by Kirby Arnold
With Buhner around, the Mariners played hard, won a lot of games, and had as much fun off the field as they did on it. Buhner was a master prankster, and the ruder and cruder, the better.
Former pitching coach Mike Paul would spend considerable time with his hair after games, and Buhner occasionally slipped into the bathroom and sprinkled baby powder inside the blow dryer before Paul got out of the shower.
Buhner could vomit on command—he called it “blurping”—and he typically targeted rookies and others with weak stomachs, particularly manager Lou Piniella.
“Our coaches would come up to me like once a week and say, ‘Go get Lou again,’” Buhner said. “So I’d drink some milk and get it to come back up. Then we’d watch Lou tear up and gag. One time he ran into the training room and threw up all over the training table.”
Nobody escaped Buhner’s blurps, and more than just Piniella lost their lunch because of him.
“There was a day in Anaheim when we had three piles of puke to clean up,” Griffin said.
Buhner also established a tradition of making sure the shampoo and conditioner bottles were “filled” after every Mariners road series.
“Always on getaway day no matter where we were at, when we would leave a ballpark I’d always top them off,” he said. “I’d usually have a couple bottles of water and a few beers in me.”
Buhner would wait until everyone else had showered to make sure he didn’t mess with any of his teammates, then leave his “gift” for the next team.
“One time in Detroit I was doing it when Norm Charlton, my partner in crime, started whistling at me,” Buhner said. “He was trying to tell me that Lou was coming.”
Buhner didn’t realize that Piniella hadn’t yet showered. When the skipper walked in, he saw Buhner hovering over a shampoo bottle.
“Jesus Christ, Jay. What the hell’s going on?” Piniella barked.
“Oh, hey Lou,” Buhner said. “Uh, nothing.”
Piniella soon figured it out. “Just tell me which ones are safe,” he said.
Buhner did.
“All right,” Piniella said. “Continue.”
Buhner also had a bitter side, particularly toward former manager Jim Lefebvre. The two feuded often, going back to 1989.
“I thought I’d made the team out of spring training,” Buhner said. “I led the team in RBIs and home runs, and in the last game I’d gone deep to win a game against Rick Sutcliffe when he was with Chicago. Then I got off the bus and was told I’d been sent down. Jim basically told me to my face that he was going to screw me. Well, what goes around comes around. Mark my word, I was going to have the last laugh.”
Lefebvre sent Buhner back to Triple-A and left him there, then often told reporters early that season how the Mariners, who were struggling below .500, could use a right-handed power hitter. Eventually, there was no choice but to call up Buhner, which the Mariners did in June.
“He got his hand forced,” Buhner said of Lefebvre. “And even then, he would call me into his office every day and tell me I’d better step up or it would be my last game.”
In his fourth game, on June 5 against the Kansas City Royals in the Kingdome, Buhner stepped up to Lefebvre’s challenge. He hit a ninth-inning home run to tie the score 3–3, then began a home-run-trot tradition that he continued the rest of his career. As Buhner crossed home plate, he touched the bill of his helmet with his middle finger, looking toward Lefebvre in the dugout.
For the rest of Buhner’s career, he touched his helmet with both hands as he crossed the plate after home runs.
“I got rid of the middle finger deal—I can’t say I’m proud of that—but it was my way of tipping my hat to him,” Buhner said. “As far as I’m concerned, I did get the last laugh.”
The Buhner-Lefebvre feud nearly came to blows during a game in 1991 when the manager pulled Buhner out of the on-deck circle and inserted a pinch-hitter late in a close game. There was an open area behind the Mariners’ dugout in the Kingdome, and Buhner took his bat back there.
“All you could hear was ‘Ka-bang! Ka-bang! Ka-bang!’” said pitcher Bill Krueger. “Jay was back there, right behind the part of the dugout where Lefebvre sat, banging on that wall as hard as he could.”
Lefebvre went back there and, according to media reports, teammates had to hold Buhner away from him.
Buhner’s final home run came, perhaps appropriately, in Yankee Stadium during the 2001 American League Championship Series. He knew at the time that it might be his last home-run trot.
“I took my time on that one,” he said. “I wasn’t 100 percent shutting the window because I didn’t know how the winter would go.”
He’d wanted to come back in 2002, but years of injuries had taken their toll.
“When the doctors come up to you and say they can’t give you a passing grade on the physical, when they say you need to seriously think about retiring,” he said, “I knew that was the end.”
Dan Wilson: The Quiet Pillar of Strength
Lou Piniella was managing the Reds when a young catcher caught his eye at spring training in 1991. Dan Wilson, the Reds’ first-round draft pick in 1990, had come into camp and displayed good hands and a solid work ethic.
“We noticed right away he could catch and throw,” Piniella said. “He had real good hands behind home plate and he gave a nice target. Our pitchers always wanted to know if Danny was going to catch because they liked throwing to him.”
Piniella became the Mariners’ manager in 1993 and, by no coincidence, Wilson was on the team a year later. Mariners general manager Woody Woodward traded pitcher Erik Hanson and second baseman Bret Boone to the Reds for relief pitcher Bobby Ayala and Wilson.
Wilson’s value to the Mariners won’t show in his offensive numbers. He retired after the 2005 season with a .262 batting average, 88 home runs, and 519 RBIs in 14 major-league seasons.
Catcher Dan Wilson dives back to first base. Photo by Don Bates/The Herald of Everett, Washington
Defensively, in the way he caught, threw, and handled a pitching staff, Wilson’s value was immeasurable. He committed 42 passed balls and 45 errors in 10,360 ⅔ innings, finishing his career with a .995 fielding percentage.
He didn’t go out with a batting title or championship ring, but Wilson made himself an accomplished catcher because of his preparation, his competitiveness, his toughness, and his ability to put the team ahead of any individual pursuit.
Wilson made the American League All-Star team in 1996 and he batted a career-high .295 in 2000.
“There was always a question of whether Danny would hit,” Piniella said. “But I liked him in big-game situations, in RBI situations. He could squeeze, hit-and-run; he stole a few bases. And he was always prepared. Sometimes I had to over-prepare just to make sure I knew what I was talking about when I talked to Danny.”
When Wilson retired and was asked to look back on his career, especially his 12 seasons with the Mariners, he didn’t focus on the moments of individual glory. It was typical of such a consummate team player.
“Just stepping on the field at Safeco Field is somewhat of an accomplishment, to have this beautiful stadium,” he said. “To see how things have changed baseball-wise in Seattle over the last 12 years, it’s pretty amazing.
“It was a team effort. That’s satisfying.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Rise to a Championship
LEE ELIA KNOWS WHEN THE MARINERS began the transformation from a team always striving for a championship to one that finally won it.
“We came together when the roof caved in,” said Elia, the former hitting coach under manager Lou Piniella.
He wasn’t speaking in a figurative sense.
The Mariners were taking early batting practice the afternoon of their game against the Baltimore Orioles on July 19, 1994, when Elia, leaning against the batting cage, heard a loud “ka-boom!”
“I looked back and saw a little dust, and I just thought somebody dropped something,�
�� he said. “We went back to hitting, and then two or three minutes later, ‘ka-boom!’ again. Next thing we know, people are pulling us off the field.”
The Mariners never stepped into the Kingdome again that year.
Four ceiling tiles weighing 26 pounds each came loose from the underside of the dome’s concrete roof and crashed into the seats behind home plate. The Kingdome was closed for four months as the remainder of the 40,000 tiles were removed and the underside of the roof resurfaced.
The Mariners, meanwhile, were ousted from their home park for the rest of the season and forced into the longest road trip in team history. They played 20 games over the next 22 days, traveling a record 10,425 miles. Through it all, the Mariners came together as a team, Elia said.
“If you liked a guy or hated him, it didn’t matter, you were with him,” he said. “If there were any anxieties between one guy and another, they got cleaned out. It was like being on an island. You had nowhere else to go, and I think the guys bonded.”
They bonded and they won.
The Mariners, last in the American League West and seven games behind the first-place Texas Rangers when they began their long trip, won nine of 10 games during one stretch, including six straight victories. They had climbed within two games of first place in the standings and were riding a wave of momentum to the top.
Then the baseball world stood still.
Major-league players went on strike August 12, wiping out the end of the 1994 season, the World Series, and the Mariners’ impressive run of success. They thought they could have won the AL West had the season continued. Now all they could hope was that the momentum they rode when the season ended would continue when, or if, the 1995 season began.
“That winter, Lou and I talked about how great it would be if it carried over the following year,” Elia said. “Look at the people we had. We had Junior and Jay and Edgar, we had Randy Johnson, Chris Bosio, and Norm Charlton. We had Tino Martinez and Mike Blowers. What a bunch.”
Because of the strike, however, nobody knew when those guys would get together again. When spring training began, teams opened their clubhouses to replacement players and the exhibition season began with some rag-tag baseball that was hardly major-league quality.
A federal injunction against the owners ended the strike on April 2 and, after an abbreviated spring training for the regulars that lasted through much of the month, the season began April 25.
The Mariners won six of their first seven games, quickly establishing themselves as a competitive team. It seemed clear from the beginning that their lineup, from top to bottom, would score plenty of runs.
The key, of course, was the man in the middle, Ken Griffey Jr.
The Worst Break
The Mariners were on their way to an 8–3 victory over the Orioles on May 26 when the season arrived at a make-or-break moment.
Kevin Bass launched a fly to deep right-center field, but Ken Griffey Jr. had it tracked from the moment it left the bat. Griffey arrived at the wall just as the ball did and, with a “Spider-Man” leap high on the padding, he made a backhand grab.
Griffey also crashed hard into the wall, and his glove twisted awkwardly on impact. Alex Diaz, playing right field because Jay Buhner was injured, immediately went to Griffey’s side and signaled for help from the dugout.
On the bench, Buhner kept saying to himself, “Get up, Junior. Get up.”
“We would see Junior run into something hard all the time, but he would get up and shake it off,” Buhner said. “He was like Wile E. Coyote, always getting crushed and shaking it off and going right back at it. We’d always seen Junior take a beating and bounce right back.”
Griffey wasn’t bouncing back from this. Head athletic trainer Rick Griffin sprinted from the dugout and met Griffey as he walked in from the outfield.
“I broke my wrist,” Griffey told him. “How do you know?” Griffin said. “Just look at it,” Griffey said.
Griffin did, and what he saw were grossly twisted bones between Griffey’s right forearm and hand. He’d shattered both bones in the wrist.
“How long am I going to be out?” Griffey asked as he walked off the field.
Doctors said 10 weeks at least, and they surgically inserted a plate and several screws into the wrist to stabilize it.
Griffey missed 73 games and the Mariners did their best to stay in contention without him. When Griffey returned on August 15, the Mariners were 51–49 and 11½ games behind the California Angels, who were running away with the American League West. The Angels were 10½ ahead of second-place Texas.
Still, the Mariners felt good that they hadn’t fallen apart after Griffey’s injury.
“One of two things could have happened when Junior was hurt,” third baseman Mike Blowers said. “We could have folded the tents. But there also was an opportunity for a lot of people, myself included, to do some things. It was a time to become more aggressive and find out about ourselves. I don’t think it was a coincidence that it had a big impact on a number of us having our career years.”
Blowers hit 23 home runs and drove in 96 runs that year, by far the best of his 11-year career. First baseman Tino Martinez had 31 homers and 111 RBIs in a season that launched his stellar career. Buhner had the first of his three straight seasons with at least 40 home runs and 100 RBIs. DH Edgar Martinez won the American League batting title with a .356 average, and he led the league with 52 doubles and 121 runs.
More than those front-line players, the Mariners of 1995 were a team of unsung heroes.
Rich Amaral and Alex Diaz platooned in center field while Griffey was out, and they contributed both offensively and defensively. Amaral, who’d spent nine years in the minors before he broke in with the Mariners in 1991, batted .282. Diaz made diving catches in center and contributed offensively. His two-run homer in the sixth inning on June 27 pulled the Mariners past the A’s in a 6–4 victory.
Doug Strange hit a game-tying, ninth-inning home run on September 19, and the Mariners went on to beat the Rangers.
The Mariners also made roster moves that bolstered the team.
General manager Woody Woodward, blessed with ownership’s approval to raise the player payroll, obtained pitcher Andy Benes from the Padres at the July 31 trade deadline. Benes went 7–2 in 12 starts the rest of the season.
On August 15, the day Griffey returned to the lineup, the Mariners got speedy Vince Coleman in a trade with the Royals. Coleman, near the end of his career, became the leadoff hitter, batted .290, and stole 16 bases in the final 40 games.
Griffey, meanwhile, had endured a summer of grueling rehab to get back in the lineup.
“Junior would come in every day that he was hurt and tell the guys, ‘Just keep it close. I’ll take you there in September,’” Elia said. “Some of us coaches started taking him down in the hitting tunnel where nobody ever saw us, and we would pound him hard, make his hands work. And when he came back, he was ready.”
Griffey got a hit in each of his first four games after he returned but hadn’t hit a home run. Then, in a Sunday afternoon game against the Red Sox at the Kingdome, he went 3-for-4 and homered off Rheal Cormier, only his eighth home run of the season. The Mariners lost 7–6 in that one to drop 12½ games behind the first-place Angels, but they felt good knowing that Griffey’s home-run stroke had returned. He homered again the next night in a 6–0 victory over the Orioles.
The Yankees arrived for a four-game series beginning Thursday, August 24, and the Griffey of old returned when the Mariners needed him most. The Yankees scored six runs in the fourth inning and led the Mariners 7–6 going into the bottom of the ninth inning with closer John Wetteland on the mound.
Wetteland got two quick outs but walked Coleman, who then stole both second and third with Joey Cora batting. Cora singled to left, scoring Coleman with the tying run and bringing Griffey to the plate. Wetteland tried to jam Griffey, but he jumped on that pitch and drove it into the upper deck in right field to give the Mariners a 9–
7 victory.
The Mariners considered that victory as the launching point of their amazing late-season surge to the division title.
“My biggest concern when Junior came back was how he would be able to hit after such a nasty injury to his wrist,” Blowers said. “That pitch was up and in on Junior, and he was able to get on top of it and hit it out of the ballpark. When he did that, we all knew we had something. We knew that the best player in the game was back.”
It was the first game-ending home run of Griffey’s career.
“Junior learned something about himself in that game,” Buhner said. “It was a moment when he realized, ‘I’ve got it back.’ Mentally, that’s the biggest challenge you face when you come back from an injury like that. You’re asking yourself, ‘Am I really ready?’”
He was, and the Mariners rode that home run into a late-season surge that made them champions.
A September to Remember
The Mariners won three of four games from the Yankees in that late-August series. Then they pounded the Red Sox 11–2 on August 31 and began the final month of the season with five victories in seven games.
The first-place Angels, meanwhile, were struggling.
They lost six straight to finish August, and their lead in the AL West was seven and a half games over the Mariners and Rangers, who were tied for second. September was no kinder to the Angels, who lost six of their next seven games. When the Mariners returned home September 8 to begin a three-game series against the Royals, they were six games out and needing the finish of all finishes if they hoped to remain in contention for the division title.
There was more than one carrot to chase, however.
Baseball had gone to an extra round of playoffs for the 1995 season, with one team from each league qualifying as the wild-card entry into the postseason. That became important when the Mariners swept all three games from the Royals but gained only a game in the standings because the Angels took two of three from Minnesota.
Still six and a half games behind the Angels, the sweep of the Royals pushed the Mariners past the Yankees in the wild-card standings by a half-game, and an early case of playoff fever was starting to spread in Seattle. Newspapers began printing the wild-card standings on their sports covers, and the Mariners themselves got into it by hanging a “Wild Card” banner high in the Kingdome.