‘Hope Opener’: Mariners start home season with huge lines, roars, Ichiro’s gas--and a rout
The lines — and the buzz — wrapped around the ballpark. The queue went down First Avenue. It stretched toward Pioneer Square, up Edgar Martinez Drive to the I-5 freeway overpass.
And it was still more than two hours until the first pitch of Friday’s home opener.
This most anticipated Mariners season in 21 years was absolutely on.
Team broadcasters Dave Sims and Rick Rizzs greeted the anxious, cheering throng outside sold-out T-Mobile Park’s home-plate entrance Friday afternoon. They were standing directly behind the bronzed Ken Griffey Jr. Griffey’s immortalized 24 Mariners jersey was on the backs of thousands of fans — and worn by the on-field DJ blaring the tunes that had players and fans dancing in the stadium hours before the game.
“I think this team is going to live up to the expectations,” Sims said into a microphone.
The crowd waiting to enter roared.
Sims and Rizzs, the voices of Seattle’s baseball renaissance last September into October that ended on the season’s final day one game out of the playoffs, counted down the final seconds to the opening of the stadium gates for 2022. At 4:40 p.m., men and women, kids and grandparents, wearing the Mariners jerseys of Griffey, Kelenic, Cruz, Martinez, Crawford, Ichiro, Haniger, Rodriguez, Seager, Pineda, even Lee, through the gates — plus green-and-blue confetti and balloons.
Inside, the party was already starting out in The Pen, the stadium’s beer garden beyond the left-center field fence.
And why not? It was, after all, 5 o’clock on a sunny Friday.
The way it looked, sounded and, well, was Friday at the Mariners’ 11-1 destruction of the defending American League-champion Houston Astros, Seattle’s 21 years of waiting to get back to the playoffs may be about to end. It was the largest margin of victory for the Mariners in a home opener in team history. They beat Boston 12-4 to begin the 2019 home schedule.
“That was a fun night,” Mariners manager Scott Servais said.
Those double-fisted folks basking in The Pen Friday afternoon sure think this is the year.
Matt Go, a 26-year-old salesman from Seattle, and Andrew Barrera, 26, a youth-baseball coach from Kent, were with a third friend on the lower porch of The Pen. They were holding six beers between the three of them.
That’s two more beers than the Mariners have playoff appearances in their 45-year history.
“Have to,” Go said, pressed against others in The Pen. “You see that line?
“That’s longer than we’ve had to wait for a World Series.”
Next to Go, Pat Sanford was smiling into the sun. So was his wife, Kristi Nilson.
“This is the Hope Opener,” Sanford said.
“It’s like, ‘Wow! Baseball’s a thing again in Seattle.”
He and his wife have been coming to Mariners games since they were in the Kingdome, in the inaugural season of 1977. Sanford helped design the presentations on Safeco Field, now-T-Mobile Park’s giant video board. Their son Kristian, now 34, works on the Mariners’ game-operations staff. He plays the in-game music over the stadium public-address system, including each Mariner’s walk-up tunes for each at bat.
Kristian was 18 years old when he began working for the Mariners. He’s been a ball boy. He’s been the Moose’s escort.
So yes, the Sanford-Nilson family, to borrow the Ted Lasso-inspired phrase on the gold placards that spread across Western Washington at the end of the Mariners’ 90-win season of 2021, BELIEVE.
“They’re headed that way, to the playoffs,” Nilson said in The Pen.
“The way they finished last season I said, ‘OK, they are right on the verge. Right on the edge.’ And they’ve been on the edge for a little while,” Sanford said. “But, I mean, they were really exciting at the end of last season. That was SO fun.
“And I’m hoping they can take that next step here. They made some good moves (signing 2021 American League Cy Young Award-winning pitcher Robbie Ray to a five-year, $115 million contract, for one).
“I wanted them to make some even bigger moves,” he said, laughing.
“But, we’ve got a lot of young, good talent. ...I feel pretty good about how they (developed) the young talent.
“And, the fact they brought Julio up...”
Ah, yes, Julio Rodriguez. The hugely hyped, 21-year-old rookie from the Dominican Republic. He was at Class-A Everett this time last year. Friday, he started in center field for the seventh time in eight Mariners games this season.
Rodriguez earned the largest roars among all players introduced before the game. He raised both arms toward the bright blue evening sky.
As he jogged across the (T-Mobile) pink carpet from the right-field wall to the infield dirt beside second base, his smile was as large as the hope filling this Mariners season.
The loudest cheers to begin this opener were for a Mariners and baseball legend.
Ichiro Suzuki, now 48 with gray hair shaved short like an Airborne soldier, looked as fit and ready to play as he was at age 28. The forever-loved Mariners legend bounded out of the first-base dugout to the pitcher’s mound just before the game began. Wearing his familiar white, 51 home Mariners jersey, Ichiro smiled and waved to the roaring crowd of 47,000.
Then he fired a dart. It was harder and straighter than some Major League pitchers throw. It buzzed off the corner of home plate.
His catcher: Julio Rodriguez.
The old throwing to the new. They hugged, a long, this-is-real hug.
The crowd exploded again.
The fans roared again at Seattle’s Ayron Jones’ cool, electric-guitar rendition of the national anthem.
And they erupted yet again with two strikes on Houston leadoff batter Jose Altuve to begin the game. Mariners starter Marco Gonzales then struck him out. The yard popped some more.
A “LET’S GO MARINERS!” chant erupted stadium-wide, unprompted, in the middle of the first, after Gonzales had set down the Astros in order to begin the game.
They were roaring again in the bottom of the first. That’s when Jesse Winker, the All-Star acquired from Cincinnati this winter, singled home 2021 Pittsburgh Pirates All-Star and new Seattle leadoff hitter Adam Frazier with the game’s first run.
“For some of the new guys, it was their first game here in Seattle,” Servais said. “First time, I think it was Winker, when he was at the plate, he said ‘Is it like this every night?’
“I said, ‘Yeah--keep winning, it’s like this.’
“No, it was great. A great way to start the year.”
The 28-year-old Winker, in his sixth Major League season, said after the game it was the best crowd atmosphere he’d played in.
It was, indeed, the Mariners’ “Hope Opener.”
Yes, as Sanford, who’s been coming to M’s games since 1977, said out in The Pen, “baseball’s a thing again in Seattle.”
This story was originally published April 15, 2022 at 7:55 PM.
