SEATTLE MARINERS

Seattle's first taste of Major League Baseball wasn't very palatable. The Seattle Pilots were one of four expansion teams in 1969 and played at a renovated minor league park called Sicks Stadium. The Pilots crashed, losing ninety-eight games and finishing last.

After one season, the Pilots bid Seattle adieu and headed for Milwaukee. Seattle turned its attention from the skies to the seas, where eight years later, the Mariners sailed into Seattle and weighed anchor at the Kingdome, the first indoor ballpark in the American League.

The Mariners first game was a 7-0 whitewashing at the hands of the California Angels on April 6, 1977 and it was a portent of what was to come for more than the next decade. Seattle would finish last, or next to last in ten of its first thirteen seasons and not post a winning record until 1991.

During these lean years, the Mariners had little to offer and what excitement they generated came from veteran players finishing out their careers in the great northwest. Willie Horton hit his three-hundredth career home run for Seattle in 1979 and forty-three year old Gaylord Perry (known as the "Ancient Mariner" for obvious reasons) won his three-hundredth game against the New York Yankees on May 6, 1982.

In 1988, the Mariners fortunes began to turn when they brought Edgar Martinez to the varsity squad and obtained promising slugger Jay Buhner from the Yankees. The next season they unveiled an effervescent young center fielder named Ken Griffey Jr. and a lanky lefty named Randy Johnson, who would post a 133-74 record for Seattle over the next ten seasons.

Under second year manager Jim Lefebrve, the Mariners posted an 83-79 record in 1991, although they finished twelve games off the pace. This wasn't good enough for Mariners' owner George Argyros, who fired Lefebvre and turned the team over to its tenth manager in ten years, Bill Plummer; 1992 was a last-place disaster of a season and led to the hiring of Lou Piniella.

The Mariners lynchpin season was 1995. Lagging attendance and a growing displeasure with the Kingdome generated talk of the team going the way of the Pilots and heading for greener pastures. On the field, the team was thirteen games behind first-place California in August. Led by Johnson (18-2, 2.48), Buhner (forty home runs, one-hundred twenty-one runs batted in, .262), and the Martinez boys, Tino (thirty-one home runs, one hundred eleven runs batted in, .293) and Edgar (twenty-nine home runs, one-hundred thirteen runs batted in, .356 to lead the American League), they went on a tear and caught the Angels on the last day of the season. Seattle won the one game playoff to clinch its first Western Division crown.

They fell behind by two games in the best-of-five Division Series to the Yankees, only to come back and sweep the last three. They won the decisive fifth game in the bottom of the tenth, rallying from a one-run deficit to win on a two-bagger by Edgar Martinez that came to be known in MarinerLand simply as "the double."

Although they fell to the Indians in the American League Championship Series, the Mariners' late season heroics helped generated big crowds, lots of enthusiasm and popular support for a new ballpark that would manifest itself in Safeco Field in 1999.

As if they didn't have enough hitting, the Mariners introduced Alex Rodriguez in late 1995 and the shortstop exploded on the scene in 1996 (thirty-six home runs, one-hundred twenty-three runs batted in, .358) as part of a lumberjack lineup that would hit two-hundred forty-five home runs. Griffey (forty-nine home runs, one-hundred forty runs batted in, .303), Buhner (forty-four home runs, one-hundred thirty-eight runs batted in, .271) and Martinez (twenty-six home runs, one-hundred three runs batted in, .327) led the onslaught. Despite the power, the team finished second, unable to overcome an injury to pitching ace Johnson.

Johnson was back with a flourish in 1997, recording his only twenty-win campaign for Seattle. They won the Western Division, this time clobbering two-hundred sixty-four home runs. All nine regulars managed double-digit home run totals led by Griffey (fifty-six), Buhner (forty), Paul Sorrento (thirty-one), Martinez (twenty-eight) and Rodriguez (twenty-three). Their slugging prowess could not save them from a first-round playoff defeat to Baltimore.

The Mariners then endured two consecutive losing seasons in 1998-99, with the team moving to Safeco during the latter season. Johnson and Griffey were traded, but the Mariners were invigorated with a new infusion of talent. Freddie Garcia (17-8 in 1999) and veteran Jamie Moyer replaced Johnson on the pitching staff and in 2000, newcomer Kazuhiro Sasaki anchored the bullpen with thirty-seven saves. The Mariners won the 2000 Wild Card, and beat the White Sox in the first round, only to lose to the Yankees in the American League Championship Series.

The Yanks and Mariners would rematch in the 2001 American League Championship Series under very different circumstances. The Yankees were three-time defending World Champions and New York City was coming off of the terrorist attacks of September 11. The Mariners entered the Series having set a modern day measuring stick for team success. They won an American League record one-hundred sixteen games behind Ichiro Suzuki, who made a spectacular debut in American baseball, winning the Rookie of the Year Award, Most Valuable Player Award and a Gold Glove. He hit .350, made two-hundred forty-two hits and stole fifty-six bases. Bret Boone (thirty-seven home runs, one-hundred forty-one runs batted in, .331) had the season of his life while Martinez (one-hundred sixteen) and Mike Cameron (one-hundred ten) each topped a hundred runs batted in. The Yankees put a damper on Seattle's storybook season with a five game win in what was a much anticipated, but somewhat anticlimactic series.

Seattle has not returned to the post-season since that defeat. They have produced some of baseball's greatest individual players of the last decade, but they have yet to achieve the ultimate of making it to, or winning, a World Series.