The Mariners’ season will end in less than a month, and the team as we know it will walk off the field for the final time.
Yes, there is a God!
As much as the Mariners need to forget about 2005 and put on a new face for ‘06, there’s one image I would cherish to see again next year.
I want Dan Wilson to block balls in the dirt, steer young pitchers in the right direction and drive doubles into the gaps. I want to see him healthy, smiling and making a difference on a team that’s headed in the right direction, not rehabbing a season-ending knee injury as this year’s Mariners head for another last-place finish.
I want to see Dan Wilson play one more year and get the sendoff that his retirement deserves.
Will it happen?
That will be impossible to say until Wilson, the final link to the Mariners’ 1995 division championship team, announces whether he will retire or try to play another year.
He’s had plenty of time to think about it, having been injured since early May when he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee.
What we know is this:
The injury has given Wilson more time with his wife and four children this summer. He has learned that summer in Seattle is the best time of year to enjoy things besides baseball. He has figured out that life away from baseball is going to be really, really good.
“It is a little strange, though,” he said last week. “When you’re home more at this time of year, you feel kind of like an outsider because you haven’t been there. You’re not involved in their routines.”
The more he became a part of his family’s summer routine, the more he has liked it.
“It’s been a bit more of a normal summer, and that’s nice,” Wilson said.
But has he decided to retire?
“I don’t know. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it,” he said.
His heart, though, may already have made the decision for him. Wilson thinks he knows what he will (or won’t) do next season. It’s just a matter of making that final decision and telling people.
“I’m getting pretty close,” he said. “But I haven’t really decided when.”
Let’s hope he decides soon, so all the Dan Wilson fans can either look forward to next year or give him a proper sendoff before this season ends.
In a perfect world, he would come back for one more year with the Mariners and show everybody that he has one more productive season to play. In a perfect world, he would rise above the younger, stronger, faster catchers the Mariners bring to spring training and become their opening-day catcher again.
The world isn’t perfect.
Injuries at age 37 – which is what Wilson will be next season – don’t heal like they did at age 27, especially knee injuries to catchers. Age makes a man wiser, and Wilson is among the wisest when it comes to carrying a pitcher through a game, but it does no good to arm strength and bat speed.
So if Wilson decides he is finished as a player, let’s hope the final image of him isn’t from that sad day in May when he walked off the field with the injured knee.
The fans deserve one more opportunity to send him off to the rest of his life.
If this is it, he should take the lineup card to home plate before the final game of the season on Oct. 2. In the ninth inning, manager Mike Hargrove should send him to the mound and talk to the pitcher one last time.
Then, when Wilson turns to walk back to the dugout, he should take it slowly.
Fans, teammates and opponents will need a long, last chance to thank him properly.
Kirby Arnold is The Herald’s baseball writer
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