Safeco Field: Wonderfully Frustrating

Safeco Field is a wonderful stadium and is one of the most beautiful parks in the country, if not the most. The old cliche "there isn't a bad seat in the house" applies. A great Sunday afternoon is spent in the sun at the park watching the Mariners most likely lose to a possibly superior club. Or hopefully win. But I'm cynical at this point. Anyway, the experience of Safeco the building is magnificent. Safeco really does feel like home.

Why is it then that the people who flock there are, for the most part, hard to sit near? I preface the rest of this post with the fact that this might just be me and that I have too high of standards. Not everyone is as big of a fan as me and not everyone follows the game as closely as me. This is something I've noticed this season especially but the fans at Safeco haven't been particularly knowledgeable or into the game even back when the team had great success. Yes, it was better earlier in the century but they still had the tendency to be terrible. This year, every game I've gone to has been marred by a bad fan experience. The home opener brought the girls who would not stop talking at an extremely high volume and the guys next to them who were borderline lecherous and just annoying in general. (The specifics will be less vague as we get closer to the present, don't worry.) Then there was the tool at a game later in the month who just made jokes about Griffey sleeping and otherwise was annoying everyone including those attending with him. Then there were the Cubs fans. My God the Cubs fans. On Wednesday there was the lady who was explaining every single detail to her companion, who was a Spaniard who likely had little experience with it. While this isn't really a problem, my strategy for explaining it would be to let them ask questions rather than explain every detail. And, y'know, not be wrong and say things like a run rarely scores in the first inning or that 80% of hockey teams make the playoffs while 20% of baseball teams do (the second fact is much closer to the truth, at least). Or explaining obvious things like why they play Do the Hustle after a stolen base.

But anyway, most of those are innocent enough. I like that she was trying to explain the game to someone who didn't know about it, even if it wasn't the greatest way to go about it. Today's game was what drove me crazy the most, though the team doing terribly didn't help. I was sitting next to my exact opposite as a person. Well, there were two of them but one was more obvious. For starters, he was old. I am not. That's the most basic. He talked pretty much the entire game. I do talk during the game but not continuously. What he talked about was not generally on topic and what was on topic was generally wildly inaccurate. I tend to talk about the game at hand and if it goes off topic, it's usually sparked by something else. I don't really talk about politics because I don't really know enough about them to talk about them. Not only did he talk about politics, his views to diametrically opposed to mine. And to top it all off, his granddaughter got rejected from Seattle U because her GPA was under 3.8 or something (which I suspect is BS because 1. I've never heard of that specific of a rejection letter and 2. it's not THAT important to get into our school I don't think.) All of this isn't really that bad. We're just different people. I just found the extent to how different we were was comical, right down to his hatred of my institution of higher learning.

No, the problem with this was the kind of fan these guys seemed to be. It started right away. Derek Jeter came to the plate. He is pretty well known as the Yankees' lead off hitter. Tom Hutyler said his name over the intercom. His picture and name were on the diamond vision as well as at least three other places in the stadium. He proceeds to ask "Who is this? Jeter?" Maybe this particular complaint is a problem for me because I tend to think people should be able to find things out for themselves. Maybe that's a lofty expectation of mine. It's akin to asking what the score is or what inning the game is in to me. I understand mid-inning or something since the information isn't always readily available because of various other things going on on the screens but it's fairly obvious during the game who is batting. This sort of thing continued on into the game, whether it was wondering where Sabathia was before he was a Yankee or whether the pitcher was still in when a player with a complete different piece of handedness came up.

I absolutely hate defeatism and extreme pessimism and these guys exhibited it. This is understandable this year, as the team has been dreadful, especially the hitting. Rowland-Smith started today and he has not been good this year. But he didn't deserve to give up 6 runs today. His first inning was:
groundout
throwing error by Lopez on a grounder (runner reached)
grounder through the hole between short and third for a single
reach on error on what is usually a fielder's choice at second
sacrifice fly to score run
ground ball single up the middle to score a run
strike out

So Ryan had what should've been five outs in the inning but what ended up being a 2-0 hole to start the game. The rest of the way, he was betrayed by his defense, with runners reaching on a ball dropped in the sun for a double. That runner eventually scored on a wild pitch, though I don't know if it was really RRS's fault. He did give up two legitimate doubles in the fourth but those were really the only two all night. Rowland-Smith deserved to give up maybe half of the runs he actually did give up and maybe fewer.

Which brings me, at long last, to the thing that pissed me off the most. I irrationally love Hyphen as a player and even have a jersey with his name and number, which I wore because he was starting. The douche next to me somehow noticed this and said "you have his jersey. You could go out there and pitch better than him," to which I mumbled barely audibly, "yeah." Why would you do something like this to 1. a fan of the same team as you and 2. in a game where he wasn't really that terrible and was just getting unlucky. If he was a Yankees fan, fine. But no. He wasn't. I don't go up to people with Griffey jerseys and make fun of them because he sucked this year or talk to them about how bad he was this year. People can be a fan of whoever they want to be. I just don't see the need to be that much of a dick to someone but then again I tend not to be confrontational.

Then the game just spiraled out of control. After RRS came out, the team was down 6 runs or more the rest of the way. When another ball fell for a double due to the sun, the offending fan proceeded to say "oh he won't catch this next fly ball, it's going to fall," and later, "maybe they just aren't used to the sun because they play in Seattle." This is not funny and just needlessly downerish. Gutierrez and Saunders aren't going to drop balls very often. Seattle being cloudy jokes have ceased being funny for pretty much ever. It's just, urgh.

Then when the Mariners finally did string together some hits, it was just "well that will help us win. Only need 12 more of those." Which I'll admit, I've thought before. But I've also not shown myself to be annoying the entire game up to that point. And I'm still always hoping that I'm going to witness the game where some gargantuan comeback occurs. But the main thing is that this season is over. The wins and losses don't really matter anymore. A win doesn't make us much more likely to make the playoffs. At this point I'm watching to see individual players do well and to see something entertaining. So why try to ruin that by saying something like that?

To finish off the talk of negative nancyism, every time a Mariner player would come up, these guys would remark at their poor hitting statistics, mainly the batting average. You mean a team that is one of two to score fewer than 300 runs in the first half doesn't have good hitting stats? Amazing! The one player they did laud for his hitting ability was Jack Wilson which, what? Him? Okay. But saying Justin Smoak isn't going to help this team because he's hitting .210 isn't really a great way to look at things because 1. he's a rookie 2. he's 24 3. he's only had 235 ABs 4. he's one of the best prospects in the game and 5. he's been here 2 days. The same goes for Saunders, besides the last point. Yes, Figgins has been terrible. Yes, Gutierrez has come back down to earth. Yes, Lopez and Kotchman have been terrible. But honestly, expressing surprise audibly every time they come up to the plate isn't necessary.

These fans reflected most of what annoys me about a lot of Safeco Field attendees, much like this game was like a microcosm of the entire season to this point. Not paying attention, not knowing much at all, being overly dickish for no reason and just being unfunny in general, willful ignorance. These qualities don't describe every Safeco fan. It's fine if you are one of these things. Hell, I don't pay attention to the game for every second. But it's the combination of these that are all too evident. There are great Mariners fans out there. But it seems like if these behaviors are at least somewhat on display every game, there is a problem. This on top of the general lack of want to cheer or clap unless prompted. Seahawks fans are the loudest in the league, as are Husky football fans and Sounders fans. Sonics fans were raucous and seemed knowledgeable in their day as well. So why are Mariner fans so much worse in general? Is it because the tickets are cheaper? Or that they've been bad for a while? Or that I've just been exposed to it more? Or am I just holding people to to high of a standard? Or simply just should stop eavesdropping and try to ignore it? I am certainly not going to stop going to Mariners games as I love them every time but this doesn't add to my enjoyment.