Don’t worry, Seattle, I’ve sufficiently reprimanded two of the miscreants for the role they played in an annoying “infestation” of your wonderful Safeco Field.
Baseball is of course your national pastime – the first game was organized in 1839 by Civil War General Abner Doubleday and called by the great Vin Scully – but you’ve certainly learned by now that some Canadians are crazy for the sport too. Included in that number are my two boys, ages four and six, who attended their first-ever MLB game a couple of weeks ago when their beloved Toronto Blue Jays took on your Mariners.
They waited for more than an hour in the scorching sun to get autographs – thanks Marco Estrada and Marcus Stroman! They learned that you stand for both national anthems, and remove your hat and shoot fireworks to show respect. They learned that Safeco Field offers incredible views of low-flying aircraft, cruise ships, garlic fries and Josh Donaldson dingers.
People warned us that kids can get bored by the fifth inning, but not my boys: they were locked in on the action for the whole nine – give or take 14 bathroom trips – and my elder son called it the best day of his life.
What we later learned, however, is that we were part of a bigger problem, and potentially Not Welcome in that park anymore. We were informed of this in a column by an ESPN reporter who was “certifiably annoyed” by us Canadians and chastised us as “rude house guests.”
“Our neighbors to the north have gotten just a little bit too full of themselves,” he said, smoke twirling from his corn-cob pipe as he stroked his waxed moustache with one hand and fingered a Colt Sidehammer Revolver with the other. Probably.
He had many complaints about our collective behaviour, including the fact that some of us dared to “make remarks about our government.” I can feel his pain. The state of Washington did, after all, vote 54.4 per cent to 38.2 per cent in favour of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, with Seattle’s King County picking Clinton on a whopping 72 per cent of ballots. To spare any more anguish, I will not use the name of the dusty old catcher’s mitt who actually won the election. You good Mariners fans obviously have very little in common with the president’s core voters in Oklahoma, Wyoming, and Russia.
I bet the president would be a hell of a ball player though, especially on the base paths – he could steamroll every single opponent and never get called for obstruction.
The author also singled out several Blue Jays fans sitting near him who were – I hope you’re near your fainting couch – yelling things.Granted, those of us from the Vancouver area should have done a better of job keeping it to a whisper – for years we’ve all been quite comfortable with the rule at Vancouver Canucks games that states anyone caught making too much noise will be asked to take their rowdiness somewhere more appropriate such as a burn unit or funeral home.
I really can understand why the annual Blue Jays series rubs some Seattle fans the wrong way. I mean, there were a heck of a lot of Jays fans in the stadium. If we had a team here, we’d go see them. But we don’t, and so we borrow your stadium in massive numbers.
It’s obvious who doesn’t have a problem with the arrangement: the owners of the team. The Mariners’ average home attendance this season (including the Jays series) has been 24,601, while the average for the Blue Jays series alone was more than 40,000 per game. This despite a substantial “Hoser Tax” – cheerily branded “Dynamic Pricing” by the Mariners – added to ticket prices for the series. That’s capitalism; the American Dream; Uncle Sam eating a corn dog, drinking a tall boy of Coors Banquet, cashing cheques and laughing at all those Timbit-scarfing suckers who have money to blow on ball games because of all the free health care they’ve been using.
But we are Canadians after all, and apologizing for things is our national pastime. And in this case it appears that we’ve stepped on someone’s toes. (Or did someone step on our toes? It doesn’t matter: we’re still going to apologize.)
So here goes: sorry about that, bud. Good luck to your Mariners, unless they’re playing the Jays. I must note that all of the Seattle fans that we encountered along the way were very gracious hosts, chatting with our boys and making us and our funny Canadian money feel most welcome in your house. I’m sorry to hear it wasn’t the same all over the park.
And know that at least my two young fellows have been appropriately disciplined for their part in this controversy: I told them they have to go to Seattle again next season despite the risk of encountering finger-wagging sports columnists.
See you next year!
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