by Kirby Arnold
Gaylord Perry’s Flight to 300
The Mariners were in the middle of an East Coast trip early in the 1982 season when pitcher Gaylord Perry beat the Yankees in New York for his 299th career victory.
After that April 30 game, the team traveled by bus to Baltimore to finish the trip, then planned to fly back to Seattle—commercial, as usual—on an off day before they began a home series against the Yankees. Perry was scheduled to pitch the opener against New York.
But on the day he pitched in New York, Perry told Pelekoudas, “If I win 299 tonight, we’re chartering home.”
Perry’s idea was to fly immediately after the final game in Baltimore so the players could spend their day off at home in Seattle instead of traveling.
“That’s fine, if you can work it out,” Pelekoudas told Perry.
That meant flying the idea past team owner George Argyros, who was a brick wall to almost any idea that involved spending more money.
“By the time the bus got down to Baltimore and I walked into my hotel room, the phone was ringing,” Pelekoudas said. “It was George, and he proceeded to scream at me for probably 15 minutes.”
Argyros was livid. “Don’t you ever give my phone number out again. We’re not going to charter,” he told Pelekoudas.
“George, I didn’t give anyone your phone number,” Pelekoudas said.
Didn’t matter. Perry had gotten Argyros’s number and already had run the idea past the owner, and the big guy didn’t like it.
Later, Argyros called Pelekoudas back and apologized for getting upset, and they had a long discussion about team travel. Pelekoudas explained why it was best for the players that they didn’t spend an entire off day flying back home, and in this case he’d like to grant Perry his wish.
“OK, you can get a charter,” Argyros told Pelekoudas, adding one difficult provision, “as long as it doesn’t cost any more than a commercial flight.”
Faced with a situation almost as difficult as hitting a grand slam with two men on base, Pelekoudas jumped on the phone. He called a friend with Ozark Airlines and got lucky. Ozark had just flown a military charter from Seattle to the East Coast, and Pelekoudas talked the airline into letting the Mariners use the jet for the return trip.
“I pleaded with them to get the cost down to what the commercial cost would be for us, which was about $19,000 or $20,000,” Pelekoudas said.
The airline agreed to it and Pelekoudas called Argyros, who gave his approval.
“Gaylord got his wish,” Pelekoudas said.
Two nights later, on May 6 after a day off without travel, Perry beat the Yankees to win his 300th.
Don’t Forget the Skipper
On the field, nothing could stop the Mariners during the 2001 season, when they tied the all-time record with 116 victories. Off the field, they had their moments.
The Mariners were playing a mid-June interleague series in Colorado when Ron Spellecy, the traveling secretary, became ill and underwent quadruple bypass surgery. With Spellecy down for several weeks, the Mariners handed his duties to Jim Fitzgerald, who was a baseball operations assistant under GM Pat Gillick.
“Get on the next plane to Oakland,” Lee Pelekoudas, who had become the assistant general manager, told Fitzgerald. “For the foreseeable future, you’re our traveling secretary.”
Fitzgerald was the best man for the job, even if he didn’t feel like the right man for it.
“Traveling secretary is the hardest job in baseball. I did not know anything about cars, buses, trains, airplanes, hotels,” he said. “I flew down there and just pieced it together. I was learning as I was going. I was arranging tickets and on the phone with the hotel people handling all kinds of details. Players were telling me things like, ‘My wife is coming in early. I need a crib. I need a connecting room. I need a car.’”
Somehow, Fitzgerald pulled together all those details without a major snafu, and the Mariners made it back from Oakland for a six-game homestand before hitting the road again.
Sunday, June 28, was getaway day, with the Mariners flying to Anaheim after the homestand finale against Oakland. The As had beaten the Mariners 6–3 and, although the M’s remained 18 games ahead of the second-place Angels in the division standings, manager Lou Piniella was angry at having lost.
Meanwhile, Fitzgerald did his best to hustle the players, coaches, and personnel out of the clubhouse and onto the bus for the short drive to Boeing Field, where the Mariners’ chartered jet waited to fly them to Anaheim.
“The bus always leaves one hour after the final pitch, and since the game ended at five o’clock, I wrote on the message board that the bus would leave at six,” Fitzgerald said.
As six o’clock approached, the clubhouse was nearly vacant as the last of the traveling party was either on the bus or driving on their own to the airport.
“It’s about two minutes until six and I’m looking around the clubhouse, and it’s empty,” Fitzgerald said. “I opened the door to Lou Piniella’s office, and it’s empty. I say to myself, ‘All right, the bus is leaving.’”
Pelekoudas, who had driven his own car to the airport, called Fitzgerald to make sure the bus would depart on time. “Are you guys leaving?” Pelekoudas asked. “Yeah, it’s six o’clock and the bus is pulling out,” Fitzgerald said. “Do you have Lou?” Pelekoudas asked.
“No, but I checked his office and he wasn’t there, so he must be driving on his own,” Fitzgerald said.
The bus arrived at the airport and everyone had boarded the jet when Fitzgerald’s phone rang again. It was a security officer at Safeco Field.
“Do not leave,” he told Fitzgerald. “Lou just walked out of here and there’s no bus. One of the batboys is driving him there now.”
When Fitzgerald had peeked into Piniella’s empty office before boarding the bus, he forgot to check one important place: the shower attached to the office. That’s where Piniella was as the bus pulled away without him, and one thought filled Fitzgerald’s head.
I am so fired, he said to himself.
On the plane as the team waited for Piniella, Fitzgerald could hear many of the players cackling in the background, especially center fielder Mike Cameron and right fielder Jay Buhner.
“If you have any guts at all,” Buhner told Fitzgerald, “you’d have this plane take off right now.”
Wisely, Fitzgerald didn’t. He did, however, try to remain inconspicuous in the back of the jet, hoping Piniella would take his seat and not scream too loudly at being left at the ballpark. While they waited for Piniella to arrive, Pelekoudas told Fitzgerald to begin handing out the 30 envelopes containing meal money.
“When you’re finished, stay in the back of the plane,” Pelekoudas told Fitzgerald. “Because when Lou gets here, he’s going to be hot.”
Piniella finally arrived, took his seat at the front of the jet and didn’t say a word. The jet took off and, after leveling off at about 30,000 feet, Fitzgerald built up enough courage to walk to the front and give Piniella every opportunity to ream him.
“Lou, I’m sorry I left you,” Fitzgerald said. “I apologize.”
“That’s OK, kid, don’t worry about it,” Piniella told him.
The travel tale didn’t end there.
Later on that road trip, during a series at Texas, Cameron called for a session of Kangaroo Court, where Fitzgerald faced charges of leaving the manager at Safeco Field. The fine was $10, and Fitzgerald knew that it would double if he fought the charges and lost. Rarely does a defendant convince the usually unyielding Kangaroo Court to overturn a case, but Fitzgerald fought this one with a passionate plea.
“I wrote on the board that the bus was leaving at six o’clock,” he told the court. “Well, there’s a new sheriff in town! When I say the bus leaves at six o’clock, it leaves at six o’clock!”
That drew a murmur from the players and a protest from Piniella.
“Well, then I’m hanging the sheriff!” Piniella said. Cameron, swayed by Fitzgerald’s speech, deli
vered his ruling. “You’re right,” Cameron said. “Lou, you’re fined for being late for the bus. You owe 10 bucks.”
“But the kid left me behind!” Piniella pleaded. “He left me!” Didn’t matter, Piniella had to pay up.
For the rest of the 2001 season, even after Spellecy returned to his traveling secretary duties, Fitzgerald was known as “The Sheriff.”
CHAPTER FIVE
When All Else Fails, Give Something Away
SEATTLE HAS LONG EMBRACED BIG EVENTS.
The annual unlimited hydroplane boat races would draw hundreds of thousands to Lake Washington. The NCAA played its Final Four in the Kingdome three times, bringing big crowds and Chamber of Commerce notoriety to the city. University of Washington football games drew tailgating crowds to Husky Stadium a half-dozen Saturdays each fall, and the NFL Seahawks filled the Kingdome on Sundays. Even the Mariners made a splash when they hosted the All-Star Game in 1979.
The Mariners’ big challenge, however, was trying to sell the everyday concept of baseball.
Opening Day sold out annually, but that was never a true gauge of the interest in baseball. The Mariners’ first opening night in 1977 drew 57,762 to the Kingdome; their second game drew 10,144. They drew more than 1.3 million in the first season when the return of baseball became somewhat fashionable, but they didn’t come close to breaking one million the next four years.
“In those early years we learned that it was an event town,” said Randy Adamack, then the Mariners’ public relations director. “Opening Day for us is a big event, and at certain times during the year a Mariners game would have a big focus. Our challenge was that we played 81 times here and we needed to make each one of them an event.”
To do that, they did what all good promoters would do when their product alone wasn’t enough to fill the seats. They gave stuff away.
The Mariners had hat nights. They had bat nights. They gave away T-shirts and jackets. They also brought in entertainment, some of it good, some lousy, to entice folks into spending beautiful summer Saturday nights inside the concrete dome.
Some of those promotions were big hits, some were flops, and many became part of the Mariners’ lore.
Face of the Franchise: Funny Nose Glasses
The Mariners gave jackets to fans during one promotion in 1981, and to publicize the event they put together a TV commercial starring outfielder Tom Paciorek.
His sales pitch: “Hi everybody, I’m Tom Paciorek of the Seattle Mariners. This Saturday night, come to the Kingdome because the first 30,000 fans will receive a pair of these great funny nose glasses. That’s right, funny nose glasses.”
Paciorek put on a pair of the glasses, featuring a big bulb of a nose and a black mustache, when a voice from behind the camera interrupted.
“No Tom, it’s not Funny Nose Glasses Night, it’s Jacket Night. The first 30,000 will get a Mariners jacket.”
Paciorek looked stunned. “Then what am I supposed to do with 30,000 pairs of funny nose glasses?” he asked.
“Tom,” the voice added, “that’s your problem.”
Jacket Night went over well, as most Saturday night giveaways did, but the commercial starring Paciorek left fans with a taste for more, specifically noses and glasses. The Mariners were besieged with calls from fans wanting a Funny Nose Glasses Night. In 1982, those fans got their wish.
The Mariners scheduled the promotion for May 8 and the response was overwhelming. A crowd of 36,716 showed up, almost 10,000 more than two nights earlier when Gaylord Perry beat the Yankees for his 300th career victory.
Men, women, and children wore their funny nose glasses in the stands, owner George Argyros and his wife, Judie, wore them, as did the Mariners themselves. The relief pitchers walked to the bullpen before the game wearing them, all looking like the sons of one really ugly daddy, and manager Rene Lachemann wore a pair to home plate for the pregame meeting with umpires.
Plate umpire Tom Haller took one look at Lachemann and said, “No wonder you guys are in last place.”
Hold the Smoke
Randy Adamack had flown into Seattle on July 5, 1978, the day before he began his new job as the Mariners’ public relations director. After he got settled in his hotel room, he opened the sports section to get a feel for what was going on with the Mariners.
“There was a story at the bottom of the page saying how the laser light show scheduled for July 4 had been smoked out,” he said. Intrigued, he read on.
Immediately after the Mariners lost 5–3 to the A’s, the crew responsible for the postgame Fourth of July laser show began setting up its equipment behind second base, in the middle of the Kingdome field. Part of the look was to pump enough smoke into the dome for the lasers to have a cool effect.
“The problem is that they put out about 10 times more smoke into the building than they should have,” Adamack said. “The whole place was filled with smoke and they had to evacuate the building. By the time the smoke cleared about an hour and a half later, there wasn’t anybody left to see the show.”
It did go on, however.
“A handful of people from the staff were still hanging around,” Adamack said, “and they said it was a heck of a laser light show.”
Mascot Maniacs
The San Diego Chicken had become a phenomenal success in the late 1970s, and the Mariners decided to catch that wave 1981. Not just by having the Chicken show up at their ballpark, but by staging a mascot contest.
They called it the International Mascot Competition and invited anyone interested in being considered as a mascot for the Mariners to come to the Kingdome and perform before a game. More than two dozen showed up.
There was a circus performer from Bulgaria who wore a rabbit costume and called himself the “Bulgarian Rabbit.” One guy followed a classic Northwest motif and was a roller skating salmon. Another wore a white suit, and from the waist up he had concocted a replica of the Seattle Space Needle that was about 10 feet tall.
Then there was a guy who called himself “The Baby.” He wore a crewcut, crooked glasses, a diaper that covered just the right places, and nothing else.
Adamack was one of two Mariners employees who served as judges, along with Seattle Post-Intelligencer sportswriter J. Michael Kenyon.
“We introduced the mascots individually and they would come out of the left-field gate and make their way across the field, past third base and over to foul territory in front of our dugout,” Adamack said. “Then they would wave, do flips, rollerskate, whatever it took to impress the crowd and the judges.”
Staying in character, The Baby crawled the entire way on his hands and knees, a distance of about 100 yards over the abrasive artificial turf of the Kingdome.
“When he got to the dugout, he stood up to wave at the crowd, and his hands and his knees were blood red,” Adamack said. “He had worn them raw crawling across the field.”
One judge voted for the Space Needle and Kenyon favored The Baby. Adamack was mulling his deciding vote when Kenyon leaned over and said, “I’m going to rip you guys in the newspaper if you don’t pick The Baby.”
Adamack couldn’t be swayed. He picked the Space Needle.
“J. Michael didn’t talk to me for about a month,” Adamack said.
“I don’t think that promotion drew an extra fan that night,” he added. “But around town it created some talk. It was something that was written about and it was very visual for TV. Our games were on TV only about 20 times all season, and in 1981 we were just happy to have anyone mention our name.”
Buhner Buzz: A Cut Above
The crowning glory of the Mariners’ promotions, at least in the post-Funny Nose Glasses era, was Buhner Buzz Night. Anyone who showed up bald like Mariners right fielder Jay Buhner got into the game free. For those who didn’t arrive hairless, employees from a chain of salons were outside the ballpark with their clippers buzzing, shearing Buhner fans bald in exchange for donations to support breast cancer research.
Seven Buhner Buzz N
ights drew 22,302, among them 298 women.
The idea for the promotion sprang in the early 1990s from an on-the-air jab at Buhner’s shrinking hairline by Yankees announcer Phil Rizzuto.
“That’s a summer haircut,” Rizzuto said, pointing out the horseshoe of hair that remained on Buhner’s balding noggin. “Summer good and summer bad. That one’s really bad.”
The Mariners’ marketing staff saw that and, during a brainstorm meeting, came up with the Buhner Buzz Night idea. The first one in 1994 drew 512, including two women, who sat in a special bald-only section in the Kingdome behind Buhner’s position in right field. The Mariners considered it a success, although that head count was nothing compared with future Buzz Nights.
Jay Buhner is all smiles in the dugout. Photo by Justin Best/The Herald of Everett, Washington
In 2001, when the final Buzz Night was held one year after Buhner retired, 6,246 participated, including 112 women. Among them was 77-year-old Helyn Nelson, who auctioned off her hair and raised $148 for a group of students at her church to participate in a mission to Fiji.
At every Buzz Night, Buhner would take a break from his pregame duties to join fans at the buzz-cut stations outside the Kingdome—and at Safeco Field for the final one. He often grabbed a pair of clippers and buzzed away himself. Among his clients one year were his two sons, Gunnar and Chase.
The Mariners also flew Buhner’s father to Seattle from Texas to surprise his son during one Buzz Night. When Jay came outside to mingle with his fans, Dad was sitting in a barber’s chair.
The two embraced, then Jay shaved his dad bald, too.
Class Actors
Nobody would confuse ballplayers with comedic actors, but the Mariners became known since the mid-1990s for the funny commercials that aired each year as part of their ticket sales campaign.
“The team had some modest success in 1993 and we realized that we had some personalities here,” said Kevin Martinez, the club’s marketing director. “This was kind of uncharted waters because we had never used players as actors. But we really felt like there was a need to foster the bond between the players and the fans. Those of us who are around them every day get to see their sense of humor, and the question we asked was how to bring it out.”