Welcome back to Routine Moments in Baseball History, a running weekday feature that looks back at plays that have been ignored by the history books because history books only talk about things that are important or interesting. Today's installment is "The Ballad of Bucky Jacobsen." It's difficult to describe what happens to a bad baseball team in the dead heat of the summer. The season isn't officially over, dozens of games remain to be played, but whatever sense of hope or forward momentum the team had during spring training has been wiped out by long months of failure. Once a team gets 15 or 20 games behind the division leader it becomes a ghost ship, drifting through the schedule without a sense of purpose. When you've sunk that low in the standings it really doesn't matter whether you win or lose, and it also doesn't matter how you play the game because you'll be playing it badly. Many players are just trying to boost their stats to the point where they could be traded for prospects in the offseason or win a new contract, the coaches are trying not to get fired, and many fans just give up on the local sports page altogether.
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It was this kind of situation the 2004 Seattle Mariners found themselves in when they called up Bucky Jacobsen to the majors. The season was shot to hell by July, so why not bring on a 28-year-old career minor leaguer who can't really play in the field?Everyone who lived in the Pacific Northwest remembers what happened next. Basically, Bucky tore the shit out of the ball and became a folktale.Part of what made Bucky so appealing was the way he looked: He was a 6'4" ginger with a shaved head and enormous biceps; he resembled a pine tree with a red beard, or Ron Weasley if Weasley got tired of everyone making fun of him and got fucking JACKED as an adult. There was also the "longtime striver finally gets his shot" angle, since Bucky had gotten drafted in the seventh round all the way back in 1997 by the Milwaukee Brewers and spent years bouncing around the minors. Also there wasn't much else going on in the Seattle sports world at the time. But most importantly, Bucky could flat-out hit, and that was a rare thing on the Mariners back then—he launched nine home runs in just 176 at-bats in his seven short weeks on the team, and his slugging percentage was higher than anyone else on the team who logged that many at-bats except for Ichiro. The Mariners were so desperate for hitting that they brought in some minor league slugger, some dude who looked like he should be tearing down and putting up signs for a living, and it worked.On August 20, Bucky had been in the majors for about five weeks, and either pitchers were figuring him out a little bit or he was running out of whatever luck he had been granted, because he wasn't hitting like he was when he first appeared in a Mariners uniform. The swings were still mighty cuts, they just weren't connecting as often. Still, he was a reason for Seattle fans to tune in and nurture some spark of wait-till-next-year idealism in their hearts. The team was in Detroit and Nate Robertson was pitching for the Tigers. If you were watching and not a Tigers partisan you would have been rooting for Bucky the same way you root for Dennis Quaid in The Rookie. Come on dude, make your dream come true and become the Mariners' permanent designated hitter! He went 0 for 4 and struck out swinging in his last at-bat.The folktale ended in early September, when one of Bucky's knees gave out and he had to go through a series of surgeries. He tried to get back to the majors after that, but he didn't hit well enough to climb out of AAA ball for the Mariners, and no other team was eager to take a chance on a nearly 30-year-old slugger with a bad knee. By 2007, when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer did a "where are they now?" profile of him, he was tearing down and putting up signs for a living in North Bend, Washington, and still nursing a by-now-pretty-much-hopeless ambition to play in the bigs again.Today Bucky runs a baseball academy and appears on local TV in Seattle as an analyst for Mariners games. His official photo on Twitter shows him during that 2004 season, just finishing a swing, his expression fixed into a scowl, presumably watching the ball come off his bat and rise into the sky. It's the sort of memory you could live on for a long time, even after you're no longer a legend.This has been Routine Moments in Baseball History. Follow Harry Cheadle on Twitter.