At the Mariners game the other night, my friend Jeff and I left our seats in the 300 level upper deck, which look down on third base, and journeyed over to the bullpen area, which is just behind the fence in left field. The bullpen is basically two pitching strips behind the leftfield wall, with a chain link fence standing parallel on the other side of the bullpen. The chain link gives the fans a view in but still keeps them out. But as a fan, this is totally cool access because the distance between you and the players is only a matter of feet, and when you’re used to seeing them at a clip of a few hundred feet or the boxed-in dimensions of the TV, the immediacy of it is entrancing.

Equally powerful is the sight of the stadium from that angle. Looking down on the field for hours at a time from the upper deck, hell, from even directly behind home plate, cannot convey the awesomeness of looking up at the stands, filled with people, from the field. A total Roman-gladiator style rush.

We went down to the bullpen in the seventh inning, and Mariners relief pitcher Julio Mateo was warming up. I was excited because Mateo is on my fantasy league team and I’ve been a big proponent of his. I believe that I’m the only one among the millions of fantasy league players who has him on a team because his “Owned By” percentage according to ESPN is currently 0.0%. He’s a good pitcher, totally undervalued, with total game face and cool. (And as I’ve always been one who’s a sucker for the underdog, I decided to promote him to honorary captain of my team.) We watched him and the bullpen catcher run through a series of pitches: sliders, fastballs, curveballs, all of them leaving his arm at an unnatural velocity compared to the relative motion of his arm and landing in the catchers glove with a smack about .2 seconds later. It looks supernatural from five feet away. We watched the warm-up tosses for about five minutes. Meanwhile on the mound, starter Freddy Garcia was beginning to struggle and the call went out from manager Bob Melvin to bring Mateo in. Mateo went down the ramp leading to the door that opens on to left field. As he ran out to the mound, I got a little lump in my throat. “Go get ‘em kid.” I’m not sure why I’ve developed paternal feelings for a 25 year-old Latin kid who I’ve never even seen smile, let alone his heard interviewed. Funny.

He ran across left field to the pitcher’s mound, a distance of around 300 feet. The further he ran, the fuzzier his definition became to my eye, until when he reached the mound he simply became another right-handed thrower in a white Mariners uniform pitching to a batter in a gray uniform.

The stacked levels of the stadium rose like a sheer-faced cliff from the expanse of green field, and all of the sounds, the lights, and our vantage point in far left field made it the experience feel immense. After getting a quick first out on a pop-up, Mateo recorded a strikeout on Miguel Tejada, the American League MVP for 2002. He then finished the inning with another pop-up out. One-two-three and he, along with the rest of the team, disappeared into the dugout.

It was all a metaphor for something, although I’m not sure what. I did feel like I’d watched a complete life cycle unfold, from near to far to gone. The image was certainly a piece of poetry, the distance, the stadium, the fans, the athlete, the pitch, the confrontation…and then an empty field.

And then the next inning came, the teams re-emerged, and the three-outs started over again.