SEATTLE – You dream about moments like this.
Bottom of the ninth. Bases loaded. Two outs. Your team behind by a run. First day of the baseball season.
You dream about this pitch. A big, luscious fastball right where you want it.
You dream about what you’ll do with it. Maybe single into the gap. Or clout one into the seats. But it’s always good, it’s always dramatic.
When the winning run scores, your teammates rush onto the field and mob you. And the fans stand and cheer you, long and loud.
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And you tell them. Then a new group of reporters gathers around and you delight in reliving that special moment.
And you take this day to bed with you and you fall asleep with a smile on your face.
You dream all this and then one day you live that dream, only it doesn’t turn out the way it’s supposed to.
You get the pitch you want. And it looks as big as a melon and you’re almost salivating as it comes towards the plate.
You swing and you know the moment you connect that the dream is about to die. And it does, with the ball settling into the right fielder’s glove.
Dreams die hard in baseball – as Mike Cameron found out Monday afternoon.
“I just missed it,” he said after he left the bags full in a 6-5 Mariner loss to the Chicago White Sox.
He would say this again and again, as yet another group of reporters came to his locker to ask him about the pitch.
Fastball. His pitch.
“I got one,” he said softly, moments after the clubhouse opened to the media, “and I missed it.”
Most of his teammates had scattered to areas which were off-limits to reporters, but not Cameron. He is always there at his locker, on the bad days as well as the good days.
Except for that final pitch and that final score, this had been a good day for the Mariner center fielder.
He was given his Gold Glove Award in pregame ceremonies, and he had held the trophy high above his head.
“He’ll sleep with that tonight,” someone in the press box remarked.
Maybe he would have, if things had turned out differently.
“A Gold Glove is special,” he said, after someone steered his thoughts away from the day’s sad ending. “It’s (defense) something I work hard at doing. It’s one piece of hardware your peers order for you.”
Moments later, someone would bring up the pitch, the final pitch, and Cameron would re-live it again.
“I got a good pitch to hit,” he would say. “I just got under it a little bit.”
You would have thought that he was entirely to blame for the loss, and in his eyes, he was.
“I missed a pitch I should have hit,” he said. “That was the last out.”
He didn’t really miss it. He hit it high into the late afternoon sky with three runners on the move hoping that maybe the wind would catch it and miraculously push it beyond the right fielder’s grasp.
But miracles most often happen only in movies and this wasn’t any movie.
Until then, it had been a memorable day for Mike Cameron. In the second inning, he had gotten all of a Mark Buehrle pitch and sent it rocketing into the visitors’ bullpen in left field for the first run of the game.
He had struck out his next time up, then had hit a line-drive single off the shortstop’s glove in the seventh before walking in the eighth.
It had been the kind of day Mariner fans wish for Cameron, one of the most popular players on the club.
He had enjoyed a breakout season a year ago, batting .267 with 25 home runs, 110 RBI and that Gold Glove, his first.
This year, his goal is to “stay healthy and be consistent. Do the things I’m capable of doing and the numbers at the end of the season will take care of themselves.”
After he said this in the quiet of the clubhouse, his mind was brought back to the game he had just played and to the out he had just made. And rather than saying he didn’t want to talk about it anymore, he addressed the issue once more.
“We had the opportunity to win the game,” he said. “I screwed it up a little bit.”
But he knows there could be another day, another moment like this, in this long grind of a season.
“It may come up … tomorrow,” he said. “I’m looking forward to it … the challenge.”
Bottom of the ninth. Bases loaded. Two outs. His team behind by a run.
The pitch. A big, ripe fastball.
“I’ll see that play,” Mike Cameron said, “in my sleep.”
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