The headline read “Cano hopes to excite Seattle for baseball.”

The most celebrated member of the Mariners of an earlier generation excited Seattle for baseball, saved baseball for the city, in fact, led to the construction of a new park. As good and as exciting as Ken Griffey Jr. was, though, he didn’t spur the Mariners to post-season success.

While the city’s professional football team plays tonight in its second Super Bowl in its 38 years in the National Football League, the Mariners have never played in the World Series in their 37-year existence.

“That’s my one regret as I retire, that we haven’t gone to the World Series,” Chuck Armstrong, the team’s president for 28 years, said the day before he retired last week.

The Mariners reached the American League Championship Series in 2001 and 2002 but …

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Pete Rose, Paul Molitor, Ryan Braun.

Do these two former players and one current player have anything in common? Do I have any reason to link them here?

I link them because they have all recently said or had things written about them that deal with baseball’s most sinister scourges of the past 35 years – P.E.D.’s, gambling, cocaine:

* Braun used performance-enhancing substances and incurred a pair of suspensions, one for 50 games, which an arbitrator overturned, and one for 65 games, which he accepted in silence and shame.
* Rose bet on baseball games and accepted a lifetime ban from the game.
* Molitor used cocaine early in his career and was elected to the Hall of Fame in spite of it, unlike steroids’ users of the past two decades.

It was …

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This could be confusing so pay attention. This year’s Super Bowl between Seattle and Denver will feature a quarterback who played two years of minor league baseball against a team that is run by a fellow who quarterbacked it to two Super Bowl championships after playing one year of minor league baseball.

Russell Wilson, the Seahawks’ quarterback, and John Elway, the Broncos’ executive vice president of football operations, are not the only athletes – far from it – who have played baseball and football, not even the only ones who have played both professionally. But they stand out at the moment because of the coincidence of their presence at the game in East Rutherford, N.J.

Elway has had his time, playing in five Super Bowls, being named most valuable player in the last one, which was also the last game of his career, and gaining election to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

There’s no do-over so we’ll never know how an Elway baseball career would have turned out, but …

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