My relationship to Félix Hernández is complicated and simple. I grew up here and came of age in sports at exactly the right time to adore the Mariners; then I moved away at 11 years old and had little to no in-person contact with the Mariners, save the jaunt to the Trop every year or two to catch a game in the series there (which was comforting in its own right, as pre-updating Tropicana Field felt shockingly like the Kingdome, or at least hazy 7-year-old memories of the Kingdome). I confess that for most of Félix’ reign, my attention was elsewhere; first in college in the pre-smartphone era, where I kept up with the Mariners through the tepid connection of box score scanning on ESPN, then in law school, where, well, if you’re in law school you’re not spending a lot of time on obsessing over baseball.
ALN: It Never Quite Lined Up
