Seattle Baseball on the Road to Recovery; Are We There Yet?

In Seattle, fans are languishing through another long summer of baseball. It’s been a rough decade for the Seattle Mariners, having finished below .500 five times in the last eight years, twice with more than 100 losses. These are the numbers prior to the onset of the 2011 season, which itself fell apart rather abruptly for the Mariners as they entered a (team record) 17 game skid after the All-Star Break.

Now, things aren’t completely bleak in the Emerald City. The fruit of several years far from playoff contention has quite literally ripened in the form a thriving farm system. As the Mariners took a nosedive in the standings this July, management began to unload under producing and often overpaid talent. In several situations this summer, the powers-at-be within the Mariner Organization opted to trade for prospects and draft-picks; rather than the veteran bat or two the team may have sought had they not fallen from contention so abruptly. With the recent exodus of several Mariner starters many of these prospects are getting the chance to play regularly at the Major League level.

From their entry into the American League in 1977 through 1990, the Mariners did not complete a single season with a winning record. They shared a Seattle arena, dubbed The Kingdome, with the city’s equally abysmal NFL team, The Seahawks. However, in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s a series of decisions were made in the Mariner’s front office that would come to change the face of the team and ultimately the city of Seattle itself.

Throughout the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s the Mariners brought in “over-the-hill” free-agents, hero forty-something’s on their way out of the game in an effort to fill seats. This strategy resulted in smiles and beautiful memories, but rarely translated into wins. In the late 1980’s, the team gradually came to be under new, more aggressive ownership. The new owners, affiliated with Nintendo Corp. of Japan, saw young, homegrown talent as the pathway to success. One of the most promising young players was a kid by the name of Ken Griffey Jr.

The name Griffey is now synonymous with Seattle baseball. Yet the early 1990’s were tumultuous times for the Mariners, as there were those within the Organization who sought to move the team elsewhere. These desires, coupled with league restructuring and the season-ending Player’s Strike in 1994, almost put an end to Major League Baseball in Seattle.

However, a group of guys with names like Junior, Randy Johnson, Edgar Martinez and Alex Rodriguez put together a few pretty good years up in the Pacific Northwest. Not just good enough to keep baseball around, but good and exciting enough to get Washington taxpayers to sign on off on a shiny new Stadium for the twice A.L. West Champions (1995, 1997).

As the big names of the 1990’s exited the Seattle Baseball scene, new ones would arrive. A new right fielder arrived from Japan in 2001 with much fanfare and an armada of Japanese press. His name was Ichiro Suzuki.

Above: Safeco Field; The House that Griffey Built. The 516 Million Dollar stadium opened its doors in 1999 and boasts one of the only retractable roofs of its magnitude operating anywhere on the planet.

The Mariners, who fell just two wins short of an American League Championship in 2000, would go on to win 116 games in 2001, tying the record set by the 1906 Chicago Cubs. Yet it would be bittersweet, as the Seattle club again fell two games short; defeated by the New York Yankees in 6 games for the second year in a row. The 2002 and 2003 clubs were talented and played sound baseball, but fell short within the A.L. West itself.

From 2004 on, the teams have been exciting at times, but never quite fired on all six cylinders. With two finishes over .500, it hasn’t been all bad news, but the flavor of the last eight years of Seattle Baseball has definitely been disappointment. Disappointment as year after year, the team seems to bite and claw, kicking and screaming to within sight of contention; only to fall, often violently back into the wilderness from whence they came.

This year began with great promise, yet without the ideal mix of talent and team chemistry, playing 9 innings, 162 times in a summer can begin to drag. When a team begins to drag, they stop winning. When the Mariners stopped winning this year, they did so in dramatic fashion. The gravity of the fall resulted in management conducting a series of trades for young talent. These new acquisitions fall into an existing farm system already busting at the seams with talent and a Major League club full of recent vacancies.

This year wasn’t “the year” for the Mariners, but there is both promise, and change in the breeze blowing into Safeco Field off of Elliott Bay these days. This November, Seattle will be battening down the hatches for what promises to be another hard Pacific Northwest Winter. But, as has gone on for quite some years now, folks will be sitting at the bar on brisk Sunday mornings watching another Seattle team. When the topic of Baseball comes up, somebody inevitable says, “The Mariners? Well, there’s always next year.”