From the Heart: Fan Response to the Seattle Mariners' 1995 Baseball Season

It was more than sixty years ago that Mickey Cochrane first called baseball "the fan's game." Yet for all of the talk of the importance of fans, there are very few examples of listening to their voices as they try to articulate what the game means to them. Really, a fan's history of baseball in which the dominant voice in the narrative is the voice of those who follow the game on a daily basis, is not easily found.

What I would like to do in this paper is to provide an opportunity to hear the voices of the baseball fans who followed the Seattle Mariners through the most exciting period in the history of the franchise: the 1995 season. My sources come almost exclusively from faxed messages sent to the Mariners after their final game of 1995, a Game Six loss to Cleveland in the American League Championship Series.

What comes through in these faxes is the raw sentiment of people whose lives were touched in special ways by the Mariners. Written in unguarded moments when the relative anonymity of sitting at a computer and composing a fax permits us to speak sincerely without worrying about sounding corny, these letters are heartfelt. Many of the faxes remind us of the sheer joy that baseball can offer to its fans. As one of the faxed messages put it, "In a world screaming about Bosnian atrocities, scores of people screaming about O. J.'s trial, mothers and fathers screaming about the loss of a child by guns, man it was great to be screaming about the Mariners. Thanks guys."

Other faxes go further. In an era in which cynicism and calculated coolness are too often the norm, these faxes serve to remind us that adults have their moments of pride, hope, and inspiration, and that baseball can serve as a conduit for these emotions through an intense identification with the game and individual players. Perhaps most important, these letters help remind us that baseball has the power to bring people together in community.

The Magical Season

For Seattle Mariners baseball fans, 1995 is simply known as "the magical season." As one fan put it as the team headed into the climactic final week of the regular season, "There is a magic in the air as one Mariner follows another getting hotter than the burning phosphorus that falls from the Kingdome sky rockets signifying home run after home run and dramatic win after dramatic win." Responses to the magic showed up in some unlikely places. "I deliver medication to nursing homes and lock-down mental facilities," a fan wrote to the Seattle Mariners. "I can't thank you enough for the joy you guys gave to those people. I had never seen them so excited about something before—They had 'refuse to lose' on their wheel chairs and doors."

The season was nearly magical enough to stare down death itself. Take, for example, the case of ninety-year-old Janet Adams Duke. Her last words to her surgeon, as she left her hospital room on the morning of October 7, 1995, before game four of the Divisional Series against the New York Yankees, were "Just get me back here in time for that game." Unfortunately, her family later reported, the surgeon "was unable to comply, but 'Take Me Out to The Ball game' was played at the close of her funeral service" on October 12. Ms. Duke would have approved of that day for her funeral. It was a travel date during the League Championship Series. Neither Ms. Duke, undoubtedly cheering from above, nor her family and friends would have to miss a pitch.

To understand the powerful hold that 1995 had on Ms. Duke and so many other South Puget Sound residents, some background information about the awful suffering endured by Mariners fans would be useful. For the first seventeen years of the team's existence the Seattle Mariners were synonymous with mediocrity. The team won nothing; most especially it never came close to winning the hearts of its potential fan base in western...