Corey Hart Leaves Milwaukee for Seattle . . .

It’s official, Milwaukee Brewers fans — Corey Hart has signed a one-year, incentive-laden deal with the Seattle Mariners.

While I’m extremely disappointed, I understand why this happened.  Earlier this baseball offseason, the Mariners signed former New York Yankee second baseman Robinson Cano to a huge deal worth $240 million.  As the Mariners for the past several years have been pitching-rich but offense-poor (Felix Hernandez won a well-deserved Cy Young in 2010 with a 13-12 record and a 2.27 ERA with 232 strikeouts, and the Mariners’ offense hasn’t improved since then), they needed to upgrade their offense desperately if they had a hope of maximizing Cano’s abilities as a hitter.

So . . . enter Corey Hart.  As Doug Melvin told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s Tom Haudricourt, Corey Hart can be a DH for Seattle, as they’re an American League club.  This means it’ll be easier for Hart to meet whatever benchmarks his incentive-laden contract includes (as the specifics of Hart’s contract are not yet known, partly because Hart must still pass a physical before the contract is approved) than it would be if he were still playing for the Brewers in the National League, as the NL does not have a DH.

In addition, the Mariners traded for OF Logan Morrison, sending P Carter Capps to Miami in exchange.  So it’s obvious that Seattle has majorly upgraded its offense — first they got Cano, next they got Hart, and now they’ve acquired Morrison.

One would think that the Mariners’ offensive woes will now be a thing of the past, providing Hart and Morrison (who both have extensive injury histories) can stay on the field.

Anyway, Brewers fans, while you nurse your disappointment, you may want to check out this post from Book View Cafe author Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff — Ms. Bohnhoff is a baseball fan, just like me, and also like me, she’s written several baseball-themed SF stories.  (Though unlike me, she’s actually gotten her stories into print.  Well, the century is young and I have faith . . .)

Here’s a quick taste (keeping in mind that Ms. Bohnhoff is talking about author W.P. Kinsella and his novel SHOELESS JOE in addition to her love of the game):

One day, after years of believing that baseball was a boring game played by overweight men in their jammies, the corn fields and the thrill of the grass and the brilliant sounds of the diamond gave me that sensation, just as Ray Kinsella describes it to Salinger.

As my husband tells it, we were driving home from a nursery, having purchased a trunk load of plants for our garden. I was pregnant with our second child. Jeff turned on the car radio to a Giants game and braced himself for a wisecrack from me. Instead, I said (and this is the Gospel truth), “You know, I just realized that I love baseball!”

And I did. And do. Because the word is baseball.

Yes.  Yes it is.

And it’s good to be reminded of that, even when your favorite player has just signed with a team that’s so far away, geographically, that you have next to no chance to see him play unless his new team does so well that they end up getting picked up several times for ESPN’s or MLB Network’s game of the week.