I knew the Seattle Mariners were finally home this weekend and had been planning their big home opener for Friday night.  It was a gala event, sold out, the wife of the late voice of the Mariners, Dave Neihaus, was on hand to throw out the first pitch.  It had been a rough road trip, but they were finally home for some home cookin’.

They went out on the field and scored three runs that night.  It would have made the Cleveland Indians look silly, if it weren’t for the fact they scored 12.

The next thing you know, we were offered tickets to game #2.  It was going to be a rare Saturday night with nothing planned and so we jumped at the offer.  John and Susan, who gave us the tickets, suggested we take the bus down to the game and they’d give us a ride home.  Feeling adventurous, we did it.  I went on the Metro site, entered my starting and ending point and found out a bus one block away would take the two of us down to Safeco Field for $4.50.  That’s less than I would have spent on gas and no parking fees!

To make things even sweeter, our seats were in the Terrace Club section.  Front row, second level, just to the right of home plate if you were standing on the pitchers mound.  We easily had a half-dozen foul balls come into our section. PLUS, there was an $8 food voucher with each ticket PLUS they took your order and delivered the food to your seat.  I suppose it would have been asking too much to have the Mariners win, but they came close.  Still a good game and an amazingly good time.  Interesting that the Mariners would lose by the same score the Sounders won by, just hours earlier and one stadium over.

But my Mariner weekend didn’t end there.

While grocery shopping at QFC Sunday afternoon, we were checking out when I started bantering with the cashier and we went from a joke about the Mariners and their losing ways to the fact that, as a teenager, she used to babysit former starting second baseman Jack Wilson.  What are the odds? It seems that her family was friends with his family while growing up in California and that she would, at times, babysit Jack and his brother.  She said both were great kids and that their families would even go camping together. There was the time they had a donut-eating contest and Jack stuck so many donuts in his mouth that he started to cry.

Like I said, it was just another weekend.  I hadn’t planned on it being a Mariners weekend, but somehow it turned out that way.  And that’s just fine by me…

Tim Hunter