Seattle Mariners coincidences

If I wrote a blog that was just about movie-related coincidences, would you still read it?

Well anyway, here's one more.

Yesterday I got my sick day started with two movies that were some of the first I came across on Netflix when browsing through what they described as "comedy movies." I don't feel like either fits that description particularly well, but they definitely both fit the description of "sick day movie."

And both also involved the Seattle Mariners baseball team.

The first was Rob Burnett's The Fundamentals of Caring, a title I'd been familiar with for a while. Paul Rudd was the easy clincher on this one. If Paul Rudd can't get you through a sick day, who can?

The story involves Rudd's character caring for a young adult with muscular dystrophy, played by Craig Roberts, who I recognized but who I couldn't place as the star of the movie Submarine until checking his other credits later on. 

The pair goes on a road trip to see some kitschy bits of Americana the young adult has seen on TV, and they pick up a hitchhiker played by Selena Gomez, on whom he has a crush. She's trying to get to Denver, and though it's not clear they've come from the same location -- their location is not specified -- she's come from Seattle. And her father, played by an uncredited Bobby Cannavale, is secretly following them because he's worried about her. When Rudd finally clocks him and confronts him, finding the latter's intentions to be benign, Cannavale's character is seen wearing a Seattle Mariners cap.

Fast forward to Life or Something Like It, the movie I'd first passed and labeled as a likely sick day movie, before (correctly) identifying a greater promise of quality in The Fundamentals of Caring. Life or Something Like It is not bad, as such, but it's mid enough that I went with only 2.5 stars to the 3.5 stars of Fundamentals.

We're hit straight away with the Mariners connection in this one. Angelina Jolie plays a local news reporter dreaming of a bigger gig in New York, and one of the first things we learn about her is that she's dating one of the Mariners players. (Not Edward Burns, her cameraman who is destined to be her love interest.) We see her reporting on the end of the Mariners season, getting her father season tickets to the Mariners, and even doing a little after hours hitting at what was then called Safeco Field, now T-Mobile Park.

That's a good coincidence, but it's not all of it.

Thursday in America, which was Friday for me, was a very light day on the Major League Baseball schedule, with only five games, but one of those held particular interest for me in terms of my fantasy baseball team. Not only do I have one Mariners hitter on my team, but my opponent had a hitter and the starting pitcher for their opponent, the Washington Nationals.

So I was also watching this game on my phone, which started at the end of the first movie and carried over into the second. 

And yes, it was being played in the aforementioned T-Mobile Park, once the slightly less obviously corporate Safeco Field.

I don't tell you about all my movie coincidences -- even if it sometimes seems like I do -- but this one was too good to pass up. 

They teed it up for me, if you will.