Ultimate Baseball Road Trip (127 page)

Josh:
Indoor fireworks?

Kevin:
My wife liked them.

Josh:
You think the constant booming contributed to the ceiling tiles falling?

Kevin:
Unfortunately, it wasn’t that constant.

Another fan favorite was the annual Buhner Buzz-cut Night, when the team would offer free admission to fans who shaved their heads to resemble Mariner right fielder and living chrome-domed legend, Jay Buhner. Hundreds took part in the promotion every year.

Josh:
Too bad they don’t have that promo now. You could get in without having to do much actual shaving.

Kevin:
Too bad they don’t offer free Red Sox tickets to geeks like you who know the batting averages of the Salem Red Sox.

Josh:
You say that like it’s a bad thing.

A low-water mark for the Mariners came in the early 1990s when Dave Valle, a defensive catcher if ever there was one, was squatting for the M’s. Calling attention to Dave’s futility at the plate, nearby Swannie’s Bar offered well-drinks at the daily price of the weak-hitting backstop’s current batting average, before having to cancel the promotion when Dave’s average dipped below .175. They simply couldn’t afford to keep the promo going.

There’s no way to sugarcoat it; the early Mariners were tough to love. Their slow start and legendarily poor attendance belied a long tradition of support for baseball in the Northwest, however, though Seattle teams always seemed to be either coming or going. The city’s earliest hardball championship came with the Seattle Reds, who won the Pacific Northwest League in 1892 playing in Madison Park. Unfortunately financial woes caused the PNL to fold soon thereafter. Professional baseball returned to the region when D. E. Dugdale started up the Seattle Indians as part of the Northwestern League in 1896. That team played in a ballpark known as YMCA park. The league included teams from regional cities such as Portland, Spokane, and Tacoma. By 1902 the Seattle and Portland teams had merged with teams from California to form the Pacific Coast League. For a brief while a second Seattle team, the Siwashes, were members of the PCL, and played in Recreation Park along with the Braves. But Seattle proved too small a town to support two teams, and the Braves were the team to close up shop. Another Seattle ballclub was the Seattle Giants, who played at Yesler Way Field from 1907 to 1913. But again, no one seemed to be able to stick around for the long term.

After leaving the city, Seattle baseball greats showed a tendency for later displaying their talents on the national stage. In 1903 Harry Lumley batted .387 and was sold to Brooklyn where he led the Majors in home runs and triples as a rookie in 1904. The next year Emil Frisk went to St. Louis to become a Brown. The Siwashes continued to play in the PCL, though losing their best players hurt attendance. They departed the league for the Class-B Northwestern League in 1907. Dugdale became the chief operator for the club, which played its home games at a ballpark named for him. Dugdale Park seated fifteen thousand and was located at the corner of McLennan Street and Rainier Avenue South.

The Siwashes made it back up into the PCL by 1919, though they were now called the Indians once again. They won the PCL title in 1924 but fell on hard times after that and dabbled in mediocrity. Dugdale Park burned down on July 5, 1932; the reason was never discovered. The Fourth of July fireworks had gone off without a hitch and were blameless in the blaze. The team finished its season at Civic Stadium.

By 1937 the team was bought by Emil Sick, owner of the Rainier Brewery. Sick renamed his team the Seattle Rainiers, and they were commonly called the “Suds.” Sick built a new ballpark in 1938 on the very site of old Dugdale Park and called it Sick’s Stadium. The ballpark was very small, seating only twelve thousand fans, but featured a grassy knoll beyond the left-field fence. The hill was dubbed “tightwad hill” because cheaper fans could watch the games while picnicking on the hill without paying a dime. A modern version of tightwad hill can be found at the big league ballpark in San Diego.

Josh:
I don’t understand why thrifty people are always called tightwads.

Kevin:
We know where we’d be sitting.

Rookie pitcher Fred Hutchinson won twenty-five games in 1938 for the Suds, before he was traded to the Detroit Tigers for cash and players. The Rainiers went on to win the PCL in 1940, 1941, and 1942, led by George Archie and Jo Jo White, players from that trade. When the PCL changed from being an independent professional entity to being essentially a league of AAA affiliates for the Majors, Seattle Rainier attendance steadily declined.

Big league ball returned to Seattle for one season only, when the expansion Seattle Pilots of the American League played their 1969 home games at Sick’s Stadium. The Pilots were never really given the chance to succeed. Sick’s Stadium had been built in 1938 and was too tiny and cramped of a ballpark for a Major League team to call home. Poor management and city officials who were inflexible caused the relationship to sour quickly.

Since 1969, Allan H. “Bud” Selig has been known to Seattle sports fans as the Milwaukee auto dealer who sneaked the Seattle Pilots out of town in the middle of the night. After trying to move the White Sox from Chicago to Milwaukee, he found a team that was less well entrenched in its city, and in essence, took it out of the area before it could gain much of a footing.

Josh:
Not too many “Bud” fans in these parts.

Kevin:
Maybe that’s why the microbrews do so well.

If you can’t tell, we’re not fans of moving ball teams without very good reasons. And though the Pilots only drew 678,000 fans in their only season in Seattle, they did outdraw the AL teams in Chicago and Cleveland that year. The Pilots remain the only professional franchise to be given only one year in their city. Their record was 64–98. The Brewers, in their first season in Milwaukee, by the way, only managed a record of 65–97, but their ballpark, County Stadium, helped increase attendance by a third.

There are, however, some interesting coincidences concerning the Seattle team’s and the Seattle Mariners. For example, the starting pitcher in the Mariners’ inaugural game in 1977 was Diego Segui, who also pitched for the Pilots. Another Pilot, Lou Piniella, was the team’s fourteenth pick in the expansion draft. Piniella was not that highly regarded by the Pilots and was traded to the Kansas City Royals, for whom he went on to become Rookie of the Year. Later Piniella became the most successful manager in Mariners history, leading the M’s to most of their winning seasons. Fans interested in learning more about the ill-fated Pilots should pick up a copy of pitcher Jim Bouton’s classic book,
Ball Four,
which dishes more dirt than Pig Pen from the
Peanuts
comic strip. At the time, some baseball insiders said Bouton did a disservice to baseball in writing this book. But in retrospect, even though it did reveal the darker underbelly of the supposedly “All American” boys of summer, the book is considered a classic.

Though the Kingdome was an inhospitable kingdom for Seattle baseball, there were many moments and memories that could only have occurred in that dimly lit concrete tomb. Why they never painted the outside at least with a bright coat of Mariner blue, we’ll never know. But it’s part of the history of the team and the city. To quote Hall of Famer and the voice of the Mariners, Dave Niehaus, “That first opening night, I thought the Kingdome was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen. I thought the team would probably be a .500 team within three years.”

Kevin:
I remember asking my dad if they could win the World Series their first year.

Josh:
Hope truly springs eternal, doesn’t it?

The 1979 All-Star Game was held at the Kingdome. The only Mariner on the roster was Bruce Bochte, and that was probably because they had to have at least one. Gaylord Perry slung his three hundredth career win at the Kingdome, as the Mariners beat the Yankees 7-3, on May 6, 1982. “Mr. Mariner” Alvin Davis won the Rookie of the Year Award in 1984. The second-place finisher was Mariners pitcher Mark Langston. And Harold Reynolds played outstanding second base for the M’s from 1983 to 1992 before going on to be an even bigger star on ESPN and the MLB Network. But none of these exceptional players or moments led the Mariners to sustained success in the win-loss column.

That would come after a nineteen-year-old phenom named Ken Griffey Jr. took the town by storm. “The Kid” clobbered the first pitch he saw at the Kingdome, knocking it over the fence as he would go on to do more than any other player in team history. Griffey finished hitting dingers at the Kingdome when he belted the 377th of his career on its closing day, June 27, 1999. Junior also played Gold Glove–caliber defense in center field, alongside his father Ken Griffey Sr., who came out West to play left field for the first time on August 31, 1990. The Griffeys became the first father-son duo to play on the same team. To further this great accomplishment, the Junior/Senior combination connected for back-to-back home runs at the Kingdome on September 14, 1990, against the Angels.

Kevin:
Obviously he was juicing!

Josh:
There’s no proof of that.

Kevin:
You’d say anything to protect a Boston player.

Josh:
As you would with Edgar.

Kevin:
Fair enough.

Edgar Martinez won his two batting titles in the Dome, hitting .343 in 1992 and .356 in 1995. Martinez was the first AL right-hander since Joe DiMaggio to win more than one batting title. Later, Boston’s Nomar Garciaparra would join the exclusive club with his back-to-back titles in 1999 and 2000.

The Mariners gave birth to the phrase “Refuse to Lose” in 1995, as they came back in dramatic fashion to catch the faltering Angels—coming from eleven games behind in August to end in a tie for the AL West title, which resulted in a one-game playoff on October 2, 1995. The playoff game at the Kingdome was winner-take-all, as a loss by either team would put it one-half game behind the New York Yankees in the wild-card race. It was baseball’s first one-game playoff in fifteen seasons. Cy Young Award winner Randy Johnson came into the game as a relief pitcher for the Mariners and defeated the Angels’ Mark Langston, the man the Mariners had traded to Montreal to obtain Johnson. With the Mariners leading 1-0 in the seventh and the bases loaded, bad ball slapper Luis Sojo hooked a ball inside first base that rolled along the right-field wall. A cruel bounce for the Angels and a throwing error by Langston allowed four runs to score on the play. There was no turning back for the Mariners. With destiny on their side, they prevailed 9-1.

The 1995 M’s went on to sweep the Yankees at home in the Dome, after losing the first two games in the Bronx. Griffey tied the postseason home run record with five—all in the first round. In the final game, with the M’s down 5-4 in the bottom of the eleventh inning, Edgar Martinez hit “the Double” down the first baseline to score two runs. The come-from-behind win was for many folks in Seattle the greatest moment in Mariners history. And though they lost a hard-fought series against the Cleveland Indians for the American League Championship, fans stayed after the final game ended and gave the Mariners a standing ovation—for nearly half an hour—for the great ride that was the 1995 season.

We don’t know if it was fate or fortune, but Seattle voters were asked to decide on a ballot measure for building a new ballpark during the very same week that the Mariners were entering postseason play for the first time. There is little doubt
that if the 1995 playoff run hadn’t occurred, baseball in Seattle would have sailed on for greener pastures. That fortuitous season had been only Seattle’s third with a winning record.

Since 1995 the Mariners have had their share of successes and failures. Randy Johnson struck out nineteen hitters in a game not once, but twice in one season—1997. But with free agency looming, he left in a trade to Houston midway through the 1998 season. The next Seattle superstar to debut was Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod became the first shortstop to hit forty home runs and steal forty bases in 1998 and went on to become the highest-paid player in sports history, signing mega-deals with the Texas Rangers and then the Yankees.

After the Mariners’ move to their new ballpark was set firmly in motion by the exciting play of these superstars and others, the team couldn’t stop the hemorrhage of future Hall of Famers. In four consecutive years the M’s lost Johnson, Griffey, Rodriguez, and manager Piniella. While the losses should have been devastating, the M’s rebuilt their team with players whose egos didn’t get in the way. The entire team was worthy of mention, no one player more than another, as it broke records in 2001. Along with their Major League record-tying 116 victories came a record twenty-nine road series won and Ichiro Suzuki’s most hits by a rookie at 242. Other AL records broken during that year included the team’s most road wins (59) and Ichiro’s most singles (192).

And Ichiro, himself, having become the face of the franchise since the departure of all the other stars, went on to take up the mantle of quiet superstar in the understated manner akin to his newly adopted home. In his first ten seasons as a Mariner, Ichiro had more than two hundred hits every year, batted over .300 every year, and won ten straight Gold Glove Awards. He also made ten straight All-Star teams. In 2004 Ichiro broke George Sisler’s eighty-four-year-old record of most hits in a single season with 262. The record-breaking game was broadcast live on television across Japan, where Ichiro spent the first seven seasons of his career. The quiet bad-ball hitter is certainly one of the most underrated superstars in the history of the game.

To say that it was disappointing that the Mariners never made it to a World Series during their brief flirtation with success between 1995 and 2002 would be an understatement. They remain the only team in the American League and one of only two teams in all of baseball to have never made it to a World Series. The Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals are the other. Between the 1997 and 2004 seasons, ballpark attendance routinely topped three million in Seattle, peaking at 3,542,938 in 2002. By 2011 it had dwindled to just less than two million.