by Lou Piniella
“When he sent me down that last time, Lou said, ‘You need to be strict with the fundamentals—making routine plays, bunting guys, being a better base runner—to play up here.’ He told me I had to be more consistent with my hitting, making better contact, and I vowed to myself, ‘Lou will never have a reason to send me down again.’”
When we brought Alex back the last time in ’95 and kept him on the roster for the postseason, I said to him, “Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. You’re gonna have a wonderful major-league career. Just don’t try to make it all happen now.” That was my message. As I said, we knew Alex was going to be our regular shortstop in 1996, but it’s so much easier if you first let him get his feet wet. In those stints when he was up, in ’94 and ’95, he learned a lot from Luis Sojo and Edgar. We just wanted to make sure that, in 1996, he was really ready. The only thing he didn’t have was the knowledge of the strike zone. I said to him, “You’re getting yourself out when you’re not swinging at strikes. Go talk to Edgar.” His bat speed, his athleticism, his defense, were all off the charts. He was smart, he knew the history of the game, and he had a passion for the game. You could see he wanted to be great.
Early on in spring training ’96, I told Alex to just relax, that he was our shortstop, and starting off I batted him second, in front of Junior, so he’d get his share of good pitches to hit. Did we expect him to win the batting title that first year? No. But at the same time we knew it wouldn’t take long for him to have serious impact. Edgar and Uncle Lee Elia took him under their wings and he just took off, an instant superstar, winning the 1996 batting title with a .358 average, along with a league-leading 141 runs and 54 doubles, plus 36 homers and 123 RBI. What a first season! At the same time, Junior established personal highs in homers (49) and RBI (140) despite missing 20 games with a broken hamate bone in his right wrist after fouling off a pitch on June 19.
Although it had been preordained for two years, Alex’s ascension as our everyday shortstop in 1996 became even more imperative after Woody was forced to make yet another payroll-driven trade that previous December. Tino Martinez, a number one Mariners draft pick in 1988, was coming into his free-agent walk year, and after a career season in 1995 (31 homers, 111 RBI), Woody was certain the ownership would not be willing to shell out for the kind of multiyear, big-bucks contract it would take to retain him. Right after the ’95 World Series, I told Tino’s uncle, Tony Gonzalez, who’s one of my best friends in Tampa, that we were going to have to trade him. When Tony told Tino this, Tino asked him to talk to me about trying to trade him to the Yankees, who were his favorite team growing up and had just moved their spring training from Fort Lauderdale to Tampa. I knew the Yankees were looking for a first baseman to replace Mattingly, so Woody called Gene Michael to tell him we were looking to trade Tino but were going to need to get back some good, young, inexpensive players who were ready for the big leagues. A few days after that conversation, I was sitting at home in Tampa when I got a call from Mr. Steinbrenner.
“Are you trying to fleece us again?” he said.
“No way,” I said, explaining that we needed to trade Tino and I was looking to put him in the best place for him, if I could.
“Well, it’s going to be hard replacing Mattingly,” he said. “Can this kid do it?”
“Just look at his numbers from last year,” I said. “He’s just now coming into his own.”
“Okay,” Mr. Steinbrenner said. “Why don’t you come over to Malio’s and we’ll talk about this over lunch.”
Between Mr. Steinbrenner, Stick, myself, and Woody, we were able to agree on a deal to send Tino and Jeff Nelson, one of my best relievers, to the Yankees in exchange for Sterling Hitchcock, a promising twenty-four-year-old left-hander who’d won 11 games for the Yankees in ’95, and Russ Davis, a power-hitting third base prospect.
We were able to replace Tino at first by signing free agent Paul Sorrento, who had a nice year (.289, 23 HR, 93 RBI) for us in ’96. Hitchcock, meanwhile, wound up leading my staff in victories with 13. But while I never like to use injuries as an excuse, it’s fair to say our inability to follow up the breakthrough ’95 season with a return trip to the postseason can be directly traced to the loss of our two top starting pitchers, Randy Johnson and Chris Bosio. Randy, the defending American League Cy Young Award winner, was bothered by a bulging disk in his back, missing all of June and July, and he didn’t start a game for us after August 24. Bosio was plagued by a recurring knee issue and was out June, July, and September. In all, I used fifteen different starting pitchers in ’96. (In addition, Davis broke his leg on June 7 and never returned.)
The one saving grace in all that starting pitching scrambling was Woody’s July 30 trade-deadline deal with the Red Sox for Jamie Moyer. To get Jamie, Woody had to give up my “bobo,” Darren Bragg, the gritty, blue-collar outfielder I loved having around me. Although initially criticized by the Seattle media, the deal turned out to be a huge win for Woody.
Jamie was a soft-throwing lefty with a tremendous knowledge of pitching who was probably ill-suited for Fenway Park and, before that, when he was with the Orioles in their own small ballpark, Camden Yards. He was thirty-three at the time of the trade, and most scouts probably thought he was about done. But from 1996 to 2006, Jamie won 145 games for the Mariners, including 20-win seasons in 2001 and 2003, and in 2012, at age forty-nine with the Phillies, he became the oldest pitcher in baseball history to win a game in the big leagues. Unlike most pitchers today, who want to throw harder and harder, Jamie wanted to throw softer, much like Tommy John. He would baffle hitters with 84 m.p.h. stuff, a big, sweeping curveball, and his “out” pitch changeup. It was the most amazing thing I ever saw. Jamie also became an instant leader in our clubhouse, as the pitchers, especially, all gravitated to him to pick his brain.
Despite the injuries, we finished the ’96 season 85–76, missing the wild card by two games. From September 12 to 21, we ran off 10 straight wins to close within 1½ games of front-running Texas in the AL West, only to lose six of our last eight. It was disappointing, but the season attendance, 2,723,850, was by far the highest in Mariners’ history, and I looked forward to getting back on track in ’97 with all my big guns and a healthy Unit.
Over the winter, Woody made one significant trade, sending Chris Widger, our very capable backup catcher, to Montreal for Jeff Fassero, a thirty-four-year-old left-hander who’d won 15 games for the Expos in ’96. Bosio’s bum knee had forced him to retire, and Fassero stepped right in, winning 16 games for us in ’97 with a team-leading 234⅓ innings. But after a winter of rest for his back, it was the revitalized Unit who played a leading role in our second AL West title in three years, going 20–4 with a 2.28 ERA, including two 19-strikeout games. Between May 1994 and October 1997, Randy was 53–9, including a 16-game winning streak.
After the truly rewarding ’97 regular season—in which Junior won the AL MVP, leading the majors with 56 homers and 147 RBI and we won the AL West by six games over the Angels while setting a major-league record (that still stands) with 264 homers—I felt good about our chances of taking it all the way to a first World Series for Seattle. Junior was in a tremendous zone that entire season. He was just so focused. He didn’t take any bad swings. He didn’t chase any bad pitches. His timing was impeccable, and we all thought he might very well beat Roger Maris’s American League home run record of 61. The amazing thing is, if you look at his swings, from his first at-bat in the big leagues to his last, they’re all the same. But his 1997 season was by far the best season I ever had from any of my players. He never felt any pressure and his performance never varied the whole year.
Our only weakness had been a particularly porous bullpen—which came to a head for me on July 30, when we were up 7–2 in the eighth inning against the Red Sox and wound up losing 8–7. With that loss, our bullpen achieved the highest ERA in the majors (6.20) and had given up the second-most homers (16). Right after that, Woody moved boldly—too boldly, I suppose, in retr
ospect—to shore up the problem, first trading our promising young left fielder and 1995 number one draft pick, Jose Cruz Jr., to the Blue Jays for righty setup reliever Mike Timlin. A few minutes later he sent two top prospects, catcher Jason Varitek, our 1994 number one draft pick, and right-hander Derek Lowe, to the Red Sox for Heathcliff Slocumb, a right-handed closer who’d saved 63 games over the previous two seasons. While Timlin and Slocumb did help stop the bullpen bleeding in ’97, Varitek and Lowe in particular went on to have long and productive careers, both playing major roles in the Red Sox’s “curse-breaking” 2004 world championship team. Still, if Woody hadn’t made those deals I don’t know if we could have survived August and September.
“We desperately needed relief,” said Woody. “The Slocumb deal was one you wish you could have back, especially because Varitek and Lowe were my draft choices. But that’s the nature of the beast. There isn’t a GM in baseball who hasn’t made a bad deal. I’m sure Dave Dombrowski, one of the best GMs in the game, would like to have back the deal we made with him in which we got Randy Johnson in the first place—for Mark Langston. At the time, Langston was one of the best lefties in the game and one of the faces of the Mariners, and Dave looked at him as being the key to getting the Expos to the postseason.”
As it turned out, my optimism about an extended 1997 postseason was quickly dampened when Davey Johnson’s Orioles knocked out Randy after only five innings in game 1 at the Kingdome—and did likewise to Jamie, after just 4⅓ innings, in game 2. Thanks to a superb effort by Fassero (8 innings, 3 hits, 1 run), we were able to win game 3, but the Orioles clinched the series by beating Randy, 3–1, the next day. Looking back, I maybe underestimated the Orioles. I know I underestimated Davey when I saw his game 4 lineup, which had a .237 hitter, Jeff Reboulet, at second base and hitting second, instead of Roberto Alomar, a future Hall of Famer who’d hit .333 during the season. Reboulet proved there was, in fact, a method to Davey’s madness by shocking us with a homer off Randy in the first inning, and the Orioles, who scored a second run in the inning on a double by Geronimo Berroa and a single by Cal Ripken, never trailed in the game.
It wasn’t long after that the seeds were sown for Randy’s departure from Seattle. With free agency looming for him after the 1998 season, he engaged our ownership about a contract extension only to be rebuffed. Even with the new ballpark coming in 1999, nothing apparently had changed insofar as the Mariners’ being able or willing to retain their top stars when they neared or became free agents. The reasoning given in this case was that Junior would be coming up on free agency in 2000 and the priority was to have a war chest full of money to sign him.
From the get-go in ’98, it was clear to everyone that Randy was in a funk and allowing his contract situation to affect his pitching. On Opening Day against the Indians at the Kingdome, we staked him to a 9–3 lead after five innings and I had to remove him in the sixth when the Indians scored three runs on a pair of doubles and a pair of singles. We wound up losing 10–9.
On July 5, after giving up eight runs in eight innings, including a pair of homers to Juan Gonzalez, against the Rangers, Randy’s record stood at 7–8, with a very un-Unit-like 5.07 ERA. His sulking and all the trade rumors swirling around him were bringing down the whole team, and I finally had to have a talk with him. He didn’t want to leave Seattle, but he also wanted to be paid.
“Look,” I said to him, “the better you pitch, the better the chances to stay here.”
He didn’t believe that. I should say here that Randy was never a problem in the clubhouse as much as he was to himself. The whole time he was with me in Seattle, we had very few conversations. Randy kept to himself—he’d be sitting there in his locker with his headphones on, or sifting through his photography. He used to say to me, “Damn, you don’t ever talk to me,” and I’d say, “That’s because I don’t want to talk to the back of your head!” But when I called him to congratulate him in 2014 on being elected to the Hall of Fame, we talked longer than the whole time he was with me in Seattle. I couldn’t get him off the phone!
Randy was basically an introvert. I’d see him often on the road, walking around the city by himself, with just his camera. I think he was also maybe a little self-conscious about his height. When you’re 6′10″, there’s a lot of moving parts there, and he worked exceedingly hard on his repetition and in becoming more compact. He always wanted to be great and would not accept mediocrity. He had this reputation for being sullen, but his teammates all liked him. And unlike guys like Nolan Ryan, Bob Gibson, and Don Drysdale, who were absolutely mean out there, more than willing to grind a fastball into a batter’s ribs, Randy was conscious of his overpowering stuff and was always concerned about hurting someone. His mere size was intimidating enough to batters. But as evidenced in the 1993 All-Star Game, when he threw his first pitch to John Kruk over Kruk’s head, he had a sense of humor about it as well.
As we approached the trading deadline in 1998, 10 games under .500, two things had become apparent: we weren’t going anywhere, and we needed to bite the bullet and trade Randy. Considering the fact that Randy was, in fact, a two-month “rental” player pending his free agency, I again give credit to Woody for getting a tremendous return from the Astros for him—a power-hitting infield prospect in Carlos Guillen and two young starting pitchers, Freddy Garcia and the lefty John Halama. Garcia stepped right in at the top of our rotation with 17 wins in ’99 and won 59 games for me from 2001 to 2004. Halama won 35 games from 1999 to 2001 as my number four starter, and in 2001 Guillen did a nice job for us upon replacing Alex as our shortstop. As for Randy, he left the Astros at the end of the season after they failed to make the playoffs and signed a four-year, $52 million contract with the Arizona Diamondbacks.
We had expected at least 18 wins from Randy in ’98 and wound up getting nine. Leading up to his trade, we were 8–20 in June. Once the deal was done, it was up to me to restore morale. But this was a team of professional veterans—Junior, Edgar, Jamie, Buhner, Danny Wilson—and our 39–34 record after the All-Star Break—without Randy—was the best in the AL West, just not good enough to make up for the underperformance of the first half.
The encouraging second-half comeback in 1998 could not mask the fact that we went into the 1999 season with a very uncertain starting rotation, as well as with the general perception that we were gradually tearing down the team to get ready for the new ballpark. And then, with the season having barely gotten started, I lost Alex for a month and a half with knee surgery, as well as his replacement, Guillen, for the entire season after he, too, was felled by a knee injury. In addition, the regression by Fassero (4–14), whom we traded to Texas in August after he’d won 16 and 13 games his first two seasons with us, put a major crimp in my already thin starting rotation.
The fact that, in midseason, we had to make the transition to a totally new ballpark and a totally different brand of baseball, with natural grass and wider expanses in the outfield, made it particularly tough on Woody in his efforts to make trades. Despite a second-straight losing season, we drew over three million fans for the first time in Mariners history, including 56,530 for the last game in the Kingdome, June 27 (in which Junior, fittingly, hit a game-winning three-run homer), and 44,607 for the opening of Safeco Field, July 15.
Behind the scenes in 1999, I could see that the frustration of two straight losing seasons, the inability to keep our best players, and the increased involvement of Howard Lincoln in the baseball operations had tempered Woody’s excitement over the new stadium. There were strained relations between him and Lincoln, who felt Woody was too obliging with me on player personnel moves. On September 18, one of the saddest days in my managing term with the Mariners, Woody announced his retirement. Woody was always very composed, but the press conference—in which he insisted he wasn’t forced out—was one of the few times I ever saw him get emotional. He’d done a great job of leading the organization to where it was, and now he wasn’t going to be there to fully enjoy the new b
allpark. As Woody walked off the podium, I started to think about my own situation. I’d been in Seattle nine years and there was always the possibility a new GM would want his own manager. John Ellis had relinquished his position as CEO, Lincoln was getting more and more involved, and I thought, How much longer do I have here?
That’s why I was so delighted when, a month later, the Mariners announced the hiring of Pat Gillick, who had just quit as GM in Baltimore, as Woody’s successor. When John Ellis, who still had tremendous influence in the organization, had asked me about Gillick a few weeks before, I encouraged him, saying that Pat was the only guy to bring in. I knew Pat to be an outstanding baseball executive, the architect of two world championship teams in Toronto who’d then built winning teams in Baltimore. I had missed the opportunity of working for him in Toronto when Mr. Steinbrenner wouldn’t let me out of my contract in 1988, and now I was getting a second chance.
Unfortunately for Pat, he was coming into the job under the worst possible circumstances, as his first order of business was going to be dealing with Junior’s contract and whether we could afford to keep him. I had a very special relationship with Junior. Not just because he was a great player, but because he was a great person. I had played with and managed his daddy, and I admired what a devoted husband and father he was. On the other hand, Junior was also a great needler, who made me laugh, and I think he understood everything I was doing.
“For a guy who seemed disorganized, Lou was the most organized manager I ever knew,” Junior said. “We respected him because of his knowledge and understanding of the game of baseball and his insistence that it be played the way it’s supposed to be played. The small details, he preached them day in and day out. I was twenty-three when he got there. We were all kids and we just needed guidance from a guy who genuinely cared about us and our families and who’d been there before.