SEATTLE — Not many things made Ken Griffey Jr. nervous on the baseball field during his playing days.
The former Seattle Mariners star center fielder was The Kid. He played with the kind of youthful easy-going demeanor that made the nickname the most apt of monikers. One glimpse of a Griffey smile while he graced the field banished any thoughts that this was an individual who could be afflicted by anything as insignificant as nerves.
So it was a different side of Griffey that revealed itself prior to Friday night’s Mariners home opener at Safeco Field, when he expressed a touch of apprehension about throwing out the first pitch.
“I’m just trying not to embarrass myself,” said Griffey, who emphasized he would throw his pitch from in front of the mound, not from on top of it. “I don’t know if I’m going to bounce it, throw it up to the radio, throw it in the dugout. I’ll try to figure out which angle I’m going to work with.”
While a Safeco Field regular-season-record crowd of 47,065 came out Friday for their first look at the 2016 Mariners, it was clear from the start that Griffey was the night’s star attraction. The love affair between the city of Seattle and Griffey is still popping the thermometer.
This year afforded the fans even more reason to express their appreciation. Friday night was the first opportunity for Seattle fans to acknowledge Griffey’s election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Griffey is the greatest of Mariners. He played 22 seasons in the majors from 1989-2010, including two stints with Seattle totaling 13 years. He was a 13-time All-Star, won 10 Gold Gloves, seven Silver Sluggers, and his 630 career home runs ranks sixth in major-league history — 417 of those round trippers coming with the Mariners.
Now he’s receiving baseball’s ultimate honor.
In January the Baseball Writers Association of America announced the results of this year’s Hall of Fame voting. Griffey, who was on the ballot for the first time, received 437 of a possible 440 votes, good for a record 99.3 percent. That bested the previous high-water mark of 98.84 percent by Tom Seaver in 1992.
And Griffey will be the first player to go into the Hall of Fame as a Mariner.
“It was a very easy decision for me to put on a Mariners hat to go into the Hall of Fame,” Griffey said. “That wasn’t even a question.
“For me, it’s trying to not get caught up,” Griffey added about dealing with the whirlwind that accompanies being elected to the Hall of Fame. “I’ve got a great support network of friends and family who don’t come to my house to talk about Hall of Fame stuff. Like I told everybody, the last thing I did that night was do the dishes, and then got to bed and caught a flight. But the Hall of Fame has also been pretty cool about not wanting to bother me.”
Griffey provided no hints as to what he may talk about in his induction speech, but he did say he’s working on it.
“I have been giving some thought about my speech,” Griffey said. “I still haven’t sat down and put pen to paper yet. But I do have some things I want to talk about.”
Griffey didn’t say whether he expected to feel any nerves during the Hall of Fame ceremony. But if he approaches it the way he did his playing career, there won’t be any worries about flubbed lines.
“I wasn’t intimidated by pitchers or in awe of the big leagues because I was able to step into a clubhouse, I was able to go out on the field,” said Griffey, who spent his childhood hanging around his dad’s team, the Cincinnati Reds. “There were certain things that prepared me for being out there at a younger age. The father-and-son game, everybody talks about the Big Red Machine being the greatest team on Earth. I keep telling everybody they’re the second-best team because they couldn’t beat us 9-year-olds every year we played them. But I was able to go out there and play in front of people at 7, 8, 9, 10, playing in front of 30,000 people right before a game at 5 o’clock, to play your dad. Then to go out there at 19, there’s not that much of a difference because I’d been there. I was prepared for it.”
But was he prepared to throw out a first pitch?
As Griffey walked out to the mound before Friday’s game, he was greeted by a standing ovation from the Safeco Field crowd. A new sign had just been unveiled in the stands in right-center, counting down the 107 days until Griffey’s official enshrinement in the Hall of Fame in July. If Griffey felt any butterflies as he acknowledged the crowd, it didn’t show.
“Like being a kid in a candy store,” was how Griffey described the feeling of being asked to through out the first pitch of the 2016 season at Safeco.
And Griffey’s nice-and-easy first pitch? It was of course a perfect strike.
Check out Nick Patterson’s Seattle Sidelines blog at http://www.heraldnet.com/seattlesidelines, and follow him on Twitter at @NickHPatterson.
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