We Need To Talk About June 2, 2016

Hello, earthlings/Kevin's friends! It is I, Natalie, the Mariners' prodigal daughter, who brings you great baseball news from San Diego, California.

That game last night was AWESOME. I'm not going to lie, the 1st inning was rough to sit through. At first, I felt some hope. Cano pulled a Cano. We got a home run. It was lovely. I was the lone Mariners fan in my nosebleed section in a sea of Padres gear. The Padres scored 4 runs in the bottom of the 1st, which was annoying, but not something that we couldn't come back from. After all, in the last few games, the M's scored 6 runs, 16 runs, 9 runs, and 5 runs. Being behind by 3 is no longer something to stress out about. This ball club can handle that kind of deficit. 

Then, in the second, Cruz hit a bomb. It was 2-4. Yesssss. Okay. We can do this. We're still in this game. Then, that feeling started to dissipate in the 4th and 5th innings. Miley and Montgomery's pitching was lackluster. Rosales-Solarte-Norris-Rosales-Rea-Jay-Myers-Kemp score. All I could think was "not again". I started to have flashbacks of Wednesday night's game, which Paxton and Peralta destroyed all my hopes and dreams. I had to slink out of Petco in shame after that game.

The top of the 6th is when things started to get interesting. Big Booty Seags (just go with it) hits a line drive out to right field, which allows Smith and Cano to get home, and advances himself to second, Cruz to 3rd. Have you heard the good news about our lord and savior, Dae-Ho Lee? Lee hits a big, fat, glorious homer to bring Cruz, Seager and himself home to Papa Servais. In the 7th, Big Booty Seags, Dae-Ho Lee Moley, Chis "I made super tasty wine" Iannetta, Stefen Romero, O'Malley, Aoki, and Guti literally made my head explode at Petco Park. Line drive after line drive and score after score left me SCREAMING LIKE A CRAZY PERSON in section 315 at Petco Park because HOLY SHIT, I'M HERE IN PERSON. I start doing the laugh-cry thing because I can't believe in two innings we just scored 14 runs. 

As we get to the 7th, the nervousness resets with Seager's error and Kemp scoring. Momentum can be great, but it is so fragile. One error can crush everything or set off a domino effect across any team. One wrong move and you can lose your mojo. Benoit manages to hold the Padres off in the 8th. Fernando Rodney makes an appearance at the top of the 9th. He holds off the M's from scoring again in the ninth, so all my concentration goes on sending Cishek good thoughts. "I believe in you!" I think over and over again to myself. I shout it from my seat. I tweet it out over and over again. I was determined to not let this team's past performance mar the game I was watching. You could feel the electricity radiating from the M's dugout. Solarte stuck out. Upton out at first. Norris strikes out swinging. And the Mariners, the beautifully flawed but ever hopeful Mariners, had their greatest comeback in franchise history. And I was there for it. I saw it with my own eyes. 

This is my first baseball blog post of my whole life, so be gentle while I try to figure out my voice. A lot of people (aka a lot of you) may be cynical about the 2016 Mariners. We've heard years and years promising we were going to be better, without ever getting better. 2015 was a hard year for all of us. But, I am forever an avid and hopeful Mariners fan, every year. You never know when you're going to witness greatness. It could happen. It did happen. I was happy to be there. Go M's!