Tales from the Seattle Mariners Dugout

by Kirby Arnold

  Rhodes struck out Justice, but he fell behind in the count to Williams before working his way back to a full count. Then Rhodes went to his best pitch, a 95-mph fastball.

  Williams made contact, but not good contact, lofting an innocent-looking high fly to right-center field. It looked certain to be the second out of the inning.

  “That ball was a can of corn,” Boone said. “You can tell when a ball goes over your head if it’s hit well, and Bernie didn’t get all of it. I almost held up my hand and said, ‘Two down!’”

  The wind grabbed that ball and carried it over the fence, tying the score 1–1.

  “Here I am thinking that ball’s going to be caught close to the warning track, and it winds up five rows deep,” Boone said. “That’s when you start believing in the ghosts at Yankee Stadium.”

  Rhodes got Martinez and Jorge Posada to end the inning, and Rivera rolled through the Mariners 1-2-3 in the top of the ninth.

  Sasaki took the mound for the bottom of the ninth and promptly gave up an infield single to Scott Brosius, then faced young second baseman Alfonso Soriano, who had flashed some power with 18 home runs in his first full major-league season.

  Like the pitch Williams hit off Rhodes in the eighth, Soriano drove this one off Sasaki high in the air and the wind helped do the rest, carrying it over the fence in right-center to win the game, 3–1.

  “That was the turning point the series,” Boone said. “We win that game, we win the series. But now our backs are against the wall as much as they can be.”

  They never had a chance.

  The Yankees scored four runs in the fourth inning of Game 5 off Aaron Sele and didn’t let up. The Mariners trailed 12–3 when they batted in the top of the ninth, and the boisterous crowd at Yankee Stadium had worked itself into a frenzy.

  The cheering and stomping became more intense with each out in the ninth, and the fans dished Piniella’s words back at him with the chant “No Game 6! No Game 6!” When Mike Cameron lined out to end the series and send the Yankees to the World Series, fans literally shook the stadium.

  In the visiting dugout, Piniella, the man who detests losing any game, anywhere, any time, absorbed the defeat with compassion for a city that had waited six brutal weeks to have something to cheer.

  “About the eighth inning, when the fans were really reveling in the stands, the one thought that came to my mind was that, boy, this city suffered a lot and tonight they let out a lot of emotions,” Piniella said in the postgame news conference. “I felt good for them in that way. That’s a strange thought to come from a manager who’s getting his ass kicked.”

  For all that the Mariners accomplished in the 2001 regular season, the series loss to the Yankees was a bitter disappointment, especially after they had dominated the Yanks during the regular season.

  Perhaps it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

  The drive to 116 victories took a life of its own as the Mariners gained national exposure in trying to become one of the most successful teams of all time. By the end of the season, it wore on them.

  “The media scrutiny became so heavy down the stretch that year,” Boone said. “I don’t want to make an excuse, but that might have been our downfall.”

  When the Mariners won their record-tying 116th game by beating the Rangers on the next-to-last day of the regular season, a sense of relief swept the clubhouse.

  “Everybody in that room looked at each other and sighed like finally we did it,” Boone said. “Then we realized, wait a minute, we’ve got to play the postseason now.”

  The postseason was a struggle and, despite the opening-round victory over the Indians, the Mariners couldn’t regain the momentum that carried them through the previous six months.

  “We didn’t play very well against Cleveland and beat a great team,” Boone said. “We didn’t play very well against the Yankees, nor did they, but they got a couple of timely hits and won the series. I look back on it now and see how we came up short.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Fade from Contention

  THERE WAS NO GREATER TIME TO BE A BASEBALL FAN in Seattle than the seven seasons from 1995 to 2001.

  The Mariners won three division championships, reached the playoffs four times, developed superstar players, and moved their artificially induced game from the Kingdome to the real grass of Safeco Field.

  On the field, it seemed only a matter of time before the Mariners reached the World Series. In the stands, the Mariners drew more than three and a half million in the 2001 and 2002 seasons.

  A not-so-funny thing tends to happen in baseball when teams ride their euphoria and their aging stars too long. Winners become losers, and it can happen fast.

  The Mariners faded quickly from the top of the division to the bottom.

  It started with injuries throughout a supposedly pitching-rich minor-league system that inhibited the Mariners’ ability to make trades. They also didn’t mix the veteran roster with a young player or two each year, possibly because the minors were void of major-league-ready players.

  In 2002, the Mariners got older instead of younger, bringing in veterans such as catcher Pat Borders, outfielder Ruben Sierra, and utility players Desi Relaford and Jose Offerman.

  They had an impressive young outfielder in the minors, Scott Podsednik, who tripled in his first major-league at-bat after he was called up in 2001. He got only 25 more major-league at-bats the next one and a half years before the Mariners lost him on waivers to the Milwaukee Brewers after the 2002 season. The next year, Podsednik batted .314, stole 43 bases and finished second in the NL Rookie of the Year voting to Dontrelle Willis.

  Figuring older and wiser was better, the Mariners began the 2002 season with aspirations of going farther than they did in 2001. Some players, in fact, said during spring training that they’d consider the season a failure if they didn’t reach the World Series.

  Instead, the Mariners went backward. After coming so close to the World Series in 2000 and 2001 that they could measure their downfall in a few at-bats that might have made a difference, the M’s haven’t been to the playoffs since.

  They won 93 games in the 2002 season but couldn’t match the incredible run of the Oakland A’s, whose 42–12 finish in the final two months included a 20-game winning streak. The Mariners also won 93 games in 2003, but Oakland surged again late in the season and the M’s didn’t, losing the division by three games.

  The 2004, 2005, and 2006 seasons were last-place disasters.

  What went wrong?

  Maybe the Mariners clung to their pleasant memories too long and didn’t realize how close they were to the dismal period that was ahead. Maybe they were too reluctant to part with the popular but aging players who’d provided so many good moments.

  There’s no doubt that age caught up with the team. Their bats got slower, their pitching softened, and they weren’t able to replace the old with the new and produce similar results.

  Manager Lou Piniella angered ownership with his constant complaints that the team needed more help offensively, and he was gone after the 2002 season. The Mariners essentially traded Piniella to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, receiving outfielder Randy Winn as compensation. A year later, general manager Pat Gillick stepped down and was replaced by former Angels GM Bill Bavasi.

  After Piniella, the Mariners hired former big-league catcher Bob Melvin, a kinder, gentler skipper whose only managerial experience consisted of a few weeks in the Arizona Fall League in 1999. Melvin understandably took a hands-off approach with the veteran club in 2003 and won 93 games, but the 93-loss season in 2004 cost him his job.

  Bavasi brought in veteran manager Mike Hargrove, whose Indians teams dominated the American League Central Division in the 1990s. Hargrove, however, had suffered through four losing seasons as Baltimore’s manager before he was fired, and nothing changed in his first two years in Seattle despite considerable change to the roster.

  The 2006 Mariners, though slightly improved over 2005, still weren
’t a shadow of the playoff teams that fans had known so fondly.

  Jay Buhner, Edgar Martinez, and Dan Wilson had retired. Mike Cameron left as a free agent. So did Mark McLemore, who played with the A’s in 2004 before retiring, and John Olerud, the hometown favorite who played with the Yankees and Red Sox before retiring in 2006. The Mariners traded fading Bret Boone to the Twins midway through the 2005 season and he, too, retired, after a few days of spring training with the Mets in 2006.

  Kazuhiro Sasaki, who set the franchise record with 129 saves in four seasons, shocked the Mariners when he returned to Japan before the 2004 season, forfeiting $8.5 million in the final year of his contract. Sasaki, who said he needed to be closer to his family, pitched another year in Japan before retiring.

  Jamie Moyer, the soft-tossing left-hander who won more games than any other Mariner in his 10 seasons, was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies late in the 2006 season.

  That left Ichiro Suzuki as the only remaining piece from the 2001 team, and around him the Mariners fielded a mixture of young players with undetermined futures and veterans with nice credentials but little history as winners. Only nine players on the 25-man Opening Day roster in 2006 had playoff experience, and just two of those, pitcher Jarrod Washburn and DH Carl Everett, had played in a World Series. By midseason, Everett was such an offensive disappointment that the Mariners released him.

  Nobody could accuse the Mariners of not spending money on their players. Before the 2005 season, they signed third baseman Adrian Beltre to a five-year, $64 million contract and first baseman Richie Sexson to a four-year, $50 million deal.

  The Mariners were lured to Beltre by his phenomenal 2004 season, when he hit 48 home runs and drove in 121 with the Dodgers. In his first season with the Mariners, he finished with underwhelming offensive numbers—.255 average, 19 homers, and 87 RBIs—and at times seemed bewildered when balls he squared up died at the warning track, victims of Seattle’s cool, heavy air.

  Beltre then became a player worthy of that big contract, both offensively and defensively, on a career path that established him as a likely first-ballot Hall of Famer.

  He hit 25 home runs and drove in 89 runs in 2006, then 26 homers and 99 RBIs in 2007, and 25/77 in 2008. Beltre’s defense was spectacular, and he won Gold Glove awards in 2007 and 2008.

  The final year of Beltre’s contract with the Mariners was painful in ways that made grown men cringe. He took a bad-hop grounder to his groin on August 12, 2009, and suffered such a severely bruised testicle that it swelled to the size of a grapefruit. That’s also when it became known that Beltre played his entire career without a protective cup, and even after the injury fully healed he still didn’t wear one, saying it was too uncomfortable. Beltre played only 111 games and made 477 plate appearances in 2009, both the fewest since his rookie year with the Dodgers, and left the Mariners to sign a free-agent deal with the Red Sox in 2010.

  Sexson performed as advertised his first year with the Mariners, giving them the right-handed power they badly needed, with 39 homers and 121 RBIs. But he also maintained his penchant for striking out, whiffing a league-leading 167 times. Critics said his high strikeout totals made him a poor fit for an offense that needed to play more small ball at Safeco Field.

  He put up solid power numbers again in 2006—34 homers and 107 RBIs—but struggled terribly the next two years. He batted .205 with 21 homers and 63 RBIs in 2007 and never recovered the following year, hitting only a dozen homers with 36 RBIs before the Mariners released him in July.

  By the end of the 2006 season, the Mariners were a changed team. Players such as 43-year-old Jamie Moyer, 36-year-old Eddie Guardado, and 35-year-old Carl Everett were gone, and the M’s fielded the youngest roster in the majors, averaging 26.53 years.

  Two of those kids, shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt and pitcher Felix Hernandez, carried hope for the Mariners’ future, and they both arrived with wonderful stories to tell.

  Yuniesky Betancourt’s Harrowing Journey to the Big Leagues

  Among teammates and opponents alike, nobody’s trip to the major leagues brought as much sacrifice and peril as what Yuniesky Betancourt said he experienced.

  The former Mariners shortstop reached the big leagues in 2005, less than two years after what he described as fleeing from Cuba that put his life at risk. Determined to leave the grip of the Cuban government and pursue his major league dream, Betancourt said he climbed into a small boat in November of 2003 and pushed off into an ocean of uncertainty.

  He had starred on the Villa Clara team in the Cuban National League and, at age 17, played for Cuba’s World Junior team. Betancourt dreamed of more, a career in the major leagues and a life in a free country, and he said he had to flee Cuba to make that possible.

  Betancourt said he and a teammate, pitcher Saydel Beltran, planned the trip for three months and, in the middle of the night on November 28, 2003, they climbed aboard a small motorized vessel with eight others. Betancourt didn’t speak in detail about the boat or how he arranged to flee because he feared the government would persecute family and friends back home. His mother and grandmother, who raised him, remained in Cuba.

  “I didn’t feel I had the liberties and freedoms I would like to have,” Betancourt said. “It was something I talked about a lot with my family. It was very difficult, but I knew I had to do it so I could realize my dream.

  “If they [Cuban authorities] caught me, I wouldn’t be able to play baseball. They would have thrown me in jail and they would have harassed my family. I was scared. But I knew I wanted to get to the big leagues and that is what motivated me.”

  Betancourt said he spent four days at sea, once stopping on a small island because the water became so rough. The boat landed in Cancun, Mexico, where Betancourt resumed his baseball workouts and prepared for tryout camps.

  Pat Gillick, the Mariners’ former general manager, had been impressed with Betancourt when he saw him playing for Cuba at the World Junior Games in 2000 in Canada. Mariners scouts saw him two years later at the World Games in Taiwan, then lost track of Betancourt.

  “He disappeared from the radar for a while,” said Benny Looper, then the Mariners’ director of player development. “We didn’t know what had happened to him.”

  Betancourt resurfaced at a tryout camp in Los Angeles, and the Mariners invited him to their training complex in Peoria, Arizona, for a closer look. They signed him early in 2005, sent him to their Double-A team in San Antonio, and watched him adapt much faster than anyone anticipated.

  The Mariners, who’d thought Betancourt would need at least one full season in the minors, promoted him to Triple-A Tacoma after 52 games, then called him up to the majors on July 28.

  He tripled in his first major-league plate appearance, batted .256 in 60 games, and showed signs of becoming the Mariners’ best defensive shortstop since Omar Vizquel in the late 1980s.

  The Mariners became so convinced that Betancourt was their long-sought answer at shortstop that they shuffled some of the top minor league prospects, moving former first-round draft pick Adam Jones from shortstop to center field in 2005 and trading away highly regarded minor leaguer Asdrubal Cabrera in 2006.

  Betancourt’s career never developed as the Mariners had hoped.

  His ability to make spectacular plays in the field was undermined by throwing errors, and at the plate he struggled to lay off pitches out of the strike zone and he drew few walks. The Mariners traded Betancourt to the Royals midway through the 2009 season, and by 2014 he was out of the majors.

  Felix Hernandez, the Boy Pitcher Who Would Be King

  Pat Rice, the Mariners’ minor-league pitching coordinator, traveled to Venezuela in 2002 to a look at a young pitcher named Felix Hernandez, about whom scouts had been raving.

  Rice and Benny Looper, the Mariners’ director of player development, had Hernandez throw some fastballs, and he impressed them with how the ball exploded out of his hand.

  “Go ahead and throw some breaking balls,” Rice to
ld the youngster, who’d already been nicknamed “King Felix” in Venezuela.

  The kid threw a few 12-to-6 curveballs, with a sharp downward break as if they were falling off a table, and Rice stood in awe.

  “That wasn’t just a high school curveball. It was filthy,” Rice said. He bragged to others about this high school senior who already had the kind of stuff that could get major league hitters out.

  “Pat,” someone told him. “Felix isn’t a senior. He’s a 15-year-old freshman.”

  Stunned, Rice could only imagine how good the kid would become in just a few years. The Mariners signed Hernandez later that summer, then brought him into their minor-league system two years later as a 17-year-old. He climbed rapidly, overpowering hitters at every level before the Mariners gave him 12 big-league starts at the end of the 2005 season.

  Starting pitcher Felix Hernandez yells as he records the final out during a game against the Yankees in 2005. Photo by Jennifer Buchnan/The Herald of Everett, Washington

  Hernandez’s record was nothing special, 4–4, but his 2.67 ERA spoke to his ability to dominate major-league hitters, even at age 19, with a 95 mph fastball and that wicked curve. He had the stuff to become a true staff ace, possibly as early as 2006, but the Mariners knew better.

  They not only placed Hernandez at the back of the rotation, where expectations hopefully wouldn’t seem as intense, they decided to institute a firm limit on the number of innings Hernandez would throw: 200, including the 14 he worked during spring training.

  The Mariners also issued an edict to their marketing department that the “King Felix” nickname had to go, again to ease any undue expectations (Funny, though … at spring training those words were embroidered into his glove).

  The Mariners’ would-be king struggled at times and dazzled at others in his first full season, loping along with a .500 record and an ERA in the 4.60 range. The club seemed fine with it, knowing that 2006 was a season for Hernandez—along with all of the young players—to settle in as a major leaguer.