By Dan Catchpole
SEATTLE (Reuters) -With the Mariners trailing the Toronto Blue Jays 8-2 in the eighth inning, Benji King and his parents, Stephen and Mary, walked out of Seattle’s T-Mobile Park.
“He’s got school in the morning,” Mary said.
They figured it was better for their 10-year-old son to get a good night’s sleep than stay, hoping for a ninth-inning rally in Game Four of the American League Championship Series.
“This is the type of thing the Mariners do every year – they get your hopes up,” and leave you disappointed, Benji said.
The Mariners returned home with plenty of hope after taking the first two games in Toronto – only to drop the next two in front of sold-out crowds in Seattle.
Since their first season in 1977, the team have lost more games than they have won – 4,022 games to be exact. They have the eighth worst record in Major League Baseball and are the only team never to have been to the World Series.
Matthew Mounsey, 22, flew back from Austin where he is in school to go to the ALCS games with his parents and 89-year-old grandmother Sandy Gillis, who has been rooting for the Ms for all of their 49 years.
Before that, she rooted for the Seattle Rainiers, the city’s minor league team that preceded the Mariners.
Gillis was on her feet for every pitch of the Mariners’ 15-inning game last Friday to clinch the Division Series against the Detroit Tigers.
“It was incredible,” she said.
This year is only the team’s sixth trip to the postseason. They ended a 20-year playoff drought in 2022 when they squeaked into the postseason.
“They’re a hard team to get invested in,” Sophia Rice, 33, said.
The Mariners had a rocky first half of the season but, after a sparkling September, Rice and countless other fans dared to dream that this could be Seattle’s season to win it all.
That spark of hope was enough that Rice and her boyfriend Connor Lawson, 33, put down $700 for two bleacher seat tickets for Thursday’s game.
Even after two ugly games, Rice and Lawson are still hopeful. They are supposed to go to Mexico City when the World Series will be going on.
And if the Mariners make it that far?
“I’ll fly back for those games,” Rice said.
(Reporting by Dan Catchpole in Seattle; Editing by Peter Rutherford)
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