A look at the history of the Mariners
Published 9:00 pm Saturday, June 9, 2007
Kirby Arnold covers the Mariners for The Herald. His new book – “Tales from the Seattle Mariners Dugout,” chronicling the stars, characters, funny moments and big games throughout the team’s 30-year history – is available wherever books are sold. Today is the first of three excerpts from the book The Herald will publish. The excerpts will run on three consectutive Sundays.
Always Room for JELL-O
The ‘77 team had its share of fun as the losses-and occasional victories-mounted. “They were just the normal pranks you’d find in any clubhouse,” pitcher Gary Wheelock said. “It was stuff like the three-man lift.”
Otherwise, that first team was fairly benign compared with the hi-jinx of later years. The king of the early pranks was the Mr. JELL-O Mystery of 1982.
Larry Andersen, a right-handed pitcher on the 1981-82 teams, conspired with teammates Richie Zisk and Joe Simpson on a prank against manager Rene Lachemann, who was a character himself.
No prank gained as much notoriety as what Andersen, Zisk and Simpson pulled on Lachemann on a road trip. After the team landed in Chicago, the three players went to a grocery store and bought 16 boxes of cherry JELL-O, then talked traveling secretary Lee Pelekoudas into giving them the key to Lachemann’s hotel room.
They poured several boxes of JELL-O into the toilet, bathtub and sink, then mixed it with a bucket of ice to allow the JELL-O to solidify. That wasn’t all of it. They took every piece of the furniture from the room-beds, mattresses, tables and chairs-and crammed them in the bathroom. Then they removed all the light bulbs from the fixtures, took the mouthpiece from the telephone, unplugged the clock and strung toilet paper around the empty room.
“Anything we could think of, we did,” Andersen said in a 2001 interview with astrosdaily.com, a website covering the Houston Astros, where he played in the late 1980s. “He came back from a night out and poof, his room was no longer a room.”
Lachemann later praised the creativity of the prank, but not before he threatened to call the authorities and have the players fingerprinted and subjected to lie detector tests. Lachemann never followed through to that extent, even though the Mr. JELL-O Mystery continued to have twists and turns the next few months.
“Every place we went the rest of that season, there was JELL-O,” Lachemann said. “I had a meeting after a game one day with my coaches, Dave Duncan and Bill Plummer. We’d usually have a beer when we got together like that. Those two took one drink of their beer and then spit the stuff out. It turned out someone has gotten into our cans of beer and figured a way to pour out all the beer and replace it with JELL-O.
“It was amazing.”
The pranksters didn’t reveal themselves until the Mariners held their season-ending party. Andersen, Simpson and Zisk appeared with their heads covered by bags that were made to look like JELL-O boxes and taunted Lachemann a final time with a game of “What’s My Line.”
“In all the years I’ve been in the game, that’s the best prank I’ve ever seen,” Lachemann said in 2006. “It was a great, great prank and it went on the whole year.”
