(soft music)
- [Jon] The story of the Seattle Mariners
is extraordinarily weird
and it takes a very long time to tell,
so let's not waste any time.
This story begins the only
way it ever could've begun:
with 140 acts of arson.
Robert Bruce Driscoll,
seen here in handcuffs
after he was finally caught in 1935,
was a transient who had
struggled to find work
in the wake of the Great Depression.
This era engendered hatred of the rich
and capitalism in general
in many people, including Driscoll.
In the New Deal 1930s,
while those in power were
busy trying to cobble together
a kinder, gentler type of capitalism,
Driscoll took a more direct
approach: setting stuff on fire.
One official described him as,
"The most dangerous pyromaniac
"ever known on the Pacific coast."
Over the course of several years,
he destroyed at least $18
million worth of property
in today's money,
indiscriminately setting fire
to factories, lumber mills,
churches, and a baseball stadium.
Dugdale Field was a small
but adequate ballpark
that served as home to the
minor league Seattle Indians.
Late at night on July 4th, 1932,
Driscoll gathered some game
programs that were lying around,
used 'em to set the grandstands on fire,
retreated to a nearby hill,
and watched the whole thing burn down.
When it did, the team
was forced to relocate
to Civic Stadium.
The thing to know about Civic Stadium
is that it couldn't
really be called a field
because the term 'field' implies grass,
which Civic Stadium didn't quite have.
The playing area was almost entirely dirt.
It was described as a mudhole,
everyone hated it, attendance cratered,
and the Indians were in
serious financial trouble.
The person who kept the team
in Seattle was Emil Sick,
a local beer magnate who
bought the team in 1937
and renamed it the Seattle Rainiers.
Among the promises he delivered on
was the construction
of a brand new ballpark
built right on top of the
burned-down Dugdale Field.
It was described as one of
the finest on the continent.
In other words, it was a sick stadium.
It was named Sick Stadium.
We move forward now to the
1960s, when Major League Baseball
is playing musical chairs
with American cities.
It's the perfect time for Seattle
to try and lure a major sports team.
And thanks in part to our arsonist friend,
Sick's Stadium is there
to serve as the bait.
The Cleveland Indians, Milwaukee Braves,
and Kansas City Athletics
all express interest,
but plans to expand the ballpark
to Major League capacity fall through
and discussions stall out.
The Kansas City A's end up
moving to Oakland instead,
which makes a very
important person very upset.
Missouri Senator Stuart Symington
is furious over losing the A's
and demands that the American League
put a team back in KC as soon as possible.
In 1960, he lost the Democratic
presidential primary to JFK.
And it's been alleged that Kennedy
was all set to pick
Symington as his running mate
until Lyndon Johnson, again, allegedly,
blackmailed his way into the position.
Whatever the case,
Symington ultimately
receives a consolation prize
in the founding of the Kansas City Royals
after Symington threatened
to pursue legislation
that would jeopardize
Major League Baseball's
precious antitrust exemption,
which essentially allowed
it to operate as a monopoly.
This could’ve cost MLB tons of money,
so they caved in and the Royals were born.
Now, the Royals were scheduled
to begin play in 1971.
Since the American League
wanted to expand in pairs,
they awarded a second
expansion franchise to Seattle,
with the estimation that
three years and change
was enough time to renovate Sick's Stadium
into a Major League park.
But Symington raised hell.
He didn't wanna wait three years
for the Kansas City Royals.
He wanted them now.
Desperate to escape his wrath,
AL owners met in the middle of the night
and bumped up the Royals'
opening day by two years,
and the same applied
for Seattle's new team.
In the strangest way, it had all happened.
A serial arsonist
necessitated the construction
of a new stadium that, decades later,
served as the bargaining chip necessary
for Seattle to land a
Major League Baseball team.
In 1969, the Seattle Pilots were born.
(soft electronic music)
Pilots are gone.
(soft saxophone music)
- [Alex] So, after their maiden voyage
in the Pacific Northwest,
the Pilots took off and
headed east to Milwaukee
to become the Brewers,
which is completely asinine
and nearly unprecedented
in the four major American
professional sports leagues,
but not completely unprecedented.
And in fact, ironically enough,
the lone other instance of an MLB team
up and leaving their original
city after a single year
also involved an organization
known as the Milwaukee Brewers.
They were MLB's worst team,
struggled to draw fans,
and incurred massive debt,
so they were sold for 40-grand
and moved to St. Louis for a while
before eventually settling
in as the Baltimore Orioles.
Over in pro football,
the Chargers spent their debut
season in Los Angeles in 1960
and simply couldn't generate
enough fan interest,
as the LA Coliseum was
generally about 90% empty
for their games.
When San Diego swooped in
and offered a temporary
place to play for free,
the Chargers packed their bags
and headed two hours
south to forever make moot
the issue of no one in
LA caring about them.
Meanwhile, the Dallas
Texans won a championship
in just their third year
of existence in 1962,
but hated sharing a market
with the Cowboys so much
that they still bailed immediately
after that to Kansas City
and renamed the Chiefs.
The closest anyone came in the NBA
was when the team now known
as the Washington Wizards
kicked off their first
couple years in Chicago
before relocating to Baltimore
and adopting the Bullets moniker,
while the Rockets only made
it four years in San Diego
before shoddy attendance
resulted in a sale
that had 'em Houston-bound in 1971,
which, given their astronomical name,
I could’ve called from day one.
The Tri-Cities Blackhawks
did move to Milwaukee
after two years in the NBA,
but they'd been around
for a few years prior
in a league known as the NBL.
And in the NHL, after just two seasons,
the Kansas City Scouts
were hemorrhaging money,
which led to their sale
and move to Colorado
before ultimately becoming
the New Jersey Devils.
So, the Seattle Pilots
becoming the Milwaukee Brewers
joined just the Chargers
and … Milwaukee Brewers
as truly changing markets
after their initial season.
They were the last ones to do it.
And now, more than a half-century removed,
it's hard to imagine they
won't remain that way forever.
- [Jon] The reason they left
really wasn't that complicated.
As a minor league park,
Sick's Stadium was fine.
If they'd had enough time to prepare,
they probably could’ve built it
into a serviceable Major League stadium.
They did not have enough time,
and Sick's Stadium was
an absolute hellhole.
(uneasy electronic music)
Thanks to Senator Symington's
impatience and a rough winter,
the renovation project derailed.
They'd managed to slap
together some bleachers,
but builders were still scrambling
to put 'em together on Opening Day.
Fans were lined up waiting to get in
and once they finished
building a row of bleachers,
they'd let a few more of 'em through.
The visitors press box had an
obstructed view of left field
and whenever a ball was hit there,
announcers had to turn around
and watch the game through a mirror.
There was nowhere for
photographers to set up,
so they had to take all their photos
while sitting way up
on the grandstand roof,
which probably explains
why there are so few photos
of Seattle Pilots home games.
But what really did 'em
in was the plumbing,
which worked pretty well
when it accommodated around 10,000 people.
Over the years, whenever
it drew sellout crowds
of around 14,000,
it typically had a little
trouble with overflow.
But at its new 25,000-seat
maximum capacity,
the stadium became a biohazard.
The whole place completely
lost water pressure.
Players had to go home or
head back to their hotel rooms
just to take a shower.
Concessions workers
couldn't wash their hands.
Toilets wouldn't flush.
And since the toilets wouldn't flush,
they had to lug in portable toilets.
The Pilots' former PR
director, Bill Sears,
once recalled a story.
The morning after a night game,
a team employee walks past some portajohns
and he hears pounding.
He unlocks the door and
out runs a terrified man.
Stadium workers had locked the doors,
not realizing he had passed out inside.
He'd been trapped there all night.
(unsettling electronic music)
Sick's Stadium was torn
down just a decade later.
And the place where it once stood
is now occupied by a Lowe's.
Out front, near the loading area,
there's an unceremonious
little monument to the Pilots:
a standup of a batter propped up
next to the original
location of home plate
holding eternal watch over
a flock of lumber carts.
It's so obviously in everybody's way.
It's gotta be a matter of time
before some fed-up employee
rips it out and throws it in storage.
But for the moment, it's here
and it's all that remains
of the one and only season
of the Seattle Pilots,
one of the worst ideas
in the history of Major League Baseball.
Let's take one last moment to appreciate
that this stadium is
literally named Sick's Stadium
and then close the door
on this chapter forever.
As quickly as the Seattle
Pilots came, they were gone.
However...
(pulsating electronic music)
Anticipating the arrival of the Pilots,
the city had, in the late-'60s,
already allocated funding
for a brand new stadium.
Seattle was so determined
to land a baseball team
and an NFL team that they
broke ground on the site
before the city was promised either one.
The Kingdome was a cavernous
all-purpose indoor arena
with about three times as many seats
as Sick's Stadium ever had.
It wasn't blind faith, though.
A lawsuit first threatened in 1970
as a means of keeping baseball in Seattle
had spent all decade looming
over the American League.
It finally went to court in 1976.
And for the second time in 10 years,
the league responded to a lawsuit
with a resounding, "Fine, whatever,"
and granted Seattle a
brand new baseball team.
To name the team, they
turned to the public
and asked for submissions.
The winning entry, Mariners, was submitted
by a Bellevue man named Roger Szmodis.
The team announced that in recognition,
Szmodis would be awarded season tickets.
But they couldn't find him.
They went to his apartment.
They left him messages.
After several weeks, nothing.
Roger Szmodis had vanished.
So far, we've been unable
to dig up any evidence
that he was ever found.
But thanks to him, we have
a word for whatever it is
the last 43 years have been.
This team was delivered
to us through arson,
political strong-arming, poopy toilets,
a lawsuit, and a missing person.
Every team has its highs
and lows, frustration,
heartbreak, greatness, and confusion.
But no other team is like this one.
The Seattle Mariners
are eminently lovable,
profoundly human, and
stunningly, outrageously weird.
You may not buy this yet, but
believe us when we say it:
There is no more fascinating team
across the entire history
of American sports.
(pulsating electronic music)
- [Alex] Those Mariners began play in 1977
and I love their first year so much.
Here, we see their game-by-game timeline.
In game number five, they
fell to a losing record
and never again made it back to .500.
And thanks to a late-season slide,
they finished their first
campaign with a 64-98 record.
But my favorite part about it
is how often they just laid
down for their opponent.
On nine different occasions,
they lost by double-digit runs
when no one else in MLB
that year outside Atlanta
absorbed even half as many bludgeonings.
Five of those nine Seattle
disasters came in August too,
meaning they accomplished
within a single calendar month
what 24 of the other 25 teams didn't
throughout the entire season,
a season that set the tone
for their first decade of existence,
which, by the way,
featured 40 such whoopings.
They lost at least 95 games in
six of their first 10 seasons
and were on pace for a seventh
were it not for a
strike-shortened 1981 season.
Altogether, they lost
924 games in that period,
over 60 more than anyone else.
A look at run differential
is an even scarier sight.
Powered by five
dead-last-in-MLB finishes
in their first 10 seasons,
they allowed nearly 1,400 more runs
than they scored in that time,
which is over 70% worse
than the second-worst team.
Needless to say, they never even sniffed
the top of the AL West to gain
entry into the postseason.
This green bar indicates the record
of the division winner that season;
in other words, the number of wins
the Mariners would have
needed to reach the playoffs.
Excluding the strike campaign,
they finished an average of 26.7 games
out of playoff position
each time the curtain closed on a season.
Year after year, their September games
were about as meaningful
as the human appendix.
Even worse, whereas plenty of teams
at least have some star power
or reasons for excitement,
the first era of Mariner
baseball lacked in all that.
In none of those 10 seasons
did the Mariners have a starting pitcher
with an ERA under 3.00.
They didn't have a player reach
even 30 homers in a season
until year nine, when
Gorman Thomas hit 32.
The very best players
that had come through their organization
were pretty anonymous names
that would've been merely
run-of-the-mill players
on virtually any other team.
Their top pitchers were guys
like Floyd Bannister and Jim Beattie.
Their best bats during this
time were perhaps Bruce Bochte
and, even though he
didn't even peak for them
until later on, Alvin Davis.
If you're familiar with them,
you know they weren't exactly
folks that put asses in seats.
If you're not familiar with them,
well, they weren't exactly
folks that put asses in seats.
So, why in the world would
anyone watch this team?
(soft electronic music)
- [Jon] If you choose to appreciate sports
simply in terms of winning and losing,
there is nothing for you here.
If it's meaningful drama
you want, you're outta luck.
Even if all you're after is
a narrative arc of any kind,
I'm sorry, we're sold out.
All the early Mariners have to offer
is a scattering of bizarre stories,
most of which involve some
form or another of fraud.
- [Alex] Toward the tail
end of the 1980 season,
Mariners pitcher Rick Honeycutt
had a once-promising season
spiraling away from him.
Through 10 starts that year,
he was one of the league's best pitchers,
had an ERA under 2.50.
But then, by late-September,
he was reeling.
His ERA had ballooned to nearly 5.00
across starts 11 through 29,
leading up to a ballgame in Kansas City.
In the third inning of that one,
Royals leftfielder Willie
Wilson tripled off him
and, while standing on third base,
noticed some happenings on the mound
that smelled fishier than a stroll
through Pike Place Market.
Wilson urged the umpire
to check out both the ball
and Honeycutt's hand.
Sure enough, in an effort to
combat his recent struggles,
he was discovered to have
taped a dang thumbtack
against his finger to cut the baseball.
That's gotta be one of the stupidest,
most obvious ways to cheat,
just even in a vacuum.
But Honeycutt made it
worse, so much worse.
Honeycutt somehow just
totally forgot about
the presence of said
thumbtack, rubbed his face,
and in the process lacerated his forehead,
almost poking his eye out
and leading to a 10-game suspension.
Naturally, once his
playing days were done,
Honeycutt would eventually go on
to have a lengthy second
career as a pitching coach.
- [Jon] The next Mariners season,
the strike-shortened 1981,
is one of the dumbest seasons imaginable.
At first, they're managed by Maury Wills,
who has parlayed an excellent
career as a shortstop
into one of the most
disastrous managerial careers
in the history of baseball.
Maury Wills was baseball's equivalent
of the modern-day venture
capital startup guy.
Despite never having
managed a baseball game,
he wrote a book claiming
that he and he alone
was going to disrupt baseball
and guaranteed that he
would turn a last-place team
into a World Series
champion in just four years.
Well, you can see how that went.
Among all those who have
managed at least 50 games,
he has one of the worst
winning percentages we've seen
since World War II.
And among those who began their careers
in the '80s and '90s,
he's the worst by miles.
In terms of strategy,
managing a baseball team
is far less complicated
than coaching a football
or basketball team.
So, what does it mean
then to be a bad manager?
Leave the demonstration to Maury Wills,
who found every conceivable
way to be bad at his job.
For one, he was always full of it.
When Rick Honeycutt was
thrown outta that game
after the thumbtack incident,
Wills said he didn't
understand why he was ejected
because the explanation was confusing.
There was no way that was
a confusing conversation.
It goes something like, "Your
pitcher taped a thumbtack
"to his finger and you're
not allowed to do that."
But Wills never seemed
to own up to anything.
Everything was always
someone else's fault,
usually his players.
They couldn't stand him
and they were only kinda
joking when they suggested
that they should start
losing games on purpose
to get him fired sooner.
Wills was this odd combination
of authoritarian and checked-out.
The authoritarian side of him
would wake up his players
in the middle of the night
to make sure they were in
bed and chase after kids
who caught home runs
during batting practice.
The checked-out side of him
would talk about starting players
who had been traded away a month ago
and head for the airport
in the middle of a Spring Training game.
As skipper, Wills made
so many tactical errors
that it would take another 10
minutes to go through 'em all.
But one stands alone as the
most thunderously stupid idea
of his managerial career.
(soft music)
Prior to a home game against
the Oakland A's on April 25th,
Wills pulls aside the team's groundskeeper
and tells him to illegally
paint the batter's boxes
longer than the rule book specifies.
It now sticks an extra
foot toward the field.
The alleged benefit is
that one of Wills' hitters,
Tom Paciorek, will get a little extra room
to step forward as he swings.
The drawback is that
during a baseball game,
there is a person whose job it is
to stand right here
and stare at the field.
He's known as an umpire
and he's been standing here
for three hours a day
for many, many years.
If anything looks different,
he will immediately recognize it.
So, in Wills' desperate effort
to keep the Mariners from
getting caught for something,
he 100% guarantees they will
get caught for something else.
When they do and he's suspended,
he says he's shocked and dumbfounded.
Yeah, man, me too.
I thought that was gonna work for sure.
And he's fired a few weeks later,
ending one of the funniest
managerial stints ever.
"He's dumb," says Brad Gulden,
the Mariners journeyman
catcher, who, by the way,
is traded to the Yankees
shortly thereafter.
Gulden ended up in
Seattle in the first place
because the Yankees traded him there
for a player to be named later,
which is a fairly common
practice in baseball.
It turns out the player to be
named later is Brad Gulden,
who returns to the Yankees
and becomes the second
player in baseball history
to be traded for himself.
- [Alex] Also in that '81 season,
more fun stuff in a Mariners-Royals game.
In the sixth inning of
their May 27th affair,
KC centerfielder Amos Otis
hit this little dribbler
up the third-base line.
Then, Seattle third baseman
and part-time stand-up comic Lenny Randle
did something you don't see every day,
something completely awesome.
This.
That's right.
He got down on all fours
and began furiously huffing and puffing
and blowing at the ball in
an effort to send it foul,
and it worked!
Well, sort of.
His Three Little Pigs routine
did indeed manipulate
the ball over the chalk.
And initially, it was ruled a foul ball,
with the home plate umpire
unable to think of any specific rule
against blowing the ball.
But for the second year in a
row, Royals manager Jim Frey
was unamused by more Mariner
ball-altering shenanigans,
voicing his displeasure to
home plate umpire Larry McCoy.
Unfortunately, McCoy
then changed his mind,
refusing to just be cool and
appreciate Randle's goof,
instead awarding first base to Otis.
This is something I've
definitely thought about
as it pertains to golf.
If a putt stops just short,
settling on the lip of the hole,
I wanna see golfers get
down and blow it in.
Randle, for the record, claims innocence,
that he was merely yelling
at the ball to go foul.
- [Jon] Oh, and a quick
note on Lenny Randle,
who was a pretty weak hitter
in his Major League Baseball career.
After retiring in 1982, he
resurfaced in Italy a year later,
hit .502, and became the
god of Italian baseball.
But 1981 isn't through
with the Mariners yet.
Just a few days after Randle's heroics,
we see Seattle
rightfielder Jeff Burroughs
being tagged out at home
by the Rangers' Larry Cox.
Cox is wearing the Rangers logo.
Burroughs is also
wearing the Rangers logo.
Two teams with the same hats.
It's probably the only time
this has ever happened,
and I think it's great.
Always makes me cringe a little
whenever I see two baseball teams
playing against each other,
because they would accomplish so much more
if they were all on the same team
and they worked together
to achieve their goals.
But sadly, the reality is
a little bit more mundane.
The Mariners' caps, helmets, and jerseys
were stolen from the Rangers' stadium.
They did at least have
their practice jerseys,
but they had to borrow some of
the Rangers' batting helmets
to wear to the plate.
They also through a
third team into the mix
by hitting up the stadium gift shop
and grabbing Milwaukee Brewers
caps to wear in the field,
choosing them because
they closely resembled
the Mariners' color scheme.
This, of course, is because the Brewers
stole the color scheme from
Seattle in the first place
when they packed up and left town.
Anyway, freed from the oppression
of being the Seattle Mariners
for one night, they win 5-3.
In the standings, 1981 was yet another
genuinely meaningless
season of Seattle baseball,
but it was a big year
for a couple of Mariners.
Reliever Larry Andersen had
languished in the minors
for an entire decade before pitching well
and finally securing a
permanent roster spot.
In the next season, he
finally got his very own
Major League Baseball card
Whoops, they spelled his name wrong.
1981 was also the year
manager Rene Lachemann
took the reins from Maury Wills.
And although the Mariners
finished well below .500,
he earned the respect of his players
and was kept on as the
permanent manager for 1982.
This, of course, earned him
his very own baseball card.
Whoops, they spelled his name wrong too.
Now, both of these cards
were from the Donruss
Card Company's 1982 set.
I looked through this entire 830-card set
and I didn't find misspellings
of players on any other
team, only Mariners.
This was no coincidence.
Even to those in the baseball business,
these guys were strangers, but not to us.
Under Lachemann, the
Mariners' sixth season
was their best yet.
They'd managed to take a winning record
all the way into August,
which they'd never before
come anywhere close to doing.
But who cares?
There were greater matters at hand.
Because, for Rene Lachemann,
this was the summer of Mr. Jello.
(quirky music)
News of the incident
hits papers nationwide
on July 4th, 1982, exactly
50 years to the day
after Robert Bruce
Driscoll's act of destruction
set this endless chain
of events into motion.
The night prior,
Lachemann returns to his
hotel suite in Chicago.
It's a luxury suite,
complete with two bathrooms
and quite well-furnished.
But when Lachemann enters,
he finds that everything has disappeared.
The paintings are gone from the walls.
The furniture is missing.
He reaches to turn on a light.
Nothing.
The bulb has been removed.
Lachemann stumbles in
darkness to the bedroom
and feels for his bed.
It isn't there.
The walls are empty here as well.
How is this possible?
Perhaps the bathroom light works.
(suspenseful electronic music)
All his furniture is
piled up in the bathroom.
He turns to look at the toilet.
The toilet is full of Jell-O.
Lachemann races to the other bathroom.
The other toilet is also full of Jell-O.
He finds that the wall
telephone is still there.
He attempts to call his
fellow coaches and players.
He can hear them, but
they cannot hear him.
The mouthpiece has been
removed from the phone.
No one can hear his screams.
Lachemann sleeps on the floor that night.
The next day, he dedicates himself
to bringing the perpetrator to justice,
offering a reward of hundreds of dollars
for information leading to the culprit.
This week, the Mariners will
go seven games above .500,
which the Mariners have never done
and will never do again until 1991.
But who cares about that?
There is toilet mystery afoot.
At first, Lachemann suspects
ex-Mariner Tom Paciorek,
who now plays for the nearby White Sox
and lives in the area.
When Paciorek supplies a convincing alibi,
the trail goes cold.
The remainder of the season,
Lachemann is haunted by
anonymous room service orders
for plates full of Jell-O that
are delivered to his suite.
Who would do this to the team's manager?
Surely not a player,
who has every incentive
not to get on his bad side.
And yet, when the chief
collaborator reveals himself
at season's end, it turns out to be
someone who had everything to lose.
(soft electronic music)
Larry Andersen, one of baseball history's
all-time greatest pranksters,
had talked his way into
getting Lachemann's room key
and orchestrated the entire thing.
After finally clawing
his way into the bigs,
Andersen is having an
awful 1982 on the mound.
At the time of the
incident his ERA is 5.91,
absolutely bad enough
to get him sent back down to the minors.
And if that happens at age 29,
his career is just about done.
Why in the world would he give Lachemann
any more reason to ship him out?
Well, listen, you've gotta
occupy yourself with something,
and that something cannot be baseball,
because baseball is really boring.
- [Alex] Let's move forward
a few years to 1985.
Going into July 9th,
the Mariners were 41-40,
entering the second-half of the season
with a winning record,
an extremely rare feet for this ball club.
They hosted Toronto that day
in what was the 622nd
game they'd ever played
in a season's back half.
But it was just the 26th
that they entered above .500,
the previous 25 coming in that '82 season.
And as we'll see, they clearly had no idea
how to conduct themselves in
such unfamiliar territory.
They got a rally going in the third inning
with Phil Bradley in scoring position
and less than two out for
cleanup hitter Gorman Thomas,
who banged this hit to right.
Jesse Barfield fielded it
and fired a beautiful throw
home in time to get Bradley,
but this one resulted
in a massive collision
with Blue Jays catcher Buck Martinez,
who shattered his leg
and dislocated his ankle.
Thomas, a good pal of Martinez's
from their three years as
teammates in Milwaukee,
tried to take advantage
of that incapacitation
by advancing to third base.
Martinez still noticed
and was able to get a throw off to third,
but it sailed into left field,
where George Bell scooped it
up and launched a throw home,
where Thomas was attempting to complete
the 360-foot jaunt around the base path.
And who was on the receiving
end of that throw home?
Why, it's the catcher,
who's still writhing around on the ground,
completely and literally broken.
No matter; he's got a job to do.
Martinez hauls in the throw
and applies the tag to his buddy,
who mercifully took his foot off the gas
to avoid another collision.
Thus, MLB's first ever
9-2-7-2 double play was born.
The Mariners had done
the seemingly impossible.
They figured out a way
to get multiple players
thrown out at home by
multiple different outfielders
on the same play.
Astonishing stuff from the M's,
who would go on to lose 9-4,
in the process kicking off
a new multiyear drought
of not entering any second-half
game with a winning record.
- [Jon] A 1985 survey asked
Seattle-area residents
to name their favorite Mariner.
The vast majority responded
that they didn't know any.
Every Mariners retrospective
has to find something from
this era to talk about,
as much as we wish we could
begin the story in the '90s.
Usually, the greatest
achievement we can come up with
is Gaylord Perry's 300th win in 1982.
Even then, Perry was a journeyman
who just happened to be a
Mariner the day he did it.
Oh, but lest you doubt
he was a real Mariner,
he'd be ejected and suspended
a couple months later
for doctoring the ball with Vaseline.
Alongside Alvin Davis,
the most recognizable
player of the early years
is probably Harold Reynolds,
a two-time All-Star
who was one of the best defensive
second basemen of his era.
He was also known for being
thrown out on the bases,
which he can't really
be blamed for entirely.
The Mariners utilized
Reynolds, a very fast guy,
as a very, very, very fast guy.
In 1988, the consequence was
the most counterproductive
stolen base campaign of the last 90 years.
Here is every player
who's ever been caught
at least 25 times in a season,
plotted as a percentage of
their stolen base attempts.
In the 1910s, players went for
steals with reckless abandon
before everyone seemingly
realized at the same time
that it was a really bad idea.
About 50 years later,
stealing came back into vogue
before everyone realized this again.
Exhibit A was 1988 Harold Reynolds,
who was caught 29 times against
just 35 successful steals.
In fact, Reynolds' top
YouTube search result
from his playing career is a
clip of him being thrown out.
It's one of the most memorable clips
in Bo Jackson's endless highlight reel.
From the warning track, he
ignores the cutoff man entirely
and fires an impossibly
perfect strike into home.
After the game, Reynolds was reportedly
sitting in front of a VCR,
watching it over and over again,
trying to figure out how
the hell it happened.
This is how it was for
the Mariners back then.
They just kind of experienced
the baseball other teams were playing.
They weren't anyone's rival.
They weren't even a national laughingstock
in the way some other teams were.
They simply did not register.
As it concerns the Mariners,
the only real important story
was beginning on the other side
of the country in The Bronx.
The year is most likely 1983.
The Yankees manager is Billy Martin.
Over the course of his managerial career,
Martin got into a bar fight
with one of his own players
on multiple occasions.
He busted a reporter's face open
because he wouldn't show him his notes.
He fought a stranger at a hotel bar
after he insulted what
the man did for a living,
which was entirely inappropriate.
There's absolutely nothing funny
about being a marshmallow salesman.
You go from town to town,
probably have a suitcase with
a bunch of marshmallows in it.
Point being, Billy martin was perhaps
the most difficult person in
the modern history of baseball.
On this particular day, as the story goes,
a lot of the players' kids are
running around the clubhouse,
but two kids are singled
out in particular.
Martin sends one of the team assistants
to tell their father,
the star first baseman,
that his kids need to be quiet.
The player naturally
takes it as an insult.
So does his oldest son,
who would be about 13
years old at this time.
This kid will hold a grudge
against the New York Yankees
for decades to come.
You know his name.
(pulsating electronic music)
