The language of baseball has always been fascinating to me. There are literally thousands of terms and sayings. Paul Dickson’s The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary lists and notates over 7,000 terms and it is remarkable how much of that is woven into our lives and regularly impacts the way we talk, whether we realize it or not.
I’ve been looking for an opportunity to write a little about the language of baseball, the stories behind how some of the many sayings and colloquialisms came to be and the way baseball slang has impacted modern English. I thought maybe this would be a good time for us Seattle Mariners fans to reflect upon the story of one of the most famous baseball sayings of all. It ain’t over till it’s over.
In July of 1973, the New York Mets were 9½ games behind the Chicago Cubs in the National League East when their catcher, Yogi Berra, first uttered the phrase. And in-fact, Yogi was right. It wasn’t over at all. The Mets came back that year and ended up clinching the division in the second-to-last game of the season.
Yogi was known for the roundabout way he would say simple things like that. When he said, it ain’t over till it’s over; all he was really conveying is that it wasn’t over. There was just something so poetic about the way the great catcher worded his sentences. And I still often hear nervous sports fans mutter into their beers, it ain’t over till it’s over, as they calculate what it would take for their favorite team to stage a comeback. Hope is a big part of why people enjoy sports, and that’s important.
The Mariners are a mediocre team right now. In the last month they’ve gone from leading the division to falling 11-games back of the Texas Rangers. The stupid, jerk-faced Texas Rangers. The glimmer of hope to hang onto is that they’re only a couple of game behind in the Wild Card race. Honestly, the Wild Card race is the only thing keeping me sane right now. Four short weeks ago the Mariners looked like the team to beat in the American League and now they look as if a stiff breeze could lay waste to the pitching staff. So excuse the dramatics, but for me, this last month has pretty much been a steep, emotional plummet back to my murky Mariner reality.
It’s not hard to figure out what’s gone wrong. The schedule got tougher and the injury bug bit. Sure, other stuff happened, but really, it was tough competition and a rash of injury.
In late April, I wrote about how May should be a easy month for Seattle and that they had to take advantage of dips in the schedule if they were going to be the best in the west. And they actually did it! They went 17-11 in May!
June, however, ended up being pretty much the complete opposite and the Texas Rangers and Houston Astros both turned into the teams we thought they were before the season began. Seattle had their hats handed to them by Boston, Detroit and Texas and still has tough series’ coming up against Baltimore, Kansas City and Houston before the All-Star break. When I said a great team has to take advantage of weaker schedules, I may have failed to mention that you have to, at the very least, hold your own against the better teams in the league as well.
Okay. I’m going to try to let Yogi talk a little sense into me. We’ve still got six more games before we reach the halfway mark of the regular season. We still have more baseball ahead of us than behind us, anything can happen and this team, once reeling from injuries, is looking like they should be healthy for the second half, (knocks on wood).
Felix Hernandez has missed significant time with a calf injury and Taijuan Walker has been sidelined by a non-structural ankle injury. Wade Miley went on the DL with arm fatigue a couple of weeks ago and Adrian Sampson is out for the season and will require elbow surgery. The last month has been tough on the Mariner’s starting rotation. Ketel Marte and Leonys Martin have been back in the line-up for a couple of weeks now, but neither of them have been playing how they were before their recent stints on the disabled list. The team was hammered with injuries in June, and it’s showing in the win/loss column.
Hopefully, that’s all behind us now. Wade Miley is scheduled to pitch on Wednesday, and Taijuan Walker is set to return to the mound Thursday night. Felix just threw a bullpen session and said he felt great afterward. He could be back for a start before the All-Star break, but I’d imagine the team would wait until after the break just to make sure his calf has completely healed.
The Mariners still have an elite offense. If they can stay healthy moving forward it’s easy to imagine them getting back to being that team we watched win almost every series they played for the first two months of the season. We’re actually getting good production from all over the field, for once. Nori Aoki was sent down to Tacoma to work on hitting left-handed pitching. Which means we’ll get to see more Franklin Gutierrez, More Seth Smith and more Shawn O’Neil. Guti’s bat has been heating up and Smith has been steady all year. It’s nice to finally see the Mariners actually getting some production from left field, even if it’s in the form of a platoon.
There’s likely to be talk over the next couple of weeks about the Mariners acquiring a starting pitcher through trade. It’s possible that they’ll go after someone, especially if Miley struggles in his next couple of starts, or if Wade Leblanc doesn’t continue to look like the second coming of Jamie Moyer. I would temper any excitement about big trades by saying that I don’t expect the Mariners to make a move for a top-line starter unless they have to. If they sign starters at all, they’ll be brought in to add depth in Tacoma. If there is a move to be made, though, I trust Jerry Dipoto to go after it. I love the way he built this team in the offseason and I think he’s a done a great job at the helm so far.
I’m trying to stay as positive as I can here, so I’ll leave you with these thoughts. If we can make it to the break without falling any further behind, then maybe there’s some reason for optimism. In the end, Yogi is pretty much always right… even when he’s wrong. There’s still a lot of baseball to be played, Mariner fans. Can this team do what it takes to get back on track? I seriously have no idea at this point. Time will always tell, but one thing remains true until then. If the 1973 Mets can do it, so can the 2016 Mariners.
It ain’t over till it’s over.
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