“We regret the errors” read the slogan on the back of my jersey on the last softball team I ever played on. The worst softball team in the history of the city. going 0-10 and losing most of our games by scores like 30-0 and 29-2. We were called The Corrections and we did a lot of regretting as the season went along.
It’s early February, and that means that pitchers and catchers report to Arizona and Florida for the start of spring training in a couple weeks. Welcome news if you’re a baseball fan. And if you’re a baseball fan in the Pacific Northwest, that also means it is time to stock up on the Excedrin, the Maalox, and probably a few bottles of Jack Daniels in preparation for the season that lies ahead.
Losing at baseball is a natural fit here for the LOSE blog, simply because there is so damn much of it. Even when you’re good, you lose a lot, because the margin between teams is so small. Consider last year, when the local club spent the equivalent of 2½ months’ worth of days losing. 2½ months! That’s a lot of failure. Take something that you like to do and suck at every day for 2½ months. Try it. I bet you’ll be sick of it. Yes, the local nine endured the equivalent of 2½ months of failure. 2½ months of me and KC covering our eyes or lamenting what we’re hearing on the radio or reaching for the bourbon.
And we had it good here in San Francisco. We got to have a parade at the end of season and everything.
My Giants heritage dates back to one of my first baseball watching experiences, which was back in 1976 when we first were living in the Bay Area. I actually remember it quite clearly, because the orange team was playing the blue team and I annoyed my dad when I pointed at the screen and said “I like THAT team. They’re wearing orange.”
He was not amused. The blue team was the Dodgers and my dad is a Dodger fan. I’m sure, at this point, he was wondering what he had done to have the cruel fate befall him of a Giants-loving son. Clearly this child was demented. But I just knew instinctively, from a young age, that rooting for the Dodgers was a wrong which needed to be countered.
And when I moved to San Francisco in 2000, I rekindled my long-lost love for the orange-and-black. It’s been pretty remarkable, seeing a team I like actually win two World Series – and not just over the course of my life, either, but twice in three seasons! With all of this winning, I don’t really know what to do with myself.
But it’s not really that much winning, is it? It’s just a little bit more than everyone else. That’s part of what makes baseball fascinating, really. The difference between winning and losing is so minute that failure is inevitable. The whole game is about failure, in some ways, because in almost all situations the team with the sticks in their hands is at an enormous disadvantage. I mean, the .300 hitter is a superstar in baseball – the guy who FAILS 70% of the time! You have to come to accept that a fair amount of failure is going to happen. If a particular game stinks, you can just play another one tomorrow.
The Giants of 1976, as it turned out, were not particularly good, finishing 28 GB of in the NL West of the eventual World Series champions, the Big Red Machine from Cincinnati. And when my family returned to the Pacific Northwest in 1977, I discovered a brand new baseball club waiting there to capture my attention, a new franchise that played in an awesome domed stadium in Seattle. The Seattle Mariners were born and I became a fan, since they were the local team and they were easy to follow.
Boy, was that ever a mistake.
The Mariners made some headlines this past week, agreeing with pitcher Felix Hernandez on a 7-year contract worth $175,000,000. “King Felix” is, at 26 years of age, one of the brightest stars in the game. You can count on one hand the number of pitchers in baseball who are his equal. He has already won a Cy Young award, and did so on a team that lost 101 games, mainly because it possessed the worst offense in the contemporary era of baseball. The team has generally been terrible throughout his entire career – and was generally terrible before his career, for that matter – and the speculation for years has been that Felix would leave Seattle via free agency, and that the Mariners would be forced to trade him to
But the Mariners ultimately had no choice in the matter. They simply had to sign him. Along with being one of the most phenomenal pitchers in the game, Felix Hernandez is also steadfastly loyal to the only organization he has known. He is a team-first guy who loves the city and who has never, ever complained about the fact that the team around him has pretty much sucked. In short, he’s the ideal guy to build a championship franchise around. Superstars of that magnitude don’t come along that often, and letting one slip away can be disastrous to any franchise – but to a franchise like the Mariners, it may have been a blow from which they’d been hard-pressed to ever recover. It’s one thing to be a bad team, but it’s another to do what the ownership of the Seattle Mariners has somehow done in the past 18 years, which is to take every ounce of a city’s good will and squander it, waste it all and leave the fanbase indifferent at best, and antagonistic at worst.
Other than the nights that King Felix is pitching, the hallows of Safeco Field are generally dormant. Plenty of good seats are available. After finishing last in the AL West in seven of the past nine seasons, the Mariners average attendance has plummeted by more than 50%. It’s been a remarkably bad run, and given the history of the club, that’s saying something. Because by any definition, the Mariners are one of the worst franchises in the history of professional sports.
Only the San Diego Padres have a lower all-time winning percentage than the Mariners, but at least the Padres have played in a couple of World Series during their own substandard existence. The Mariners have never been, one of only two franchises that can say that (and the Nationals seem poised to bust out, so the M’s will likely soon be on the clock all by themselves). They’ve had only four playoff appearances and something like 10 winning seasons in their history. They started off their tenure by rolling off 14 consecutive losing seasons – not exactly a great way to ingratiate yourself to the fan base. They were run on the cheap throughout the 1980s and put up one dreadful season after another, to which the fans responded by either staying away in droves – it wasn’t out of the question for the M’s to play before 4,000,000 empty seats during a season at the cavernous Kingdome – or sitting in embarrassed silence. You could go to a game against the Cleveland Indians in September with 5,000 of your closest friends and actually hear baserunners and the 1st baseman talking to each other on the field.
There would be some flashes of hope from time to time – they’d put some young talent together that would overachieve and be around .500 at the All-Star Break, but then would come some roadtrip of death in August during which they’d go 1-8 or something. Usually that involved getting swept by the Twins at the Glad Bag in Minneapolis and/or getting swept by the Royals when it was 140° on the field in Kansas City. So hope of another season would dissipate, and the following year they’d almost certainly be terrible as whatever young talent they had would suddenly regress. The August swoon was almost like clockwork. You could count on it like the swallows returning to Capistrano.
There was finally some hope starting in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, as the Mariners timed it well and happened to be abysmal just at the right time twice to land #1 picks in the draft in years when future Hall of Famers were available – Ken Griffey Jr. and Alex Rodriguez. They’d also finally made some deals in which they hadn’t been completely fleeced. Not only was the ownership cheap in the 1980s, but the front office was incompetent. It doesn’t make for a very good combination. But starting with the Jay Buhner-for-Ken Phelps trade which became the stuff of Seinfeld episodes and then landing a young Randy Johnson from the Expos, there was some hope for the good ship Mariner, which was skippered by new owner Jeff Smulyan who had big, big plans.
Big plans in Florida.
Smulyan was leveraged to the hilt, and had borrowed heavily to acquire the team. And during a meeting at Security
Now, Tampa had long been the hammer that owners used to blackmail cities into building new ballparks – “build it or we’re going to Florida.” But Smulyan believed that the Kingdome wasn’t a viable ballpark, nor did he think that people in Seattle really cared a whole lot about the club, because attendance had always lagged behind the rest of baseball.
But could you really blame them for not showing up? Other than the bizarre ritual of the Cubs fans in Chicago, who continually pack Wrigley Field despite the team being wretched for a century and seem to think it’s hip and cool to suffer, bad teams aren’t going to generate a whole lot of interest. And the good folks in Seattle, quite understandably, had never shown a whole lot of passion for a franchise that was consistently a loser.
So Smulyan had this plan in place, which he’d laid out at a high-level meeting, and then came one of the greatest bits of corporate espionage in history – somebody at the bank, who happened to be a baseball fan, took the confidential notes from this meeting and faxed them to the Seattle Times. I’m not sure who the Emerald City’s version of Deep Throat is, and I’m not sure that (s)he has ever been identified, but they should have their number retired and fluttering in the rafters, as they probably did more to save the Seattle Mariners franchise than anyone else.
From what appeared to be the franchise’s darkest days came a series of stunning events – given 45 days to come up with a buyer, the city coddled together a bunch of business execs, backed by the head of Nintendo in Japan, to come up with $100,000,000 to buy the club. Even so, the ballpark issue had to be addressed, and the taxpayers of King County were having none of it and voted down a tax increase to pay for it. It was an understandably intellectual position taken by a notoriously overly-intellectual city. Had I still lived in King County at the time (I had drifted down to Olympia), I would’ve voted YES, but I can certainly understand why people voted NO.
But then ... the Mariners STARTING WINNING. Down 13½ games in the standings in August to the California Angels in 1995, the Mariners went on this weird, strange, insane hot streak. They won games in ways you didn’t think possible, and you’d want to go to the Kingdome just to see what else ridiculous could happen. They would crush teams, they come from behind, they would get shutdown relief pitching from journeymen washups, the would have strange heroes (or should that be Strange heroes, since Doug Strange was always delivering key hits), or the most unfathomable guys do the unexpected and lead to conversations such as this:
“Did Vince Coleman really just hit a grand slam or am I high?”
“Both.”
“OK, just checking.”
The Mariners came all the way back to tie the Angels by season’s end, then they beat the Angels 9-1 in a hastily arranged 1-game playoff in the Kingdome, a game which turned on a bases-loaded, wormkilling dribbler from Luis Sojo down the first base line that eluded the first baseman at clanged around in the bullpen, at which point the Angels made mess of it in the field and, when it was over, all four runners had scored! It was yet another ludicrous outcome in a ludicrous season, and the fans were going mad as hatters.
But the “REFUSE TO LOSE” Mariners didn’t stop there. They then beat the Yankees 3-2 in a 5-game playoff that was one of the greatest playoff series in baseball history, a series featuring 15-inning games and 6-run comebacks and all sorts of madness and mayhem, culminating in the franchise’s signature play in the bottom of the 11th of Game 5:
The Double, as it’s known. I never get tired of watching that. I have a tendency to post the highlights of some of my favourite moments in sports, just because there’ve been so damn many awful ones. I don’t need to see highlights of the Mariners losing to the White Sox for the 863rd consecutive time. I saw the highlights of the other 862, and I suspect that they weren’t a whole lot different.
And even though the exhausted Mariners had nothing left in the tank, and lost the ALCS in 5 games to the powerhouse Cleveland Indians ... yes, that’s right, I just said that ... Seattle had suddenly became a baseball town. Seattle loved the Mariners. The team’s wacky ride had captured the public’s imagination. And even though King County had originally voted down the stadium proposal, politicians in Olympia then jumped on the bandwagon and picked up the slack, forking over something like $500,000,000 for the construction of Safeco Field, a gorgeous new ballpark right next door to that ugly concrete mushroom fungus called the Kingdome, whose days were now most definitely numbered:
I was actually somewhat sad to see it go. The Kingdome actually had a seat at the top of the third deck in rightfield that was painted a different colour, having been declared “the worst seat in Major League Baseball,” because it was so damn far from home plate. But for a zany fanbase for a franchise which had become (in)famous for it’s absurdist promotions – from things like Funny Nose Glasses Night to Randy Johnson Dyslexic Jersey Night (he had changed from 51 to 15 to try and stem a losing skid) – obtaining that seat became almost a badge of honour. And even though it seemed MILES away from the field, it didn’t actually seem like a stretch that Jr. could hit one up there. Because the Kingdome, for being an unsightly mess of a place, was the ultimate hitters park.
And the Mariners set offensive records in the Kingdome’s dying days. With a top flight front office team – GM Pat Gillick and Manager Lou Piniella – they accrued so much talent in the late 1990s that they could make ill-advised deals at the trade deadline and still absorb the losses to their farm system. Not that it was much consolation at the time, of course – the dreaded Jason Varitek-for-Heathcliff Slocumb deal of 1998 still ruffles the feathers (but you’re welcome, Red Sox, for the M’s providing you with your captain and spiritual leader of your World Series winners) – as the Mariners still couldn’t break through and win the big one, but the franchise was on the rise and the attendance levels SOARED. The fans packed the new Safeco Field, a gorgeous park with a retractable roof and the Mariners continued to build.
How much talent did this team have? The 1998 Mariners had three legit Hall of Famers (Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, and Randy Johnson) and arguably a fourth (Edgar Martinez). Over the course of three years, they traded Jr. to the Reds, traded Johnson to the Astros, and A-Rod left in free agency. And after each departure, the team got better. This culminated in a remarkable 2001 season, during which the Mariners won 116 games, tying for the best record in history.
... aaand then they lost in the ALCS. To the damn Yankees. Sigh. They picked the wrong time to have a bad week. Sabermetric stat nerds who
It was a huge disappointment when the Mariners lost to the Yankees in the fall of 2001, but the future should’ve been bright. Here was a wildly successful team with 3,000,000+ in attendance, a bright new star in Ichiro and a legendary local hero in Edgar Martinez. How could anything go wrong?
Sigh.
The Mariners are owned by a consortium of local entrepreneurs. The original money behind the deal came from Hiroshi Yamauchi, the president of Nintendo, who lives in Japan and has never gone to see the team he owns play (not even when they played two games at the Tokyo Dome last year). Nintendo USA was HQ’d in Seattle, one of the many cutting-edge companies that boomed in the area in the 1980s – companies such as Microsoft, Costco, the oft-forgotten McCaw Cellular (who had a lot to do with those cute cell phones we all carry around now), and Starbucks. (Boo! ... but we’ll get to Mr. Schultz when we talk about the Sonics) Execs from a good number of local Fortune 500s bought into the Seattle Mariners, and the deal, from the get-go, has always been framed as being somewhat of a public trust. It was good for business to be seen as a good corporate citizen, and baseball fans in the Northwest were justifiably thankful to finally have solid local ownership (Mr. Yamauchi may have put up the money but his son-in-law, the president of Nintendo USA, had the actual voting rights on the Mariners’ board) who had saved the franchise.
But about the only thing the ownership of the Mariners has done in the past 12 years is remind people that they saved the franchise. And even though the Mariners had a good run of success from 1995-2003, they did nothing of note before that and have been a disaster ever since. The Manager’s position has been a revolving door since Lou Piniella left, and Pat Gillick’s replacement as GM, Bill Bavasi, was arguably one of the worst GM’s in history, letting the farm system wither while repeatedly signing over-the-hill and past-their-prime players to bloated free agent contracts. Players who frequently came to be despised by the fans for their underperformance, but such is the nature when you overpay for players – with huge salaries come huge expectations, and failure inevitably breeds contempt.
And, for about five years or so, from about 2003-2008, the Mariners seemed to make one awful signing or acquisition per season. Almost without fail, these were hitters, some of whom essentially got booed out of Seattle, and some of whom deserved it. But as much as you can blame Bill Bavasi for this, there was a bigger issue at play, an issue which came up when Bavasi made the seemingly logical move of giving a huge contract to Dodgers’ free agent 3B Adrian Beltre, who’d had a monstrous, MVP-caliber season the year before, and has resumed have monstrous, almost MVP-caliber seasons in Boston and Texas since. But during his five years in Seattle, Adrian Beltre was about a .275 hitter who’d launch majestic fly balls that would crash back to earth and land in the leftfielder’s glove. Surely, a hitter this good shouldn’t be that mediocre for the course of five years of his career, should he? How the hell is that possible?
It’s possible at Safeco Field, which, unlike the Kingdome, is a hitters graveyard. It’s a retractable roof stadium that management leaves open most of the time, even when it’s cold. The ball doesn’t carry and most fly balls hang up in the moist Seattle air and simply drop to earth. The dimensions are long, there is also a lot of foul territory, and the moist Seattle air means the grass grows thick, which is also bad news for hitters as it slows ground balls down. All of those factors, when combined, make for a terrible place to hit, and the Mariners have been hitting terribly for a decade. And the fact of the matter is that it’s always been a terrible place to hit. Hitters have been loathing Safeco Field since it first opened. It may be a good place to watch a game, but it’s a lousy place to play.
Now, you never quite know how a ballpark will play until you actually start playing in it. You can speculate, you can guess, but you can never be quite sure. But the fact is that the Mariners organization played a large part in designing this park, as the place was essentially customized for them. So someone gave the go-ahead for design and construction of a park where offense now goes to die. This coming off the heels of a stretch of winning Mariners baseball in the 1990s defined by home runs and record-setting offense. The whole franchise was geared towards offense back then. So, essentially, by building this pitcher-dominated park, the ownership of the organization did well to kill off the franchise’s greatest strength!
And you can work around park-related issues, of course. The Giants play in a park that’s also heavily in favour of the pitchers. The Giants solved that problem by building a championship pitching staff through their farm system (and having a superstar catcher behind the plate certainly helps). Other than Felix Hernandez, the Mariners organization hasn’t done a great job developing pitchers, either. It hasn’t really done a great job of anything other than coming up with more Ichiro bobblehead promotions, while the outfit on the field has seemed to play basically almost ironically at times, their ineptitude more infuriating than amusing.
Now, the 116-win season of 2001 is still fresh enough in everyone’s mind that management and a few apologist fans can say “the 2001 Mariners didn’t have trouble hitting.” But that’s because the 2001 Mariners didn’t have trouble hitting anywhere. How else do you think they won 116 games? But with transitions in management, incompetence settled in. The farm system dried up, shrewd trades ceased, the only way to acquire was to overpay and with it comes the perils of overpaying. It didn’t take long for the M’s to completely disintegrate. Three seasons after winning 116 games, they found themselves in last place – a position they’ve generally held ever since.
But the ownership saved baseball in Seattle, don’t you know? Never mind that that happened almost 20 years ago, which is two generations of players ago. And did you know they won 116 games in 2001? That was 12 years ago, for goodness sake. Sure, the franchise has managed to maintain profitability (which, to the corporate muckety mucks is really all that matters), but who really cares? It’s not the fans’ money to make, anyway – but it was the taxpayers’ of the state who ponied up $500,000,000 for the ballpark. What do they get out of the deal? They get a bad team on the field! So much for that notion of ‘public trust.' It was only a feel-good public trust when the club was winning and the fans were excited and prospects were bright. Now that they’re losing all the time, well, it’s a business, you know? And the business needs to stay financially viable.
And with years of neglect and decay comes shrinking fan support. The organization’s response to this over the years has been, well ... they haven’t really done anything. In fact, most of their moves seem to backfire, be they on the field or in the court of public relations.
Case in point being their currently stated opposition to the proposed building of a new arena on a tract of land near to Safeco Field. They make a nuanced argument, saying it will disrupt traffic patterns, etc., etc., while completely missing the bigger picture – this is a city whose sports fan psyche was damaged greatly when the Sonics moved to Oklahoma City. A new arena likely means not only
And now Edmonton disease has settled in, and on top of that comes what can now be known as the Adrian Beltre factor: a great hitter goes to Seattle, can’t hit for shit, leaves and goes elsewhere and starts hitting again. So, Mr. Big Bat Free Agent, why would you go to Seattle? Why would you take a big contract and get booed mercilessly when you hit .264 and all of your towering fly balls die in left field? Why would you play for a last place team in a cold, northern city in front of 25,000 empty seats? Such is the dilemma of the Seattle Mariners, a Siberian outpost of a franchise known for having a lousy park, lousy management, and lousy results on the field.
And when I watch a Mariners game on television, all that I notice are the empty seats. Seats which were once filled with vibrant, excited, enthusiastic fans. The fans are skeptical, cynical, and unwilling to except the crap put forth as product on the field. Like I say, they’ve lost 50% of their attendance in the past decade through a combination of mismanagement and poor performance. The new front office regime has pleaded for patience as they’ve gone about rebuilding the farm system and trying to reëstablish the talent pool. A wise move, of course, since no free agent in their right mind would ever want to play there. The only hope for the club is to grow from within, to develop a core group of players to build around.
But growth means growing pains and the natives are getting restless. The Mariners have restocked the farm system the past 4 years to the point where it's considered one of the best in baseball. There is potential there, but potential is a fancy word that means "you haven't done anything yet." They attempted to make some offseason moves to bolster the offense, but whiffed repeatedly and wound up trading for two guys (Mike Morse, Kendrys Morales) with big bats but also injury issues who are also in the last year of their contracts – guys who, of course, will likely leave next year if they have decent seasons, because why would you keep playing in a ballpark, and for a team, which will stunt and stifle your success?
But after years of stubbornly refusing to adjust the ballpark, the management finally capitulated and decided to move the fences in this year and try to make play fairer. The 2012 club seemed to be genuinely psychologically affected by the place, as the home/road splits of every offensive statistic were among the most skewed in baseball history. Watching them put up 21 runs in a game in Texas, then come home and hit .165 as a team on a homestand was absolutely maddening. Not only have they been bad, but they've been boring, which is about the worst possible combination in what is an entertainment industry.
The one thing the M’s fans have which truly brings them some greater joy about the game these days is watching Felix Hernandez – one of the great pitchers in this pitcher-dominated era – take to the hill every 5 days. Letting him get away would’ve been a P.R. disaster.
And P.R. disasters can be hard to overcome. The three pitchers the Mariners acquired when they traded Randy Johnson won quite a few games for the M’s, and certainly won more combined than Johnson did on his own in Houston and then Arizona. But no one cares about that, because Randy Johnson was one of the greatest pitchers in history! And the 116-win Mariners got to sit at home in 2001 and watch Randy Johnson win Game 7 of the World Series for the Arizona Diamondbacks. How on earth could you ever trade a guy like that? There were reasons, to be sure, and maybe even good reasons – in the case of Randy Johnson, they thought he was getting old and didn’t want to give him a big new contract. (It turned out he pitched well into his 40s!) But valid reasons can look awfully bad in hindsight in the ultimate results-oriented business.
And in hindsight, the Mariners really are terrible, and have been terrible for most of their existence. A good 10-year run which led to prosperity and a shiny ballpark has fooled a lot of people into thinking the club has been better than it really is. There is hope for improvement in the win column this year for no other reason than that realignment has given them 19 games with the Houston Astros this season. But they’re up against two big-money, glamourous franchises in their division – the Texas Rangers and the
But at least everyone involved had the good sense to keep King Felix around for seven more seasons. when you’re fan support is hemorrhaging this quickly, and you’ve created such ill will, you might have to overpay that star player of yours, the one who fans actually want to watch. It’s usually worth it, in the end. Perhaps he’ll get injured or lose another couple mph on his fastball, lose his effectiveness at an early age. It could happen. It could also happen that, as he enters his prime, King Felix takes his stunning talents to unprecedented levels. Either way, the Mariners organization showed to baseball, and particularly their own fans, that this decade-long Voyage of the Damned may finally be ending. It’s far too early to tell, but perhaps they’re making progress in righting this rudderless ship.
