by Kirby Arnold
Copyright © 2007, 2014, 2019 by Kirby Arnold
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-68358-284-7
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-68358-287-8
Cover design by Tom Lau
Cover photo Getty Images
Printed in the United States of America
This book is dedicated to my family, which has encouraged and supported me from the day I wrote my first word as a sportswriter.
To my father, whose love of baseball left a permanent imprint on me.
To my mother, who drove me from ballpark to ballpark after I landed my first newspaper job as a 15-year-old without a driver’s license.
To my two children and my grandchildren who are the delights of my life.
And most of all, to my wife for her unending love and support of my passion, despite the hours she spent waiting for me in empty high school gyms and the nights at home alone as I worked.
I am truly privileged.
—KA
CONTENTS
Chapter 1: BASEBALL IN SEATTLE
Chapter 2: A ROCKY BEGINNING
Chapter 3: LOWLIGHTS, HIGHLIGHTS, AND A CAST OF CHARACTERS
Chapter 4: TRAVEL TRAVAILS
Chapter 5: WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS, GIVE SOMETHING AWAY
Chapter 6: DAVE NIEHAUS
Chapter 7: YOUNG STARS EMERGE; VICTORIES DON’T
Chapter 8: BIZARRE MOMENTS ON AND OFF THE FIELD
Chapter 9: HOW THE MARINERS ALMOST PASSED ON KEN GRIFFEY JR.
Chapter 10: TURNING LOSERS INTO WINNERS
Chapter 11: LOU PINIELLA
Chapter 12: POISED FOR A CHAMPIONSHIP
Chapter 13: THE RISE TO A CHAMPIONSHIP
Chapter 14: BUILDING A WINNER WITHOUT JOHNSON, JUNIOR, A-ROD
Chapter 15: THE JAPANESE CONNECTION
Chapter 16: THE RECORD 2001 SEASON
Chapter 17: FADE FROM CONTENTION
Epilogue
Index
CHAPTER ONE
Baseball in Seattle
WILL IT FLY, OR FLY AWAY?
LEE ELIA NEEDED HIS PREGAME CIGARETTE, so he ducked into a hallway outside the Seattle Mariners’ clubhouse and lit up.
It was less than an hour before a weeknight game in September, typically an empty-house night in the vast Kingdome. Elia, the Mariners’ hitting coach, was puffing away that 1995 evening when he peered through an opening that gave him a good view of the stadium. What he saw stunned him.
“My God,” Elia said to himself. “This place is filling up.”
He walked back inside the clubhouse and stopped Sam Mejias, the Mariners’ first-base coach.
“Hey Sammy, do we have a promotion tonight?” Elia asked.
“I don’t think so, Lee,” Mejias answered. “Why?”
“Well,” Elia said, “that’s not our usual 12 or 13 thousand out there. This place is filling up.”
It was a trend in the making. By September of 1995, there was no such thing as a typical weeknight in the Kingdome. The Mariners had found some magic on the field, climbing from 13 games out of first place in the American League West Division in mid-August to contention by mid-September, and they’d done it with a series of two-out rallies and comeback victories that created a buzz in Seattle. For the first time ever, baseball became important in September, and big crowds were watching the Mariners in the Kingdome.
“We went back out a little later to take infield practice, and I noticed a little guy out in center field who was holding a sign,” Elia said. “It read, ‘Refuse to Lose.’”
Those words became the Mariners’ battle cry.
“I was telling guys, ‘Look at that: Refuse to Lose. You know what? The way we’re playing, we might not lose this thing,’” Elia said. “I think that night there must have been 30,000 people at that game, and the energy was terrific. You could feel it in the clubhouse, and it never stopped.”
Two weeks later, the Mariners were still refusing to lose and, best of all, their growing fan base was on board for a delirious ride that helped prove Seattle is indeed a baseball town. The city had suffered through the loss of the Seattle Pilots after one season in 1969, then nearly two decades of losing seasons and meaningless Septembers by the Mariners. But suddenly, Seattle found baseball worth celebrating.
The Mariners went on to win the ’95 American League West Division championship, beating the California Angels 9–1 in a one-game tiebreaker on October 2. Across the Pacific Northwest, fans reveled over what their team had accomplished. They sported their Mariners hats with pride, and purchased jerseys with the names Griffey, Martinez, Buhner, Johnson, Wilson, Cora, and Piniella on the back. For those final weeks of September, then six playoff games in October, cheering inside the Kingdome had never been louder for baseball, and the enthusiasm throughout the Northwest had never been greater for the Mariners.
Those who had proclaimed for years that Seattle wasn’t a baseball town—and there were plenty—couldn’t say that anymore. It only took the Mariners 19 years to prove every naysayer wrong. Since 1977, winning a championship seemed like the remotest of possibilities.
The Mariners were known better for goofy promotions like “Funny Nose Glasses Night,” which drew a bigger crowd to the Kingdome in 1982 than Gaylord Perry pitching for his 300th career victory did just two nights earlier. Over their first few years, the Mariners offered some memorable moments on the field as well as players who became fan favorites. Their fans cheered good young players such as center fielder Ruppert Jones and second baseman Julio Cruz; but fans also appreciated a prankster like Bill Caudill, a solid closer who had earned the nicknames “The Inspector” and “Cuffs,” because of his penchant for handcuffing unsuspecting victims—including the owners wife.
Anyone who followed the team in the early years learned not to expect too much, especially late in the season when the games held little meaning. Before 1995, the Mariners were known for small crowds in the Kingdome, where the sound of cheers lingered only because the huge concrete structure allowed plenty of room for echoes to reverberate.
Yet the infant Mariners endured through shaky ownership and fears that they would follow the fate of the Pilots and move away from Seattle. Star players such as Alvin Davis, Mark Langston, Harold Reynolds, Omar Vizquel, Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Jay Buhner, Alex Rodriguez, and Edgar Martinez wouldn’t come along to pique anyone’s interest until years later. The early Mariners were a tough sell to the fans, and winning over the media wasn’t any easier.
The Struggle for Respect
Randy Adamack was 27 when he joined the Mariners midway through their second season, 1978, as public relations director. He spent many of his first days on the job introducing himself to the media, and among his appointments was a meeting with Georg Meyers, the former sports editor of the Seattle Times. The two talked
for a few minutes, and Adamack remembers feeling good about how Meyers received him. The man was pleasant and cordial, and he seemed willing to give baseball a chance, Adamack thought. Then Meyers bluntly ended the meeting with the absolute truth.
“Randy, you seem like a nice young man, and I wish you a lot of success,” Meyers said. “But I have absolutely no interest in baseball. Good luck.”
Welcome to Seattle. Have fun trying to make baseball work here. Don’t let the football season hit you on the backside.
“There wasn’t a lot of inherent media interest in this town,” Adamack said.
But did that mean this wasn’t a baseball town? As far back as 1903, Seattle was considered an important piece of the newly formed Pacific Coast League, and the city maintained a rich minor-league heritage with the PCL into the 1960s.
“More often I heard, ‘Can Seattle be a baseball town?’” Adamack said. “I tried to get myself up to speed on the history of baseball in Seattle. There is a baseball background here, but would that translate to Major League Baseball?”
Nobody would be able to answer that for years.
“We hoped baseball would work and we certainly wanted to give it a chance to do so,” Adamack said. “But I don’t think it was ever really tested until many years later. Anything above a .500 record became the goal for us. It wasn’t like that was the end-all. But you’ve got to walk before you run, and we hadn’t even walked yet.”
Only the most positive thinkers back then could have imagined a season like 1995 happening in Seattle. In fact, only the most positive could have imagined baseball lasting that long in the city. The 1969 Seattle Pilots, an expansion team doomed by ownership problems, a small old outdoor ballpark, and little talent on the field, played just one season in Seattle. Sick’s Stadium, built for minor-league baseball in 1938 and expanded for the Pilots, was supposed to be a temporary home until construction of a new domed stadium, approved by voters in 1967, was completed in 1972. Despite playing in a ballpark with poor sight lines and plumbing problems, the Pilots actually drew more fans to their home games in 1969 than four other major-league teams. Still, Sick’s Stadium was inadequate by major-league standards, and team owners dealt with serious financial problems.
During the offseason before the 1970 opener, attempts to keep the Pilots in the hands of local ownership failed, as did lawsuits to prevent anyone from moving them out of Seattle. Bud Selig bought the team, moved it to Milwaukee, and renamed it the Brewers.
Jack Aker, a pitcher who played less than two months with the Pilots before they traded him to the Yankees, hated seeing that.
“The fans in Seattle were very enthusiastic, win or lose,” Aker said. “There was never any booing. They were just happy to have a team. I thought it would work if they would get a new stadium.”
The last-place Pilots likely would have faded into obscurity if not for one thing: Pitcher Jim Bouton wrote a book—Ball Four—which became a bestseller for its revealing look at the quips, quirks, and escapades of Bouton and his Seattle teammates.
Many prominent Seattle civic leaders were not willing to allow Ball Four—or the failure of the Pilots—to become their city’s baseball legacy. Local government leaders, many of whom had fought major-league owners to keep the Pilots, began a new battle to reinstate Seattle as a major-league city. A lawsuit challenging baseball’s antitrust laws became the impetus for the expansion season of 1977, when Toronto and Seattle were added to the American League.
The Mariners were born.
The notion that Seattle could succeed as a major-league city would take a while.
Would Anybody Support a Losing Team?
Many believed Major League Baseball wouldn’t work a second time in Seattle, and in the early years the Mariners didn’t do a lot to dispute their argument. They averaged 89 losses their first 18 seasons, lost more than 100 games three times and, just when they seemed to have turned a corner with their first winning record—83–79—in 1991, the Mariners followed it with a 98-loss, last-place season in 1992.
Even those in the Mariners’ front office weren’t sure if Major League Baseball would work.
“I wondered about it myself all the time,” said Lee Pelekoudas, the traveling secretary in 1979.
In a city where football was king and the Seahawks drew capacity crowds to the Kingdome on Sundays, baseball was often filler on the sports calendar. The National Basketball Association Sonics occupied the winter months, and the Mariners drew intrigue, if nothing else, when their season started in April. But when mid-July rolled around and the Mariners found themselves hopelessly out of contention, interest shifted back to football and the Seahawks’ training camp.
On September weeknights in the early years, the Mariners were lucky to draw 5,000 to a game.
“I remember a game against Cleveland when somebody hit a foul ball into the stands down the left-field line next to the bullpen,” Pelekoudas said. “Nobody went down to get it. Everybody was sitting behind the plate between the dugouts.”
Former Mariners shortstop Julio Cruz, who became one of the first fan favorites off the original 1977 team, didn’t sense an overwhelming wave of support in the early years.
“On the streets, you never saw anything that advertised the Mariners,” he said. “It wasn’t like it is now, when you see Mariners jackets and hats and shirts everywhere you go. Now there are posters of the guys on buses.”
Play-by-play announcer Dave Niehaus, the voice of the Mariners from the first game in 1977 until his death in 2010, suffered through more losses than anyone with the ballclub. But he always believed that if the Mariners put a winner on the field, more fans would show up.
“Anybody who says it isn’t a baseball town, that’s baloney,” Niehaus said. “I always knew from people I had talked to, the old-timers up here, that this was baseball territory. All you had to do was give the fans here a product they could be proud of. I’m not necessarily saying win the division or go to the World Series. Just give them a competitive ballclub and people would come.”
When the Mariners joined the American League in 1977, Niehaus thought they would be a .500 team within five years and the fans would follow.
It took 15 years for the Mariners to win more games than they lost, and the arrival of young stars such as Alvin Davis, Mark Langston, Harold Reynolds, Omar Vizquel, Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, and Randy Johnson sparked unparalleled interest in the team in the mid- and late 1980s.
But it wasn’t until 1995, in the “Refuse to Lose” season, that the city truly embraced Major League Baseball.
Huge crowds turned the Kingdome, which seemed for years like the worst place to play a baseball game, into a noise chamber. The Mariners fed off it, making up 11½ games in the standings between August 23 and the end of the season to catch the Angels.
When Randy Johnson struck out Tim Salmon for the final out of the tiebreaker playoff on October 2, 1995—26 years to the day that the Pilots played their final game—the celebration was wild.
Those inside the Kingdome not only heard it, they felt it.
“The press box floor moved,” said Tim Hevly, then the assistant public relations director. “The building was literally shaking.”
It continued through the Mariners’ playoff series against the Yankees, which Edgar Martinez won with his dramatic 11th-inning double in Game 5. The magical season ended when Mariners fell in six games to the Cleveland Indians in the American League Championship Series.
As the dust settled in the weeks that followed, the Mariners’ office staff began to realize what 1995 meant. The thirst for baseball around the city remained strong even after it all had ended.
At the team’s offices near the Kingdome, gifts arrived almost daily.
“It seemed like everybody in town sent something to us,” Hevly said. “There were gift baskets and food, and every time we turned around there was something new with a note saying, ‘Thanks so much for what you’ve done for the city.’”
Yes, ev
eryone could finally say Seattle was indeed a baseball town.
“I never thought that this wasn’t a baseball town,” Julio Cruz said. “I was hoping the team would never move because if they moved, then I’d have to move also, and I didn’t want to leave Seattle.
“Every city needs to have baseball. This city is good for baseball and baseball is good for this city.”
CHAPTER TWO
A Rocky Beginning
MANAGER DARRELL JOHNSON AND HIS COACHES arrived early for spring training in 1977 and discovered that it would take a lot more work than they thought to begin the Mariners’ first camp.
Their task involved the usual pre-camp planning: evaluating personnel, setting the workout regimen, organizing hitting groups and throwing schedules, removing rocks from the infield, filling gopher holes in the outfield.
Wait a minute. Rocks on the infield? Gopher holes in the outfield?
The practice fields at the Mariners’ complex in Tempe, Arizona, were in rough shape, and it fell upon Johnson and some of his coaches—the staff consisted of Jim Busby, Don “Bear” Bryant, Wes Stock, and Vada Pinson—to do a large amount of the work to get them in shape.
“They were out there sweating with rakes, trying to get the fields prepared for the arrival of the ballplayers,” play-by-play announcer Dave Niehaus said. “The fields hadn’t been used in years, and those guys were out there picking boulders off the skin portion of the infield.”
Also, the outfield didn’t have a warning track, and it was a potholed magnet for sprained ankles.
“There were gopher holes in the outfield,” pitcher Gary Wheelock said. “The main stadium field wasn’t too bad, but the practice fields were in pretty bad shape. The first day we worked out, there were tumbleweeds that had blown onto the fields.”
There was more. The Mariners’ pitchers, as maligned as they were in those days, literally couldn’t have thrown the ball straight had catcher Bob Stinson not made an important discovery. Stinson, having arrived early himself, crouched behind home plate and noticed that the pitcher’s mound was off-center, about six inches closer to first base than it was to third base.