by Kirby Arnold
Other players on the team began calling Quinones “Wally Pipp,” and he had only one question.
“Who’s Wally Pipp?” he asked.
Most Disappointing Manager
The Mariners wallowed near last place in the 1980 season when the club fired Darrell Johnson, their manager since the franchise began in 1977, and replaced him with a man they hoped would take the club in a new direction.
Former Dodgers speedster Maury Wills became the second Mariners manager, and the front office saw him as a person who would instill the up-tempo style that made him such a great player. Besides that, Wills could engage the fans with his entertaining stories.
Unknown to the Mariners at the time, alcohol and drugs were taking a firm grip on Wills. Whether it was the addiction or his inexperience as a manager, Wills was unprepared and overmatched as a manager, and his time was marked by several unusual incidents.
“He probably was the most disappointing manager in our history,” broadcaster Dave Niehaus said. “He came with the reputation of being a baseball guy, but little did we know what he was going through. Some of the things he did were just unbelievable.”
During one spring-training game in 1981, Wills went to the mound to make a pitching change and signaled for a right-hander. There wasn’t a right-hander warming up.
Later that spring, Wills sent catcher Brad Gulden to pinch-hit against a left-handed pitcher, even though Gulden was a left-handed hitter. After the at-bat, Wills was irate.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were left-handed?” he asked Gulden.
Niehaus remembered asking Wills about his outfielders going into the 1981 spring camp, and the answer surprised him.
“We’ve got that guy in left field who’s going to be a pretty good ballplayer,” Wills said. “He had a pretty good year last year and he’s going to be the backbone of our outfield.”
Niehaus, puzzled, asked, “You mean Leon Roberts?”
“Yeah, Leon Roberts,” Wills said.
Roberts wasn’t even with the Mariners, having been traded two months earlier to the Texas Rangers in an 11-player deal.
The most often-told story involving Wills and the Mariners occurred on April 25, 1981, during a series at the Kingdome against the Oakland A’s. Oakland manager Billy Martin had complained during the series opener that the Mariners’ Tom Paciorek was striding out of the batter’s box when he hit the ball and should have been called out.
The Mariners faced A’s breaking ball specialist Rick Langford the next night, and Wills thought he had the perfect solution for Paciorek. He ordered Wilber Loo, the head groundskeeper at the Kingdome, to extend the batter’s box several inches toward the mound. That way, Paciorek would have plenty of room to cheat up and hack at Langford’s pitches before they broke.
“I remember looking at the box thinking, ‘There’s something wrong with that,’” said Randy Adamack, the Mariners’ public relations director. “Then I looked down and Billy Martin was pointing to it and talking with the umpires about it.”
Umpire Bill Kunkel measured the batter’s box and, sure enough, it was a foot longer than the regulation six feet.
Wills was fined $500 by the American League and suspended for two games. Less than two weeks later, the last-place Mariners fired Wills and replaced him with Rene Lachemann.
Not everyone was happy to see Wills leave. Julio Cruz, a young infielder with great speed, became one of the league’s best base-stealers under him.
“He was really good for me,” Cruz said. “I had never stolen a base off a lefty, but Maury would bring me out early and teach me how to do it. I wish he had stayed longer. What he did, he did to himself, and I didn’t pay that much attention to those things. But I know he had a lot to give to the game.”
He Wasn’t a Football Hero
The Mariners sought some left-handed punch for their lineup in 2000, and they obtained outfielder Al Martin from the Padres in a trade-deadline deal. What the Mariners got was a ballplayer who had plenty of controversy swirling off the field.
The Mariners already knew about a bigamy incident involving Martin, who was arrested early in 2000 on charges that he and a woman claiming to be his wife had gotten into a fight. The woman, Shawn Haggerty-Martin, claimed they were married in 1998 in Las Vegas. Martin didn’t deny that he attended a wedding with her, but he didn’t realize the ceremony was real. All the while, he was married to another woman.
The two-wives-at-once episode wasn’t all that raised eyebrows.
Martin had long contended that he played football at the University of Southern California. Media guides with the Pirates, Padres, and Mariners included information—provided by Martin—saying he played at USC. During interviews, he would tell stories of making tackles in big games for the Trojans.
The subject came up after Martin collided with Mariners shortstop Carlos Guillen during the 2000 season. Describing the collision to a Seattle Times reporter, Martin likened it to a USC football game in 1986 when he tried to tackle Leroy Hoard of Michigan.
The Times did some checking and learned that USC didn’t play Michigan that year. In fact, Martin never played a down at USC and there was no record of him being on the team.
Confronted with that, Martin told the Times he would supply proof that he played for USC. He never did.
CHAPTER NINE
How the Mariners Almost Passed on Ken Griffey Jr.
THE MARINERS HAD THE FIRST PICK IN THE 1987 DRAFT, and it seemed obvious to everyone in baseball who they would take.
A skinny high school kid in Cincinnati had amazed every scout who’d watched him show off his powerful swing, his cat-like ability to play center field, and his unbridled joy for the game.
There wasn’t much doubt that Ken Griffey Jr., the son of Reds great Ken Griffey, would be a star.
“The first time I saw him was at a tournament in Texas when he was only about 15 years old, and he was the best player,” said Roger Jongewaard, the Mariners’ scouting director in 1985. “He was the youngest player on the field, but he was the best player. He was special.”
Two years later, when another last-place finish netted the Mariners the first pick in the 1987 draft, taking Griffey seemed like the no-brainer of all no-brainers. Team owner George Argyros, however, wasn’t so certain that Griffey was a wise choice.
Argyros felt the Mariners had been burned the previous year when they used their first-round pick on highly regarded high school shortstop Patrick Lennon, who had off-field issues and never developed into the star they thought he would become.
“I wanted Junior desperately, and all our scouts backed me up,” Jongewaard said. “But George wanted a college guy.”
Argyros, a Southern California real-estate developer, favored a right-handed pitcher out of Cal State-Fullerton named Mike Harkey.
“I just can’t do that, George,” Jongewaard told Argyros. “This Griffey is a special guy.”
Compounding Argyros’s uncertainty over Griffey was that he wasn’t eligible during his high school season because of his grades at Moeller High School in Cincinnati.
“We wanted him, but it’s hard to take a guy No. 1 who isn’t playing high school baseball,” Jongewaard said. “I asked the athletic director what was wrong with Kenny, why he couldn’t stay eligible. His theory was that Moeller is a football school and there was pressure for Kenny to play football, and maybe this was his way of not having to play football.”
That made sense, but the Mariners also became concerned over Griffey’s low scores on the mental aptitude tests that they gave him. Dick Balderson, the Mariners’ general manager at the time, believed those tests told a lot about a potential player’s ability to play a mentally difficult game.
Jongewaard had spoken to enough of Griffey’s high school coaches to know that he was a smart kid, so the low test scores didn’t make sense.
“School just wasn’t a top priority with him,” said Mike Cameron, the longtime baseball coach at Moeller High School. “I kept tell
ing Kenny that the spring was real important as far as where he would go in the draft, and there was also college if he wanted to go there.
“Then he just looked at me and said, ‘Coach, I was born to play baseball.’”
The Mariners soon learned that Griffey, while vitally interested in baseball, had no patience for sitting through their long test.
“He wasn’t even completing it,” Jongewaard said. “He’d see that it had 90 questions and give up on it.”
Jongewaard, believing Griffey could score much higher on the test if he gave it a serious effort, asked him to take it again.
“I’ve already done it for the (scouting) bureau and I’ve done it for you guys,” Griffey said. “No more.”
“But do you really want to be No. 1?” Jongewaard asked.
Griffey said he did.
“Then we have to do this again,” Jongewaard said.
Jongewaard told Mariners scout Tom Mooney to give Griffey the test again and let him have all the time he needed to answer the questions. Most importantly, Mooney wouldn’t allow Griffey to speed through the test just to get it over with.
They had gotten about halfway through the multiple-choice test when Griffey wanted to take a break and get something to drink. They both left the room, and when Mooney returned, Griffey had sped through most of the remaining questions and marked the answers.
“He just guessed at them, putting Xs in all the columns straight down the page,” Jongewaard said. “He didn’t have the patience to finish it.”
Mooney wouldn’t let Griffey get away with it this time, and he read the questions and made him finish the test. Jongewaard doesn’t remember how Griffey scored, “but he did OK. That was a hurdle we cleared.”
It wasn’t the final one, however. Jongewaard still needed to convince his skeptical owner, George Argyros, that Griffey was worth the No. 1 pick in the draft.
“George, we can’t afford not to take this guy,” Jongewaard told him. “He is that special.”
“OK, but it will be your ass if he doesn’t do well,” Argyros told Jongewaard. “He’d better do well. He’d better do special well, if you say he’s so special.”
Jongewaard had heard the “this will be your ass” speech from Argyros before, and he wasn’t deterred. Then Argyros gave one more ultimatum: “You can take him, but you’ve got to have him signed. He’s got to agree to our deal prior to the draft.”
Jongewaard wasn’t sure he could overcome this hurdle.
Jongewaard sent one of the Mariners’ top scouts, Bob Harrison, to Cincinnati to meet with the Griffey family and get Junior’s name on a contract. Jongewaard was on the phone constantly with Harrison.
“When we opened the negotiations, Junior wanted a new Porsche and all these things,” Jongewaard said. “We couldn’t do any of the things he asked for.”
The Mariners showed the Griffeys what the Pirates gave Jeff King, the No. 1 pick in 1986, and pointed out that their offer was an increase over that money. What Griffey had to decide, the Mariners told him, was how badly he wanted to be the first player selected in the draft.
Ken Griffey Sr. turned to his son and asked, “Junior, do you want to be No. 1?”
Junior’s response: “Oh yeah.”
“I thought we had a chance then,” Jongewaard said.
On the day before the draft, the Griffeys agreed verbally to the Mariners’ $160,000 offer, but they told Harrison that they wanted to wait until the next morning to sign.
“But Bob,” Jongewaard said. “By then they will change their minds 10 times and everyone they’ve talked with will tell them to get more money.”
“No, Roger,” Harrison said. “They gave me their word.”
“This is the key guy,” Jongewaard told Harrison. “If you get this done, I’ll have a limo at the airport when you get back to Seattle tomorrow.”
Harrison got only a couple hours of sleep before he met the Griffeys the next morning, when they indeed kept their word and Junior signed the contract. Harrison rushed to the airport for his flight back to Seattle, eagerly awaiting the limo ride from Sea-Tac Airport and a hero’s welcome when he reached the Mariners’ downtown offices.
When Harrison arrived, no limo, no cab, nothing was waiting for him. He called Jongewaard.
“Roger, I just landed and nobody was waiting for me,” Harrison said. “I thought you were going to have a limo.”
Jongewaard, thrilled and relieved to have Griffey signed, had continued preparing for the draft and became so occupied with that task that he forgot about his promise to Harrison.
“I’m sorry,” he told Harrison. “Here I am one minute promising you the moon, and the next you’re yesterday’s news.”
The Making of a Superstar
Mike Cameron, the coach at Moeller, had heard about Ken Griffey Jr.’s great swing long before the kid joined the high school team.
“There were stories of him as a 12-year-old hitting balls farther than most 21-year-olds,” Cameron said.
He couldn’t wait for Griffey’s first high school practice to see the special things this player could accomplish. Instead, Cameron was shocked at what Griffey couldn’t do.
“It was before the season started and we had stations the guys would rotate to,” Cameron said. “At one of them were batting tees. He got up there and he put a ball on the tee and he would swing and miss it. He kept missing and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh! I’d heard all these stories about him, and he can’t even hit the ball off a tee?’”
Cameron decided to approach Griffey with a few tee-ball tips.
“Hey Kenny, you’ve got to work on this, so let’s try some things to help you hit the ball off the tee,” Cameron told him.
Griffey balked.
“Coach,” he said. “The Griffeys, we don’t swing off a tee.” Cameron and his assistant coach, Paul Smith, weren’t sure what to do.
“Then I remembered a very successful college coach once told me that until a player experiences failure, you won’t be able to change him,” Cameron said. “Kenny never had failure in high school. In batting practice, he could put the ball exactly where he wanted.”
Four years later, at the Kingdome in Seattle, Griffey took batting practice with the Mariners not long after the draft. First-round picks would typically work out with the big-league club for a day before joining their minor-league teams, and often those players were a mass of nerves. Not Griffey.
“He had been around big-league teams all his life with his dad, so he wasn’t intimidated,” scouting director Roger Jongewaard said. “He jumped into the cage and hit more balls out than Alvin Davis or anybody we had. He looked like a better batting-practice hitter with better power than anybody, and he was only 17.”
Mariners outfielder John Moses remembers being awestruck by Griffeys batting-practice session.
“He was in my hitting group, and right away he hit a ball into the third deck,” Moses said. “With a wood bat. Right out of high school. All I could think was that I probably wouldn’t be here the next year.”
Moses was right; the Mariners released him after the 1987 season. Two seasons later, Griffey was the starting center fielder.
Griffey’s Climb to the Majors
After the draft, the Mariners assigned Ken Griffey Jr. to their short-season Class-A team in Bellingham, Washington, for his first pro season in 1987.
The transition was difficult. He was a 17-year-old playing with and against college-age players who were five and six years older. Griffey’s numbers were strong—he batted .313 for the season—but it wasn’t a fun summer.
“After about two weeks, he was ready to come home and he was going to chuck baseball because he was homesick,” said Mike Cameron, his high school coach. “Kids at that age think they’re ready to live on their own. But it’s a shock because Mom’s not there to make the meals.”
Roger Jongewaard, the Mariners’ scouting director, had another theory: Griffey simply was too good for his competition and wasn’t challenged.
“He was too good for the league and he got bored with it,” Jongewaard said. “Late in the season, he was trying to see how far he could hit the ball and he was getting himself out.”
Jongewaard made a trip to Bellingham to talk with Griffey about it.
“Junior, I’m disappointed you’re not a better player than this,” Jongewaard told him. “I’d heard so many good things about you.”
“It’s not that much fun here,” Griffey told him.
“All it was,” Jongewaard said, “is that he was bored at that level. And that was a college-level league.”
Griffey played at High-A San Bernardino in 1988, hitting .338 in 58 games, then was promoted to Double-A Vermont. He only made it through 17 games there before a back injury ended his season.
Still, the Mariners were enthused that Griffey had performed so well at every level he played, and they invited him to spring training the next year. The plan was to give Griffey a taste of the big-league camp, then have him spend the rest of the year with the Triple-A team in Calgary.
“This will be a good thing,” Jongewaard told general manager Woody Woodward. “We’ll get Junior to Calgary and he’ll hit a lot of home runs in that little ballpark, and it’ll help our relationship with the Calgary franchise.”
Woodward couldn’t disagree, but he couldn’t agree, either. Griffey was having an exceptional spring camp, and Woodward couldn’t see sending him to the minors.
“You’re right, I’d like to get another year for him in the minors,” Woodward said. “But he is our best player in the major-league camp. How do you send out your best player?”
Griffey never spent another day in the minor leagues.
Manager Jim Lefebvre put him in the Opening Day lineup and, at age 19, Griffey went l-for-3 at Oakland in his first major-league game. He didn’t get another hit the rest of that series and only one the rest of the Mariners’ opening road trip, going 2-for-19.
The Mariners limped into their home opener with a 1–5 record, but Griffey provided a perfect lift in his first game at the Kingdome on April 10, 1989.