go to an NFL game. Baseball, and especially early Mariners' baseball, was quite different. You could often times walk down to Occidental on the night of a game in July and they'd be handing out free tickets to the nosebleed sections of the Dome just to get butts in seats. If you had to pay it was only going to be a couple of dollars for a 300 level seat. And so family's like mine, family's with moms and dads with blue shirts with their names stitched on them, these families could go to the Mariners. And we went a lot. For my particular family this is in large part due to the fact that my dad is a baseball nut. He grew up rooting for the San Francisco Giants when they were terrible and moved north to Seattle in 1968. He has been here through all manifestations of professional sports in the Pacific Northwest and unfortunately for him, and for his children, in 1977 he went to opening night of the Mariners and fell in love with a fucking terrible baseball team. But that's just it isn't it? That's why we love them in a way. And my family really loved the Mariners.
My mom would make popcorn in our old air-popper and melt butter on it, put it in a plastic bag, and then put it in her nylon Jansport back-pack ( I can still picture that bag). We would all head down to the Kingdome (you could just park up the street back in the day) and go up to the 300 level to watch the Mariners lose. And in those days of the late 80's I became mesmerized by baseball. I thought that the Mariners were perfection. Just to see them play was enough. I couldn't have cared if they won or lost, or even what happened during the game. Each guy, in their diamond logo uniforms, was a hero. From Harold Reynolds and Mark Langston, right down to Rey Quinones. That strange cement building was my temple and it never occurred to me that there was a "better" "more prestine" way to watch baseball. You watched baseball on turf in the Kingdome because that's where the Mariners played. Plain and simple.
So here we are, watching an awful ballclub play in an ugly stadium, with dismal attendance, likely to leave town at any moment. And just reveling in it. But my dad, he's been watching this team lose for twelve years. And lose badly. And show no signs of improvement. Just basically suck in every imaginable way, and we are at a game in 1989 when there are glimpses of hope. Griffey is making people realize that there can be more. And the Mariners are losing. And they are losing badly. In walks Jerry Reed. There are runners on, I don't remember how many, but he came in to try and get the M's out of a jam. And he walks the first batter he faces. And he falls behind the second guy. This is where the story in our family has taken on a bit of a Babe the Blue Ox kind of feel. Reed did not walk the second batter, but for the story I think he might have walked seven or eight guys in a row. For the story, Jerry Reed is not the guy with tons of meaningful innings pitched and a career 5.0 WAR. He is a bum who is letting everyone in the stadium down. He is the sole emissary of shitty baseball and the personification of twelve years of brutal failure. He is in many ways a white whale. And my father, eyes burning like Ahab's own, leaps to his feet, and yells with every fiber of his soul and spirit, "PTICH STRIKES, REED!!!!" And that is it. Nothing more. No follow up, no explanation. Just those three words hurled into the abyss of concrete and florescent lighting. Pitch strikes, Jerry Reed. Please, by God. Pitch strikes.
Life is like that.
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