To most sports fans in the Pacific Northwest, Ken Griffey Jr. is the crown prince of Seattle baseball.
But to me Griffey is so much more. To me Griffey is Seattle baseball.
Griffey will be officially ensconced in the Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday, and as someone who grew up in Seattle during the 1980s and 90s, for me Griffey embodies the city’s step into the real world of Major League Baseball.
Before Griffey arrived in 1989 the Mariners were the most irrelevant franchise in all of American professional sports. They had a tight-fisted owner named George Argyros who sold off young talent such as Mark Langston, Danny Tartabull and Dave Henderson before those players could make any real money, then tried to trumpet the arrivals of the likes of Barry Bonnell and Milt Wilcox as “big” free-agent signings. As a result, Seattle was forever a city devoid of stars.
It was hard being a Mariners fan back then. Through their first 14 seasons, the Mariners failed to finish above .500 even once. By the time late August rolled around, the Kingdome would be so empty that it became simple for a certain youngster and his buddy to hop onto a bus headed downtown, walk up to the ticket booth, purchase the cheapest seats, then immediately head for the front rows. You know the age-old question about a tree falling in the woods? Well, if a baseball team played a game and nobody was there to see it …
That all changed with the arrival of Griffey. Here was this 19-year-old kid oozing with talent and possessing a charismatic, carefree personality one couldn’t help but gravitate toward.
Suddenly Seattle baseball mattered.
I remember walking down the hallway of my school, groups of students milling around their lockers. Before Griffey there was never any chatter about the Mariners from anyone other than the diehards. But after Griffey, I began hearing classmates who had no connections to sports whatsoever marveling over Griffey’s exploits from the previous night.
ESPN was still something of a novelty at the time, but SportsCenter was a staple in my household. Before Griffey the reports of Mariners games tended to be limited to a graphic showing the final score sometime toward the end of the half hour. After Griffey, the national audience was finally exposed to highlights of the Mariners on a regular basis — with Griffey’s stunning catches in center field often the subject of those highlights.
Need evidence of just how much Griffey captured the imagination of the region? In the Mariners’ 12 seasons before Griffey the average annual attendance was 966,790. During Griffey’s 11 seasons of his first stint in Seattle, the average annual attendance more than doubled to 2,081,039. The perpetual rumors of the Mariners relocating also came to an end during Griffey’s tenure, with the government’s agreement to build Safeco Field in 1995 finally ensuring we had a baseball team to follow in Seattle for good.
And it’s no coincidence that team success followed Griffey to Seattle. The Mariners finally eclipsed that ever-elusive .500 mark in 1991, Griffey’s third season with the team. Seattle’s first two trips to the postseason came with Griffey batting in the No.3 hole, and he provided the team’s iconic image when he scored the game-winning run in the decisive Game 5 of the American League Division Series against the New York Yankees in 1995, his beaming face at the bottom of a dog pile of teammates beside home plate.
There have been many great players who have come through Seattle since Griffey. Some, like Edgar Martinez, are equally beloved by Mariners fans. But none of them transformed Seattle baseball the way Griffey did.
When Griffey’s Hall of Fame plaque is unveiled, his visage will be wearing a Mariners cap. He’s not the first former Seattle player to be elected to the Hall of Fame — Gaylord Perry, Goose Gossage, Rickey Henderson and Randy Johnson all beat him to Cooperstown. But Griffey is the first who chose to go in as a Mariner.
What could be more appropriate? After all, Griffey is Seattle baseball.
For more on the Seattle sports scene, follow Nick Patterson on Twitter at @NickHPatterson.
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