Publisher

I am constantly amazed at how the girl from Dusseldorf I married has adopted the Mariners as her personal franchise.

We have only been to a couple of games at the local diamond but when they play everything else takes second place. That is what is on our television.

Growing up in Germany there was no such game. Girls played hop scotch (humpel), jump rope (seil springen), Mother may I (Mutter dars ich), hide and seek (verstecken stielen), soccer (fussball) and street hockey, which they played using a Kohlrabi stalk which bends on the bottom to vaguely resemble our hockey stick and used an old tennis ball as a puck.

Elsbeth got hooked on Abner Doubleday's game when she saw Joey Cora at second base. He had those big round Spanish eyes and he was not your typical baseball hunk. So she felt like cuddling him when he struck out. She was devastated when he was traded away but then she adopted Booney and when he cried at being traded away she bawled also.

She knows the batting averages, salaries and other stats of the players and looks with great disfavor when I try to switch channels even when her boys are eight runs down.

There is little doubt that she has some kind of mysterious control over the outcome of the games. It is scary how often she shouts things like "hit a popper upper" and the enemy does pop it up. When I ask how she does that she will say, " I just kept my left hand on the arm of the chair the whole game."

Or "My elbow itched but I refused to scratch it."

Of course, I should have known that would make a difference.

They never played baseball in Germany but she was a pretty good athlete. For many years we played golf and she had a natural caddy swing. Just natural good timing. And she had her own vocabulary for the game.

When her ball came up a little short when putting, she would yell, "Okay. That's a gimmick," and pick it up. She thought the word was "gimmick."

I sometimes did that to help speed up the game. She was pretty indignant when she checked my scoring and discovered I had charged hers.

"How come you charged a stroke when you gave me a gimmick?" I didn't try to explain.

One time we were playing golf at Mill Creek and a coyote ran out of the woods and grabbed her tee shot and then ran back in the woods. She thought it was Lassie and wanted to go into the woods and pet it. We found her ball, but it had been pretty well tenderized and she was unhappy when I told her it was out of bounds.

She was adamant and urged me to show her a rule book that says you should charge for ball that is chewed on by a hungry dog which thought it was an egg and carried it out.

I never did tell her it was not a dog.

She also had strong ideas about the color of not only her clothes but she would only use a pink ball and a matching pink tee if she had a pink ribbon in her hair.

Now that is hard to take care of, but I usually was up to it with some advance planning.

When she won the match and trophy in the annual publisher's wives tourney, she added her name to the past winners engraved on it and proudly displayed it in our den.

When we were not able to attend the following year, they asked her to send the trophy back. She was indignant and refused. So I explained it was a perpetual trophy. It is always returned for the tourney. She frowned and took it to a trophy shop and had an exact duplicate made.

Now that she has given up golf, she spends her evenings hexing baseball players and sometimes while knitting an Afghan or a sweater she will shake a long needle at an umpire with bad eyesight.