by Kirby Arnold
Oh, they still struggled to win games. Between 1983 and 1986 they never won more than 74 games in a season and couldn’t finish higher than fifth in the American League West.
Things were different on those teams, though. The Mariners were no longer a collection of has-beens or players who weren’t ready for the major leagues. The farm system had begun turning prospects into big leaguers and the young Mariners established an identity among fans with their talent and the hope they provided for the future.
First baseman Alvin Davis hit 27 home runs, drove in 116 runs, and won the 1984 American League Rookie of the Year award. Pitcher Mark Langston went 17–10 with a 3.40 ERA—magnificent numbers in the hitter-friendly Kingdome—and he won The Sporting News Rookie Pitcher of the Year award. Langston also finished second to Davis in the Rookie of the Year voting.
The mid-’80s Mariners featured players in the beginnings of nice careers: Dave Henderson, Harold Reynolds, Dave Valle, Spike Owen, Jim Presley, Phil Bradley, Ivan Calderon, Danny Tartabull, Mike Moore, Mike Morgan, Matt Young, Edwin Nunez, and Jim Beattie. They weren’t quite household names in a city that still hadn’t fully latched onto Major League Baseball, but they caught the attention of those who did follow the Mariners win or lose.
Dave Valle. Photo by The Herald of Everett, Washington
“I’ve been in the game a long time, and it’s rare to find a young group like we had then,” said Chuck Cottier, who managed the Mariners from 1984 to ’86. “Most of them were brought up through the organization together, so they knew one another. Individually they were outstanding, but as a group they were great. They all liked each other and respected each other and got along well together. That’s hard to find with a young group at the major-league level. They were a very, very special group.”
They were good, too. Davis, Bradley, Presley, Langston, Reynolds, Calderon, Tartabull, Moore, and Morgan went on to become All-Stars. Unfortunately for Mariners fans, many of those players had their best years with other teams because management wouldn’t sign them to long-term contracts to stay in Seattle.
Had the organization kept the young talent together, Cottier is convinced the Mariners would have produced their first winning record long before that finally happened in 1991. Owner George Argyros didn’t believe in signing players to long-term contracts, and when free agency loomed for the talented young Mariners, the club often traded them away or let them sign elsewhere.
“In my heart, I truly believe we could have been as good as Oakland was in their heyday,” Cottier said. “Those kids would have been outstanding here. You saw what happened to them when they went to other organizations. They had nice careers and wound up as millionaires with other teams. But it cheated the fans in Seattle because when the players left, the fans lost that identity.”
Center fielder Dave Henderson was the Mariners’ first-round draft pick in 1977, and he became a fixture in the outfield from 1982 to ’86 before they traded him and shortstop Spike Owen to the Red Sox for shortstop Rey Quinones and cash. Henderson became an All-Star in 1991 with the Oakland A’s and played in four World Series with the Red Sox and A’s.
Second baseman Danny Tartabull played in Seattle from 1984 to ’86, but the Mariners traded him to the Royals before his free-agent season in exchange for Scott Bankhead, Steve Shields, and Mike Kingery. Tartabull batted .270 for the Mariners in 1986, his first full major-league season at age 23, and hit 25 home runs with 91 runs batted in. He played 10 more seasons, hitting 30 or more homers three times and driving in 100 or more runs five times. He made the AL All-Star team in 1991.
Phil Bradley. Photo by The Herald of Everett, Washington
Left fielder Phil Bradley was a star quarterback at the University of Missouri who played four full seasons with the Mariners. He beat the Mariners twice in arbitration, then was traded to the Phillies before the 1988 season for Glenn Wilson, Mike Jackson, and minor leaguer Dave Brundage. Bradley batted .300 in 1985 and .310 in 1986, setting career highs of 26 homers and 88 RBIs in ’85, when he made the All-Star team.
Right fielder Ivan Calderon broke in with the Mariners in 1984 and batted .286 in 67 games in ’85. The Mariners sent him to the White Sox midway through the 1986 season as the player to be named later in a trade that brought catcher Scott Bradley to Seattle. Calderon became an All-Star with the Expos in 1991, when he batted .300 for the only time in his career.
Third baseman Jim Presley played six seasons with the Mariners, from 1984 to ’89, before they traded him to the Atlanta Braves after the 1990 season.
Pitcher Mike Moore, the first overall pick in the 1981 draft, won 17 games and pitched 14 complete games for the Mariners in 1985. He signed with the A’s as a free agent before the 1989 season and won 19 games that year, pitching a workhorse 241 ⅔ innings.
Second baseman Harold Reynolds, the second overall pick in the 1980 draft, was one of the few young stars who played the biggest part of his career in Seattle. He was a Mariner from 1983 to ’92, then played for the Orioles in 1993 and the Angels in 1994 before retiring. Reynolds, a native of Corvallis, Oregon, became a crowd favorite with his speed and defense. He led the league with 60 steals in 1987 and 11 triples in 1988, he won Gold Gloves at second base in 1988, ’89, and ’90, and he represented the Mariners at the All-Star Game in 1987 and ’88.
“Harold came along and hit .370 one year in Triple-A,” Cottier said. “We brought him up and he developed into a very consistent player.”
Mr. Mariner: The First-Class Alvin Davis
Alvin Davis, selected by the Mariners in the sixth round of the 1982 draft, could do so many things well. He hit for average and power, he flashed a nice glove around first base and, perhaps his best-known trait, he was one of the nicest players ever to wear the Mariners uniform.
If only he could run.
Speed wasn’t Davis’s game and it cost him. He rarely beat out infield grounders to the holes, and pitchers didn’t hesitate to walk him because they knew he was no threat to steal. He was consistently among the American League leaders in walks and on-base percentage.
Davis played eight seasons with the Mariners, won the American League Rookie of the Year award in 1984 and, after one year with the California Angels, finished his major-league career with 160 home runs, 683 runs batted in, and a .280 batting average.
“I believe he could have added 20 to 30 more hits a year if he’d had any speed,” outfielder John Moses said.
Davis became the Mariners’ first big offensive star. He homered off Dennis Eckersley in his first major-league game and went on to bat .284 with 27 home runs and 116 RBIs as a rookie in 1984.
“He was a leader,” Moses said. “He was a quiet leader; his bat spoke for itself.”
Chuck Cottier said it was a privilege to be Davis’s skipper during the three seasons he managed the Mariners.
“He came up and had that great rookie year, and he continued to play well,” Cottier said. “He was a superstar in all aspects of his game except one. He was a slow runner. But he was a good fielder, a great hitter, and he hit for power.”
In addition to what Davis gave the Mariners on the field, he was a classy representative off it. Broadcaster Dave Niehaus nicknamed Davis “Mr. Mariner” because he represented the franchise with such a positive attitude. In 1997, the Mariners made him the first inductee into the team’s Hall of Fame.
Alvin Davis. Photo by The Herald of Everett, Washington
“He was an All-American kid,” Niehaus said. “It seemed natural to call him Mr. Mariner.”
What Alvin Davis’s teammates remember best about him was the joy he brought to the ballpark.
“Alvin and I spent half a season together in Double-A ball before I got called up to the big leagues,” Moses said. “We were on a 13-hour bus ride from Massachusetts to Buffalo, New York, and I mean, that was a long, hard ride. But every time I looked back at him on that bus, Alvin had a smile on his face. He was smiling for 13 hours.
“He loved the game so much.”
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Mark Langston: Iron Man on the Mound
Even in the mid-1980s, when pitchers who started a game actually saw the end of it, Mark Langston’s numbers were impressive.
The left-hander was the Mariners’ iron man in 1987, his fourth major-league season, when he pitched 14 complete games and worked 272 innings to set a franchise record that may never be broken.
Langston won 17 games in his first season, 1984, and captured The Sporting News American League Rookie Pitcher of the Year award. He kept getting better, building up not only victories, but an amazing record of durability.
Langston pitched 200 or more innings in 10 of his 16 major-league seasons, and in his five and a half seasons with the Mariners he pitched 225 innings in 1984, 239⅓ in 1986, 272 in 1987, and 261⅓ in 1988.
“He was a workhorse,” Moses said. “That’s the difference between nowadays and back then. Here’s a guy who would give you seven, eight solid innings. Now, guys just want to get through the fifth so they can get the decision one way or the other. Langston never thought about that.”
Langston’s only down year was 1985, when he labored through his second major-league season with a 7–14 record. It didn’t surprise his manager, Chuck Cottier, and the Mariners decided to give Langston a breather by skipping a start late in the season.
Mark Langston. Photo by The Herald of Everett, Washington
“For a young player, getting through a 162-game schedule at the major-league level can be difficult,” Cottier said. “It was the latter part of August and we were going to skip his turn in the rotation to let his arm rest a little.”
George Argyros, the team owner, had a different idea: Send Langston to Class-AAA Calgary and have him pitch there. After all, if the club was paying the guy, why not keep working him?
“But George,” Cottier told the owner. “This is the kind of kid you develop your organization around. We need to be careful with him. He doesn’t need to be in Triple-A, and if you send him there, you can send me there with him.”
Cottier won that dispute, and Langston never spent another day in the minors.
Langston had racked up 73⅓ innings and an impressive 3.56 ERA through 10 starts in 1989, but the Mariners, knowing they weren’t going to compete in what would be a big-money free-agent market, traded him away. On May 25 they shipped Langston and a player to be named later (pitcher Mike Campbell) to the Montreal Expos for three young, barely known pitchers whose uncertain future made Mariners fans uneasy.
The Mariners received a couple of 24-year-old right-handers, Brian Holman and Gene Harris, and a lanky, hard-throwing—but wild—left-hander named Randy Johnson.
Over time, the trade became a true fleecing of the Expos.
Langston played the rest of that season with Montreal before signing as a free agent with the California Angels, where he continued his ironman efforts by pitching 200 or more innings in five of the next seven seasons. Johnson, meanwhile, corralled his control and became the cornerstone of the Mariners’ division championship teams in 1995 and 1997.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bizarre Moments On and Off the Field
SINCE THE FIRST TEAM IN 1977, the Mariners have brought an assortment of interesting behavior by players and incidents off the field, some worth laughing about now and others that still make people cringe.
Bob Kearney was a light-hitting catcher who played eight seasons in the majors, the last four with the Mariners from 1984 to ’87. He was an adequate backstop who was nicknamed “Sarge” and is remembered as much for what he said as the things he did.
“He was really smart IQ-wise, very intelligent. But he also was very, very funny,” said longtime head athletic trainer Rick Griffin, who compiled a list of “Kearney-isms” during the catcher’s time with the Mariners. “He would say things that would make you shake your head.”
Former manager Chuck Cottier remembers the day Kearney replaced his eyeglasses with a pair of contact lenses.
“He’d been trying different types of lenses—hard, soft, whatever—trying to find a pair that worked for him,” Cottier said. “We were playing a Sunday afternoon game in Milwaukee and Bob comes up to me and says, ‘Chuck, I’ve got my contacts now and they’re the best I’ve ever had.’”
Kearney, who’d caught the night before, didn’t start that afternoon’s game, but Cottier had him warm up the pitchers in the bullpen to get accustomed to the new lenses in daylight. Late in the game, Cottier plugged Kearney into the lineup for defensive reasons.
Kearney was behind the plate when Mariners reliever Ed Vande Berg gave up a high popup with runners on second and third base and two outs.
“Sarge circled around it but he didn’t come near it,” Cottier said. “Vande Berg had to catch it off his shoetops for the third out.”
Kearney trotted back to the dugout, looked at Cottier and delivered one of his famed Kearney-isms.
“Skip,” he said. “That sun looks a lot brighter in the daytime than it is at night.”
Mariners president Chuck Armstrong was at spring training one March in Tempe, Arizona, when he decided to strike up a conversation with Kearney.
“Where are you staying down here?” Armstrong asked.
“I’m living in this condo, right on the ground floor,” Kearney said. “It’s great because it’s so warm here at night and I can walk right outside to work on my tan.”
Armstrong was stumped. “You’re working on your tan? At night?”
“Yeah, the moonrays are perfect for that,” Kearney said. “Moonrays?” Armstrong asked.
“Yeah, there’s a full moon now,” Kearney explained. “The rays from the sun are bouncing off the moon, and I get a tan.”
Talented, Unpredictable Rey Quinones
The Mariners thought they were upgrading themselves at shortstop in 1986 when general manager Dick Balderson obtained highly regarded shortstop Rey Quinones from the Red Sox. In exchange, the Mariners traded away solid little shortstop Spike Owen and talented young outfielder Dave Henderson.
The trade left the Mariners with one of the more disappointing players in franchise history. Quinones had remarkable talent but his inconsistent behavior on and off the field wound up hurting the Mariners and himself.
Rey Quinones. Photo by The Herald of Everett, Washington
“To this day, I think he is one of the most talented guys I’ve ever seen,” head athletic trainer Rick Griffin said. “But he didn’t really care about playing the game. He enjoyed being there, but he didn’t want to play.”
Quinones played only four seasons in the major leagues, including 311 games with the Mariners from 1986 to ’89 before they traded him to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Pirates released him midway through the 1989 season and he never played in the majors again.
How talented was Quinones?
Griffin remembers two games, one in Detroit and one in New York, when Quinones announced in the dugout, “This game is over, I’m going to hit a home run.” Then he went to the plate and did it.
Defensively, Quinones was one of the game’s best talents.
“He could stand at home plate in the Kingdome and throw the ball into the second deck in center field,” Griffin said. “He had the best arm of an infielder that I’ve ever seen. It’s a sad deal. You always wondered what kind of a player he could have been, but he just didn’t have his priorities in order.”
Despite all that talent, Quinones never showed a burning desire to play. He showed up late for spring training in 1987, telling the Mariners he had visa problems.
“Uh, Rey,” team president Chuck Armstrong told him, “you’re from Puerto Rico. You don’t need a visa.”
The writers who covered the Mariners that year won’t forget the day Quinones arrived.
“We got a call one night that Rey was back in the fold, and that we could come up to talk with him,” said Larry LaRue of The News Tribune of Tacoma.
LaRue, Jim Street of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Bob Finnigan of the Seattle Times went
up to public relations director Dave Aust’s hotel suite. They experienced one of the strangest interviews of their careers.
“Rey was lying on his back, flat on the floor the whole time,” LaRue said. “We conducted the interview that way, the three of us and Aust standing above him.”
Among other things, Quinones told the writers that he didn’t need baseball, saying he owned a liquor store in Puerto Rico and could live off that.
Later that season, Armstrong was walking through the Mariners’ clubhouse before a game when manager Dick Williams called him into his office. Armstrong walked in and saw Quinones there with Williams and general manager Dick Balderson.
“Rey, tell Chuck what you just told us,” Williams said.
“I’m a good shortstop, right?” Quinones said.
“You’re a very good shortstop, Rey,” Armstrong told him.
“I could be the best shortstop in the American League,” Quinones said.
“Yes you could,” Armstrong replied.
“I’m so good,” Quinones said, “that I don’t need to play every day.”
Armstrong was stunned as Quinones continued.
“I don’t need to play every day, and you have other guys who should play so they can get better,” Quinones said. “So I don’t need to play tonight.”
Williams reworked the lineup, replacing Quinones at shortstop with Domingo Ramos.
“Rey wasn’t even in the dugout during the early part of the game, Ramos was having a great game,” Armstrong said. “He made a couple of great plays in the field, and he tripled and doubled.”
Seeing that, Quinones put on his uniform and appeared in the dugout, telling Williams that he was ready to play.
“No you’re not,” Williams told him. “You’re out of uniform. No hat.”
Quinones returned to the clubhouse for a hat, then reported to Williams again. Williams told him to take a seat, that Ramos would play the rest of the game.