Griffey As Stormy As Seattle

As the Ken Griffey Jr. alarm went off for the umpteenth time in Puget Sound - it is the sports-news equivalent of local TV stations doing interviews with snowflakes - the best response came from the Post-Intelligencer’s assistant sports editor, Dwight Perry.

“Why don’t we build him an open-air stadium,” he said, “and a domed city?”

Griffey told the Seattle Times he doesn’t like snow and cold rain. That puts Griffey in company with approximately every Seattleite over the age of eight.

But unlike some, Griffey has choices, including playing for another team when his Mariner contract expires after this season.

Of course, Griffey has yet to be touched by rain or snow in Seattle during work hours (leaks don’t count). And after the new ballyard opens here in 1999, his outdoor work schedule would correspond to Western Washington’s best weather, which is better than every major-league baseball city outside of Southern California.

But winters here are indeed regarded with some dismay. Griffey is a golfer who has yet to master his water wedge, so he wants to live someplace where he doesn’t need it.

Guess what? He already does.

Griffey bought property more than a year ago in a golf-course suburb near Orlando, Fla., and this winter moved his family into the estate’s guest house while the mansion gets built. Among his neighbors is Shaquille O’Neal, with whom he visited last week.

“We went over and hung out a while,” he said by phone from Orlando. “We had fun.”

It would seem Griffey has created the ideal existence - summers in Seattle, winters in Florida. And if he misplaces his Walkman, he can go next door for his fix of Shaq Diesel.

After an extensive search of multiple electronic databases, the P-I has determined that no person has ever outrun nature. However, Griffey now is a close second, with the rest of humanity in a tie for a distant third.

The hope is that if Griffey changes teams, he will join the Marlins in his new home state. It’s hard to know whether the Florida summer’s humidity or insects are worse, but both are heavily featured in the blueprints of hell. To stand in it for 3 hours a day for 81 days, well, maybe a $40 million contract wouldn’t be enough.

Chances are Griffey won’t be changing teams. Nor is he changing his ways. Those who have spent time around him know Griffey is impulsive, erratic and mostly without reflection. He is also incredibly powerful within the franchise, as well as all of baseball, and knows it well.

That has been played out time after time. At each contract crossroads, with nearly every major player move or non-move, Griffey has cleared his throat, and the ground under Mariner management has trembled.

A few years ago, Griffey said he didn’t want to stay if the team wasn’t competitive.

The Mariners were made competitive.

More recently, he said he was gone if the Mariners didn’t win.

So they won.

He said the Kingdome was a terrible place to waste his career.

So an outdoor stadium will be built.

Last winter, he aid he would demand a trade if the Mariners didn’t re-sign right fielder and best buddy Jay Buhner.

Buhner was re-signed.

Now Griffey says he might not want to play here unless it stops raining in the winter.

Whew. If he pulls this one off, instead of feeling upset with him, we will all owe Griffey big. And while they’re at it, maybe the Mariner owners could increase salmon runs as well as install about 500 miles of light-rail rapid transit.

Truth be known, Griffey is upset less with the rain and more because teammates such as Tino Martinez, Mike Blowers and Jeff Nelson keep getting traded.

“It’s tough,” he said last week. “We’ve all grown up together in the organization. We know each other’s swings. We kept each other up, got each other going.

“It’s kinda tough to see them go because of what we went through. Cleveland’s gone out and done whatever they had to do to make themselves stronger. But they’ve got a lot of money.”

Even though the Mariners have received rough equivalence in the trades, the unknown is bothersome.

“I have no idea about (Russ) Davis and (Sterling) Hitchcock,” Griffey said of the new players. “I don’t know what I can say or what they can do.”

Actually, Griffey knows well what he can say - anything - and he said it. He knows he also has the support of his Mariner teammates because he is making management squirm.

Think about it - if you had that power over your employers, wouldn’t you exercise it?

This latest tiny tempest isn’t just about his future contract - the Mariners and Griffey know he will be made the game’s highest-paid player.

It’s about power. Griffey can’t un-do the trades, but his pout just might get his brother, Craig, up to the major leagues, or stop other trades, or anything else that displeases him.

Like the rain. It used to be that everybody only talked about the weather. Maybe Griffey can do something about it.