Dave Niehaus' death touches close to home for everything

Pardon me, other than I have to mark these verbal communication while wipe away my wife's tears. She just came home. She just found out that the voice of her youth, Mariners Hall of Fame newscaster Dave Niehaus, died of a heart attack. She just hugged me and saturated the part of my shirt that covers my heart.


"Dave Niehaus is like Disneyland," she just said. "It's secure, and it's content because it's always the same. Very few belongings are steady in life."

Niehaus was a steady. He has been the Mariners' voice for their total, from Diego Segui's first pitch in the franchise's inaugural game in 1977 to Ichiro's fly out to end the unhappy 2010 season. He has be there — for you — longer than "we've lived so far," my wife just said.

Before I moved here four years ago, I explained to a friend the reason I was excited about this new job. When I listed the Mariners, he joke that it should be hard to garner any enthusiasm about following a club whose most beloved employee is an announcer.

"Dave Niehaus is good," he said. "But he can't be the gemstone of your team. That tells you the Mariners have very little history."

We argued about it for a while. Since I've been here, I've heard variations of that joke many more times. When Niehaus became the first Mariner privileged by the Hall of Fame two years ago, the snide remarks resurfaced. He's the best thing the Mariners have? Hahaha! What a awful franchise.

But those fools never fully understood that they were diminishing an icon for cheap humor.

If the Mariners were a storied ballclub with multiple championship, Dave Niehaus would still be the jewel of the permit. In fact, if you put more team success with his voice and his storytelling and his excited style, Niehaus' legend would've full-grown larger than it already is.

in its place, he achieve something greater. He made the Mariners real the hard way. He made you care about them, even though it took the Mariners 15 seasons to post a charming record, even though they've been to the playoffs four times in 34 seasons. He was that special, that personable, that pleasant.

"He is Mariners baseball," a grieving Ken Griffey Jr. affirmed during a 710 ESPN Seattle radio meeting Wednesday night. "Everybody talks about all the players. We can't hold a candle to that man."