When the Seattle Mariners hired Rick Griffin as their trainer 25 years ago, they paid him a whopping $19,000.
It was the big time, just not big money, even by 1983 standards.
“And I took a pay cut to take this job,” said Griffin, who left his job as a high school teacher in Oregon to join the Mariners.
Dan O’Brien, the Mariners’ general manager in 1983, hired Griffin with the promise that he’d find ways to make up the difference.
“But he got fired and nothing was ever done,” Griffin said.
It’s a tough business, but Griffin stuck it out and let’s just say he’s doing well for himself now. This is his 26th season as the Mariners’ head trainer and, during their last homestand, he worked his 4,000th game.
Since 1983, he has missed only three games — when his youngest daughter was born, and when his other two daughters graduated from high school.
“I remember a few years ago when it was 3,000 games. I didn’t think much of it,” he said. “But as you get older you start to realize the magnitude of 4,000 games. That’s a lot of games.”
Nothing was like that first year.
For one thing, Griffin didn’t realize there was no assistant trainer. Oh, and nobody bothered to mention that when the team went on the road, the trainer also served as the equipment manager. The Mariners’ equipment manager then rarely traveled, so Griffin taped ankles in the afternoon and packed away gear at night.
Whatever. He was in the big leagues and thrilled about it.
“I look back now and wonder how I did that,” he said. “Take care of all the guys and be equipment manager on the road. How did I do that? But when you are young, you just do it and don’t even think about it.”
Griffin worked alone for seven years before Jeff Smulyan, just after he’d bought the team, asked if there was anything he could do that would help him do his job better.
“I told him it would be extremely beneficial if we had an assistant trainer. Every other team had one,” Griffin said. “He said fine and we got one.”
Griffin now has three others helping him and, at Safeco Field, they work in one of the most up-to-date training facilities in baseball. And he doesn’t deal with equipment on the road.
Still, there was nothing like that first year — the good and the bad.
“I grew up in Utah and my favorite team was the Yankees. It so happened that the first game that year was against the Yankees,” Griffin said. “It was a great experience for me because that was the first major league game I ever got to watch. To sit on the bench in a game against the Yankees and watch us win was memorable.”
He also discovered the cruel reality of baseball. He would walk into the clubhouse to learn that manager Rene Lachemann had been fired, or Gaylord Perry traded, or Todd Cruz headed to Baltimore and Julio Cruz to the White Six.
“I didn’t expect stuff like that to happen,” he said. “It was amazing to me that from one day to the next half the guys were gone. And we lost a lot — 102 games. The three things I remember most about my first year were opening day, fact we lost so many games and that baseball was a business.”
Griffin has worked on Jay Buhner’s joints, Edgar Martinez’s hamstrings, Randy Johnson’s bad back and Dan Wilson’s oblique. He sprinted into the Kingdome outfield in 1995 to find that Ken Griffey Jr. had shattered his wrist.
No injury was as bad as the one he witnessed in 1985, when Donell Nixon broke his leg during a spring training game in Sun City, Ariz.
“I was walking around the outfield before the game and noticed that the outfield wall was brick,” Griffin said. “There was no padding. And it was really uneven, with some of the bricks sticking out about four inches. We told everybody in the pregame meeting not to run into the wall. Donell was playing center field and he ran full-speed into the wall, and his shinbone hit one of those bricks — compound fracture of both bones in his left leg. To this day it’s the worst injury I’ve seen in baseball.”
Griffin thought he might do this job about 10 years, then move to something else, probably teaching again. Instead, this is the beginning of his 26th season in the big leagues and he’s still loving it.
“It took so long for us to become a good team, then Lou Piniella came and we started to have better teams and started winning,” Griffin said. “Everything is more fun when you win. The goal is trying to get to the World Series. Whether you are a player, manager or trainer, you want to help your team get to the World Series. I enjoy what I do and enjoy the people I work with.”
Kirby Arnold is The Herald’s major league baseball writer
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