Mariners’ playoff return: Roars at 10am. A truly electric anthem. The Return of the King
The lines, the chants, the roars began about five hours before first pitch. They really never ended.
No wonder. They’d been brewing, churning, waiting for 21 years for this.
By 9:30 a.m. Saturday, Sound Transit’s south-bound 1 Line train into downtown Seattle was standing-room crowded. Men, women, boys, girls, infants. They were wearing the jerseys of Julio Rodriguez, Mitch Haniger, J.P. Crawford, Ken Griffey Jr. Even a throwback Mike Zunino jersey was aboard.
By 10 a.m., the lines to get into T-Mobile Park and the team store for the Mariners’ Game 3 of the American League Division Series against the despised Houston Astros, the first playoff game in Seattle in 21 years, stretched down 1st Avenue South.
First pitch wasn’t for another three hours.
The urgency was as palpable as the energy. The Mariners had to win Saturday to force a Game 4 Sunday. Then they would have to win Sunday to force a winner-advances-loser-goes-home fifth game Monday in Houston.
The Mariners couldn’t wait to get the party started Saturday for Seattle’s first postseason game since Oct. 18, 2001. They let ‘em in an hour earlier than usual, at 10:40 a.m. Gregg Greene, the team’s vice president for marketing, was inside the home-plate entrance for the gates opening. He’s worked for the Mariners since 1998.
He’s been with the team through all the losing. For 14 years finishing with a losing record. For seven seasons with at least 90 losses, two years with 101 defeats.
As the gates opened and the first screaming fans roared “Let’s Go Mariners!” while about skipping past him up the home-plate plaza’s starts, Greene had tears in his eyes.
“This is special,” he said, his voice shaking.
So many smiles atop so many jerseys. Julio Rodriguez’s. Cal Raleigh’s. Logan Gilbert’s. Luis Castillo’s. Ty France’s. Even of past Mariners: Franklin Gutierrez. Dustin Ackley. Hisashi Iwakuma. And, of course, more Griffeys.
They each grabbed teal-blue towels, with Let’s Go Mariners! printed on them. It created a sea of teal throughout the stands all afternoon.
“Can you believe they made it!” one 50-ish man asked a woman wearing a cream, blue and gold Mariners home Sunday jersey to his right as they climbed the home-plate plaza steps to the 100 level of seats.
“No!” she said, before adding:
“YESSSS!!!”
A ‘completely different’ atmosphere
Ken Helling and his wife Kari from Sumner were among the first to enter the park just after 10:40 a.m. Ken Helling, 63, attended the very first Mariners game, in 1976 at the Kingdome to begin their expansion season in Major League Baseball.
“This is my very first playoff game!” Helling just about shouted.
He explained he’d moved away from Western Washington, to Arizona, during the Mariners’ first playoff run in 1995 in the Kingdome, and again in 2001 inside the current park in the SoDo section of downtown.
“This is really thrilling,” Helling said, over the roars and shrieks of the early-arrivers passing him.
“I think this is going to be a completely different atmosphere than we’ve seen,” said Helling, a director in workforce development in Thurston County. “I remember watching on TV when the Mariners were in the playoffs in the Kingdome (that Griffey, Edgar Martinez, Randy Johnson Refuse to Lose team in ‘95). I couldn’t believe how raucous that was.
“I don’t plan on sitting.”
His “seats” were 10 rows behind third base.
Brothers Jesse, Micah, Sam and Andrew Hofman drove two-plus hours from Sumas, up on the Canadian border, for the first playoff game of their lives.
Jesse, the oldest, is 25. So technically he was alive when the Mariners made the 2001 playoffs with a record-setting 116-win season, but lost in the first round of the postseason to the New York Yankees. But he was 4 then. He was too busy playing with Shrinky Dinks to remember that M’s postseason.
He first remembers becoming a Mariners fan in 2007, when he was 10.
“This team’s been abusing me for 15 years,” Jesse Hofman said. “I didn’t think they’d ever make it to the playoffs?”
His younger brother Micah, 18, believed — at least enough to bet a friend this would be the Mariners year to make the playoffs.
“I had hope this year. I had a bet that we would make it,” Micah Hofman said. “I won money this year that they made it to the postseason.
“A hundred bucks!”
Samuel Hofman is 20. Saturday was the first time he’d seen the Mariners in a playoff game. In his life.
“First time,” he said.
His smile was about as wide the stadium.
Felix Hernandez returns
When the national TBS television broadcast began with a live shot of T-Mobile Park at 12:30 p.m., 45,000 fans with 45,000 towels roared and twirled a teal tsunami of noise.
The “Let’s Go Mariners!” chant continued until Mike McCready from Seattle’s iconic Pearl Jam performed another of his truly electric, solo national anthems in the stadium the M’s call “The Electric Factory.”
The loudest of all the loud came just after McCready’s rockin’ anthem, minutes before first pitch.
The center-field fence opened and in walked The King. Felix Hernandez, the Mariners’ ace pitcher for so many of the losing seasons, master of the only perfect game in franchise history in 2012, is the icon who never made the playoffs.
He made this one.
Hernandez was with the Mariners from 2005 through ‘19. He refused to sign for big-market bucks in New York or Los Angeles and instead stayed in Seattle to get the M’s to the playoffs they never made.
Now 36, Hernandez walked in from center field to the pitcher’s mound to throw the ceremonial first pitch for Game 3. It was a long, celebratory stroll. He basked in the hazy sun and every cheer on his slow walk to the infield. He turned and waived to all sides of the park. He pumped his fists.
It was indeed, as the giant video board beyond center field proclaimed, The Return of the King.
He was so excited his pitch from atop the mound he used to own was high and hard.
Hernandez told Greene afterward that as he was walking to the mound “I couldn’t feel my legs.”
He wasn’t the only Mariner jacked about Seattle’s first postseason game in two decades.
“Getting to bring playoff baseball back to Seattle...we’re all looking forward to getting in front of our fans again,” France, the team’s first baseman, said before Saturday’s game.
“It’s a factor that I don’t think gets talked about enough,” Mariners manager Scott Servais said.
“In the first inning, when there are 45,000 Mariners fans pumped and behind us, we certainly need it. I’ve talked about it when we clinched (a playoff spot earlier this month), ended the drought, how valuable our fan base has been to this team. This team really...somehow, we get wired, we get going when it’s loud here.
“I really ask everyone to bring it. Not just our team. All 45,000 people that are going to show up here...because we need them.”
This story was originally published October 15, 2022 at 2:09 PM with the headline "Mariners’ playoff return: Roars at 10am. A truly electric anthem. The Return of the King."
