SEATTLE — Moments after Robinson Cano led off the bottom of the fifth inning with a single, hope ran out for the Seattle Mariners.
The scoreboard in left field broke the bad news to the Mariners and the 40,823 fans at Safeco Field: the Oakland Athletics had won in Texas, and in doing so clinched the American League’s second wild card berth, a prize the Mariners were chasing all the way to game 162, only to fall a game short on the last day of the season.
For a few seconds there was grumbling and booing as fans realized that the game they were attending, an eventual 4-1 Mariners victory over the Los Angeles Angels, no longer mattered. But then something unusual happened. In the middle of Kendrys Morales’ at bat, seconds after receiving bad news, fans stood up and cheered, giving the home team a standing ovation for a promising season that fell just short.
“That was one of my proudest moments,” Mariners manager Lloyd McClendon said. “I thought it said a lot about our fans.”
And it also said a lot about this season. Fans were able to give a standing ovation seconds after postseason elimination because almost nobody believed postseason elimination would wait until 161 games and four-plus innings.
“That was awesome,” left fielder Dustin Ackley said of that fifth-inning ovation. “That might have been the coolest thing I’ve seen all year. Just to know the support we got even though they knew we were out of it, and they’re still behind us, you don’t see that too often, and to have that happen was pretty awesome.”
The finish to this season was undeniably disappointing. Had the Mariners even played mediocre baseball down the stretch, they’d be playing the Kansas City Royals in a playoff game Tuesday. Instead the Mariners lost 12 of 17 at one point, including five in a row, and only stayed in the race because they were able to win their last four games while the A’s have been struggling for two months.
“We got beat up by the Blue Jays and the Houston Astros, they came and beat us,” Cano said, referring the Mariners’ disastrous final road trip. “We can’t blame anybody.”
But as bittersweet as this final day of the season was for the Mariners — a day that began with so much promise, and saw Felix Hernandez do exactly what you’d expect out of an ace pitching in a big game, and a day that ended in elimination — the fact that the Mariners finished the season with an 87-75 record, a 16-game improvement over last year, made this day’s pain a little easier to handle. In the Mariners clubhouse, players were disappointed, to be sure, but they also understood, like the fans applauding in the fifth inning, that a lot of good things happened for this team in 2014.
“Obviously this was a very emotional day for a lot of reasons,” McClendon said. “I told you guys when I took the job that I thought this was a golden era for the Seattle Mariners, and they haven’t let me down. And I think it’s only going to get better.
“They’re a little disappointed right now, but they had a hell of a year.”
And acknowledging the Mariners’ surprisingly successful season doesn’t mean ignoring their flaws. Even with the addition of Cano and the growth of some of their young players, most notably Kyle Seager and Ackley, the Mariners were still shut out a whopping 19 times. And as much as McClendon repeatedly praised his team’s resilience, which it showed again in winning four in a row to close the season after a five-game losing streak, the Mariners were only in position to show that resiliency so often because they had so many sustained rough patches. But addressing those problems will come at a later time, and as fans understood when Oakland recorded the final out Sunday afternoon, this was a day to acknowledge a pretty impressive season that had everyone in Seattle’s clubhouse looking forward to next season even as they had to digest the disappointment of falling short this year.
“It was a great experience,” Cano said of his first season in Seattle. “We fought to the end. I don’t think people thought we would be fighting this late in the season.
“It’s sad right now that we have to go home. You look back and say we should have won this game or that game, but now we can’t look back. You have a sour taste in your mouth, you go home, get some rest, and work hard and be ready for next season.”
McClendon has compared this team to the 2006 Detroit Tigers in the past, both early this season, and as recently as Friday when he noted that despite going to the World Series that year, the Tigers stumbled down the stretch, costing themselves the division. That team, which McClendon was a part of under manager Jim Leyland, was better for those late-season struggles going forward, McClendon said, and his team will too having now gone through a meaningful September for the first time.
“To know now that we’ve been here, we’ll definitely learn from it for next year moving forward,” Ackley said. “To be able to play 162 games and every single one of them means something, you can’t ask for much more than that.”
Not much more, but certainly just a little bit more would have made for a fun Monday at Safeco Field had the Mariners caught Oakland on the last day of the regular season. Instead, the A’s held on, rendering the Mariners’ final four inning moot other than the fact that Hernandez lowered his ERA to a league-best 2.14 while picking up his 15th victory of the season, perhaps clinching a second Cy Young award in the process.
Hernandez, more than any Mariner, was deserving of the huge ovation that he received when McClendon pulled him in the sixth inning. Hernandez was disappointed to be so close to his first postseason, only to fall a game short, but the Mariners’ longest tenured player, a man who has endured so many losing seasons, he understood why those fans were able to stand and cheer seconds after receiving bad news. For the first time in a long time, even on a disappointing Sunday, the future seems bright for the Mariners.
“We’re going to build a great thing here,” Hernandez said. “We’ve got the pieces. We’re going to be good.”
Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
