Dan Wilson Has a Nice Butt

That is a quote from my aunt, not a strange ode to the former catcher's glutes you weirdos.

“Dan Wilson has a nice butt.”

That is my lasting memory of attending opening day at the Kingdome in Seattle with my Auntie Teal, who would ogle Seattle Mariners catcher Dan Wilson as he was warming up the pitcher between innings. Today was supposed to be MLB’s opening day were it not for their offseason labor dispute.

Auntie Teal was not my real biological Aunt, but a friend of my parents, and our former neighbor. When I was born Auntie Teal and her husband Uncle Tim became my first godparents. They never had children of their own, probably because they didn’t want them. They owned a home with an indoor, built-in hot tub in their bedroom and a pool table in the basement of their split level, a bathroom with wallpaper featuring Rubenesque nudes, and a stack of Playboys on the back of the toilet disguised cleverly by turning the binding toward the wall and placing one National Geographic magazine atop the stack. These didn’t seem like wishful prospective parents being shunned by their lack of fertility.

My family lived a long way from my biological relatives, more by choice than by chance, and Uncle Tim and Auntie Teal were instructed, in the event of an emergency, to hold onto me and my sister until my second layer of godparents arrived to assume our guardianship and with whom we would live permanently.

But those other godparents never took me to the Mariners opening day.

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Dan Wilson became a Seattle Mariner before the 1994 strike-shortened season. I don’t remember him being traded for because I was seven years old when he was traded. Baseball Reference says that Wilson came to Seattle in a trade that sent Erik Hanson and Brett Boone to Cincinnati for Wilson and a player named Bobby Ayala. Hanson was a very good pitcher who stayed very good for a couple of years. Ayala was a an unremarkable reliever who somehow became the Mariners closer at one point, and at another point was such a punchline that once in my adolescence that I once saw a man at the zoo who looked like Ayala who was wearing a Seattle Mariners hat, innocently approached the man to ask if he was, in fact Ayala, only to have the man appear more offended that I compared him to the then-maligned closer than if I had made fun of his wife’s hair loss condition.

The Mariners had a lot of star players in my youth but were lovable losers. In 1995, another year shortened by the same strike as cancelled 1994 postseason, they reached the playoffs for the first time in franchise history. Dan Wilson was there. Dan Wilson’s butt was there. At some point in the near-term future, I was there with my aunt on baseball’s opening day. And though Dan Wilson was a pretty ordinary big leaguer, his butt was a star in my aunt’s eyes.

From my point of view Dan Wilson was as constant as my aunt and uncle.

At some point in the early 2000s Dan Wilson’s career in Seattle started to wind down, my parents got separated and then divorced, and we started to see a lot less of Uncle Tim and Auntie Teal. Divorce often causes family friends to side with one spouse or the other. In this case my aunt and uncle took no side, by which I mean they didn’t see any of us anymore.

A few years later another uncle/family friend of ours passed away unexpectedly. My Uncle Tim and Auntie Teal attended his memorial, and my Uncle Tim, faced with the realities of his own mortality and the bottom of too many pints of light lager, told us how he important we were to him through tears. My sister and I, me in my teens and my sister around 10 years old, made our first adult-like empty promises to spend more time with someone we cared about.

In 2015 I married my wife, and after contact limited to emails despite living within a couple miles of my Uncle Tim and Auntie Teal, they RSVP’d “No” to our wedding with no note, no congratulatory email, no well wishes, and no explanation.

I didn’t fully appreciate going to opening day with my aunt as a child. As a parent, the hassle of hauling a child to a baseball game in Downtown Seattle is not lost on me, but back then it was another baseball game with my aunt. We ate peanuts, sat very close to the field, and she wouldn’t stop talking about Dan Wilson’s butt.

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Opening day, much like childhood, feels impossibly distant from the conclusion of either life or the baseball season. As a child the idea of mortality feels like some shit for other people to worry about. As an adult, and especially as a parent, it becomes difficult not to obsess over mortality.

The Mariners have aged with me somewhat symbolically. In 2001 I was brimming with hope. We lived next to a family who had a daughter one year younger than me who a couple years earlier became the first girl to tell me “No” when I asked her out. The father of the family died unexpectedly in I believe the summer of 2001, all while the Mariners were amidst a historic season that would see them tie the single season record for wins by a team. A genuine thought I had at the time was “wow, I can’t believe Ken won’t get to watch the Mariners win a World Series.”

I was stupid and young. It was innocent and hopefully funny to think about now, how out of touch I was with the true tragedy of premature death. But baseball was perhaps the most important thing to me in my life at the time. I couldn’t imagine not watching Sportscenter every day or watching a Mariners game at a horrible angle on a tube TV in my living room from our dining room table. I remember internally questioning how my dad could possible call himself a sports fan without several hours of ESPN in his entertainment diet each day.

More than anything, I couldn’t imagine not being alive.

Then as a young adult, much like the Mariners, I spent several listless years bouncing around the bottom of the workforce. I was single for most of the time, technically employed the entire time, but never successful. Then I met my wife, and I am contractually obligated to describe the time we’ve spent since then as a fairy tale, but she spent a lot of years rooting for a dude at the bottom of the standings.

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The Mariners didn’t win the World Series in 2001. To date they have never even reached a World Series. Ken could have lived to be an old man and never seen the Mariners win a World Series.

I’ve sat through decades of Mariners baseball now, through false starts and failures of rebuilds. Through scandals, bad luck, and organizational stupidity. And like many people in the past couple of years, I’ve had to face my own mortality, the mortality of the people around me, the mortality of our society, and the mortality of our country.

The 1994 MLB labor strike may have caused me as much angst as the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. But this time around, in 2022, every time I was reminded of baseball’s labor strife I would think “oh shit, that thing is still going on?”

For years I obsessed over baseball stats. In 2020 I traded sabermetrics for COVID data. I drank too much and spent hours pouring over data for no reason. I was doing nothing with the information apart from drunkenly texting friends my inevitably misguided optimism about the end of the pandemic. In 2021 I no longer even had cable TV, so I can count on one hand how many Mariners games I watched. I had become my dad, an adult, a father, and very casual baseball fan.

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In 2022 I am different than the last time I was seriously interested in baseball.

In a perfect end to this story, I would have recently rekindled my relationship with my aunt and uncle. It would be more meaningful than ever, and life would have given us all the perspective that our relationship is as important as it seemed through my uncle’s beer-soaked tears. Baseball would have played a central role and maybe Dan Wilson would have made a cameo and done a couple of squats for my aunt for old time’s sake.

Instead, we are people aging in the Pacific Northwest. My aunt and uncle must be close to 70 years old and the only proof of life I have, despite them still living very close, is a published golf tournament result from 2021 that my uncle competed in. Northwesterners are the passive aggressive sort, too polite for an awkward confrontation and too guilt-riddled for an aggressive one. One day these people that you saw several times a year never seen you again. Sometimes because they are taken from you too early, or sometimes through mutual, albeit passive choice. But they are replaced with new people, some of whom you love, some of whom you must literally be paid money stomach their presence, and some of whom you clean the literal shit from several times per day.

At some point you realize you’re in your mid-30s, and your only language for genuine emotion that is not romantic is through tired and stilted sports metaphors. Then you write a blog post if you’re lucky enough to live in a time when a blog post has been invented, fallen out of popularity, and inexplicably become a thing people give a shit about again.

At one time I was attempting to become a professional writer, writing analytical pieces about the metrics behind sustainable success in baseball, attempting to infuse humor into writing and trying desperately not to sound exactly like Jeff Sullivan, then a Mariners blogger and now a baseball front office employee.

Now I am a middling comedian with a child and in a couple days I will be taking her to a minor league baseball game a couple miles from our house, the first game she will ever attend.

Because it really is a huge pain in the ass to take a kid to downtown Seattle for a baseball game, and because minor league butts are still pretty nice.