It’s a cold, miserable gray day, which is fitting given the reason we are all congregating together.

I’m not sure what to expect when I park my car in the Mariners lot south of the stadium, walk down the stairs, and cross the street to the southwest corner of the stadium.  

We’ve all been to this place a hundred times, but never with our heads full of these emotions or these thoughts.  We’ve never entered this place without knowing what to expect, or not knowing how to act.

It doesn’t take very long to realize this is going to be a tough environment to maintain composure.  Right at the front gate, a small memorial has been created.  Notes and flowers from fans, a few rye bread, salami and mustard sandwiches, and some handwritten notes from fans to Dave Niehaus, the man they are here to pay respects to.  There’s a large posterboard from Seattle’s biggest fan, Big Lo, “I put away the Mustard, I put away the rye, I put away my Mariners shirt, and now the My oh My.  Thank you Dave.  You will be missed.”

It’s hard to stare too long at any one item, or even the shrine, for fear of losing it.  And so I go inside the stadium, foolishly thinking it could possibly be less emotional inside the actual temple of the game itself.

Inside it’s dark, and just as cold.  The roof is closed.  There’s really only one thing to see – the line.  A single file line starts at home plate, extends on the edge of the field parallel to the first base line, makes a right turn at 1st base and heads up to the concourse, where it makes another right turn and goes back toward home plate, then down the 3rd base concourse, and all the way down to left field.  

The crowd is made up of fans of all ages.  60 year olds who saw the first game in the Kingdome, 7 year olds who don’t know why their parents have brought them.  Men, women, couples, they are all represented.

The place is pretty quiet – it’s hard to talk when you are biting on your lip.  You hear a few memories being shared.  But mostly we all just wait in line.  It gives us a lot of time to reflect.  There’s no rationale for the 2 hours we’ll meander in line, just to get a few seconds in front of a makeshift memorial at home plate.  

But this death is bigger than a memorial for a single man, a single icon.  It’s an inflection point in the lives of all baseball fans in the Pacific Northwest.  Baseball is unique, because when we walk in a stadium to watch a lousy 2010 Mariners team, we’re not really there for Michael Saunders.  We’re there to remember and share stories about the time we saw Ken Griffey’s first Mariners at bat, or when we jumped fences to get out of the $3.00 General Admission section, or when we ignored our dates the last 3 innings of Randy Johnson’s no-hitter.

When we weren’t at the game, listening to Dave reminded us that we needed to get back to the stadium soon, that we were missing out by doing whatever else we were doing.  

But more importantly, listening to Dave put us back in a place when it was ok to bring our glove to the game.  Because we listened to Dave when a 7pm game meant having your mom pick up your 3 friends at 4pm so we could be there for batting practice at 5pm.  

And so now we’ll have two eras – Dave and Post-Dave.  The Post-Dave era begins now, a definitive moment on a timeline that we hoped would be infinite.  We all had to grow up a little while we stood in that line.  For folks my age, our baseball grandfather had passed away.  The connection between us and the grand old stories of baseball past.  

We don’t get to pretend we’re young anymore.  The grand old stories of the past now include 1995, Gaylord Perry and Diego Segui, and we’ve suddenly become the caretakers of them.  We’re not learners anymore, we’re teachers, and I’m not sure I was ready for that switch.

But back to Safeco for a moment, where nearly 2 hours after beginning my trip in line, I get to the makeshift shrine.  It has some fantastic pieces of history, including the scorebook from the first game, and Dave’s Hall of Fame plaque.  And I don’t know what to do.  Do I take a picture? Do I smile?  What’s the respectful thing to do? what I want to do is just stand and absorb everything I’m feeling, and channel it into some sort of productive emotion.  But there are another 1000 people behind me in line, so I have but seconds, not the hours I would need.

Dave’s family stands next to the shrine, along with his long-time broadcast partner Rick Rizzs.  I can’t even imagine what it must be like to stand there for 4 hours and shake hands with 3,500 people you’ve never met, all of whom want to share the pain of your loss, even though they’ve never met the man themselves.  It must be the most complex, insane, yet gratifying feeling to see how many people cared about a person you were so close to.

The whole of the two hours was too much for me, and while I don’t break down inside the stadium, the sheer force of trying to control those emotions probably wrecks my psyche for a week.  But it is clear I am not alone in my struggles.  Everywhere I look, grown men are looking away at walls or the ceiling, in an obvious attempt to hide their wet eyes from their wives, sons and grandkids.  Women are more willing to let the tears flow.

And then it is time to leave.  I want to stay longer, because the next time I enter the stadium it will feel different.  It won’t be the same safe house from my memories, and all connection to the Kingdome will be lessened.  The next time I come in, it will be someone else’s house, with a different spirit, a different feel.  

Eventually, reluctantly, slowly, I walk out of the stadium.  I pass the shrine again.  And I cross the street without looking back.   

If you are like me, you may have passed by a number of homeless people this week and wondered what our local government was doing to get people back to work.  Or, you may have been stuck in traffic wondering what our city council is doing to fix the snarls.  Well, here’s what they were up to last week.  

(An excerpt from Nick Licata’s email newsletter)

THE EXHIBITION OF HUMAN REMAINS

Yesterday, Councilmembers Clark, Harrell, Rasmussen and I discussed my bill during a meeting of the Housing, Health, Human Services and Culture Committee, which I chair. The legislation is modeled on San Francisco’s law. Among those at the table to discuss the bill was Ron Chew, former director of the Wing Luke Asian Art Museum and a scholar-in-residence at the University of Washington. Mr. Chew was joined by Bettie Luke, Administrative Director of the Organization of Chinese Americans of Greater Seattle.  At the conclusion of our discussion, the legislation was approved unanimously. It now goes before the full Council on Monday, July 19th, for a final vote.

I assume they will get to traffic and jobs next week.

I was going to resist sharing any public thoughts on the end of Rob Glaser’s 16 year reign at the head of RealNetworks.  But as I read through some of the comment boards, trolls and scrubs who have never started anything in their life have taken some cheap shots, so I’m going to give my take.

In 1994, we had 14.4 modems and something called Mozilla to surf the web.  Microsoft was finally rethinking their now infamous decision that the Internet wasn’t a place where they should concentrate. And Glaser looked into his crystal ball and said, “You know what, I bet some day we’re going to use our computers to watch programming more than we use our TV’s.” You have to remember, that back in 1994 that idea was akin to someone today saying, “I’m going to be able to take this IP signal from my watch and make it a holographic projector that plays HD signals against blank walls at 1080i.” 

Now, not every decision was right.  And plenty of smart people were under-utilized.  I was just a young Marketing Manager, and never in the inner circle of decision making, so I have little insight, and sometimes fell victim, to some head scratching decisions.

But at the end of the day, Rob built an industry from scratch, weathered recessions of 2001 and 2009, had to battle the full force of Microsoft’s vengeance when they realized it was a space they needed to be in, distributed more than a billion RealPlayers without much of a marketing budget, took his company public, changed his business model on the fly from software to subscription, and had to balance the public’s desire for free media vs the music industry’s desire to extort money from all of us.  That’s a pretty complex game of Lemonade Stand he had going.  Go through and name all the companies that you’ve seen in your lifetime that started before (or around) Real and have been more successful while staying independent.  Microsoft, Apple, Google, ebay, Amazon, Yahoo.  You can’t say AOL – they sold out.  Skype – sell out.  YouTube – sell out.  Netscape – gone.  Napster – gone.  Maybe Adobe and Oracle? Sidewalk – gone.  Expedia came out of Microsoft and sold out to IAB, so they don’t count.  I’m sure there are a few more, but the list is pretty small.

It would have been easy for Rob to sell to Microsoft in the late 90’s for a few billion.  We all probably would have made a few more short-term bucks.  And Microsoft would have had to spend way less money than they did over the next decade systematically trying to destroy Real.  But he didn’t sell, so we all took our sticks and bows to fight against the machine guns – and we did pretty well.

I have a lot of anecdotes about Rob that don’t need to be shared here, but I’ll sum it all up with this.  If you have the pleasure to run into him at an event, introduce yourself and say hi.  He’ll grill you on your business and ask 100 questions abut what you’re working on.  The conversation will move so fast that it will be hard to keep up.  But you’ll understand how smart the guy really is, and you’ll see that he simply wanted to win.  

My guess is that around the halls of RealNetworks this week, people are looking forward to change.  They see a happier, more corporate, less politically incorrect place where they won’t get yelled at for mistakes.  But the problem is that most of those people weren’t there in the 90’s.  To them, there’s always been audio and video on the Internet, and they simply don’t get why Real was such a big deal.  They don’t understand that they worked for the Web’s very own Marconi, they just want to complain about his flaws.  But around the city, you see Real Alumni collectively tipping our caps.  And I know a lot of people say this, but I still have more friends than I can count from my days at Real.  The people were there (with some notable exceptions) were fantastic.  Smart, gifted, ridiculously focused and cool.  There was something about that company, especially back in the 1990’s, that drew great people who were glutton for punishment.  I remember telling my dad when I first started there, “It’s pretty scary.  Every meeting I feel like I’m the dumbest guy in the room.” 

No one is perfect, and like everyone Rob has his flaws, but it was a real professional privilege to work down the food chain from someone who built an entire industry.