Junior: Just What Baseball Needs Griffey’s Good-Guy Image Returns Fun To Sport That Desperately Needs It

In a sport plagued by Darth Vaders, Ken Griffey Jr. is Luke Skywalker.

He doesn’t thump his chest after hitting a home run. He doesn’t cork his bat. He doesn’t give fans the brushoff.

For major league baseball, this is no small feat these days.

“I just love baseball,” he said one morning as he got ready for an exhibition game. “When you have a job you love, it shows.”

Right now, baseball loves Griffey even more than Griffey loves baseball. Junior is the sport’s most marketable man, its greatest hope for cleaning up an image tarnished by strikes, suspensions and surliness.

“He’s able to come to the ballpark with a smile on his face,” said Jay Buhner, Griffey’s neighbor in both the clubhouse and the Seattle suburb of Issaquah. “He stays out of trouble, doesn’t cause a ruckus, doesn’t create problems. He just comes to the ballpark and plays hard.”

Hidden away in the Pacific Northwest on what had been a mediocre team, Griffey finally received some real exposure last fall when the Mariners won the A.L. West title. Fans watched Griffey tie a single-series record with five homers against the Yankees and score the winning run to put Seattle in the league championship series against Cleveland.

His performance, after missing 73 games with a broken wrist, only enhanced his reputation as one of the game’s marquee names. Griffey’s not in the Michael Jordan class of endorsers yet, but his list already includes Nike, Nintendo, Chevrolet, Visa, Upper Deck and Gargoyles Eyewear.

In a pro sports world in which players’ misdeeds grab bigger headlines than their good deeds, Griffey’s nice-guy image attracts as many advertisers as his home run numbers do.

“It’s not like they said, ‘You’re our guy; you have to do this,”’ said Brian Goldberg, Griffey’s agent. “It was more, ‘You have a clean life and we’d like to get baseball back into the positive good graces of the fans. Would you do some things off the field?”’

Some things? A two-week stretch during the off-season almost is enough to qualify him as frequent flyer gold.

From Jan. 21 to Feb. 3, he went from Orlando, Fla., to San Diego to Orlando to Seattle and back to Orlando, taping commercials for Nintendo and Chevy, recording a voiceover for Visa, interviewing for a GQ cover story, shooting cover photos for SI for Kids and Beckett’s, meeting with Nike officials and seeing his hand surgeon. In the midst of this, he squeezed in signing a record $34 million, four-year contract extension through 2000.

“Sometimes it creates a schedule that’s more than hectic,” Goldberg admitted, “but Kenny’s not complaining.”

Why should he? Baseball’s high command has made Griffey its No. 1 marketing focus, and new Nike commercials are promoting him for president.

“He’s young, he’s personable, he’s attractive as a person, he’s friendly,” acting commissioner Bud Selig said. “Who would you rather have?”

An unscientific one-day poll by ESPN on the Internet showed 59.4 percent of 1,595 fans favored Griffey to 21.2 percent for Bob Dole and 19.4 for President Clinton. The poll was a tie-in to Nike’s “Griffey for President” campaign, in which the shoe company is spending at least $15 million on commercials and “Griffey for President” merchandise handed out at ballparks through the November elections.

“They’re trying to get young adults who are 18 to 24 to register to vote,” Griffey said.

Griffey has some detractors, has had them, in fact, since attending Moeller High School in Cincinnati, where he drove a BMW to class. Buck Showalter, former manager of the New York Yankees who’s now managing the expansion Arizona Diamondbacks, said Griffey showed disrespect for the game by wearing his cap backward and his uniform shirt untucked.

Griffey’s response was that he was just being himself. Compared to other players, his transgressions do seem tame.

“It looks like he actually enjoys playing the game,” Toronto Blue Jays president Paul Beeston said. “The fans like his affection for it, the way he has his hat on backward.”

While not at Deion Sanders’ level of flamboyance, it’s still clear that Griffey is a star. A gold-and-diamond pendant with his number “24” hangs around his neck. He, alone on the team, has a Nike swoosh on his batting practice jersey instead of a team logo.

The game comes before business, but sometimes the two intersect.

“We have a rule; it’s pretty much no filming of commercials during the baseball season,” said Goldberg, but acknowledged exceptions could be made.

One day this spring, a card game in the corner of the Mariners clubhouse was going on without Griffey. He was in a back room, looking at videotapes, trying to figure out why he’s been popping up.

After the game, he had a meeting with his marketing manager at Nike Sports Management. The following day, he taped a commercial for Taylor Made golf clubs with Mark O’Meara.

The reason Griffey can stay focused on so many things at once without becoming distracted is his strong family ties.

On a trip to Hawaii last Thanksgiving, he took along more than 30 people: his parents, brother Craig, who’s a minor-league outfielder in the Seattle organization, his wife’s parents and grandparents, the godparents of his two children and “everyone associated with either of our children’s lives.”

Just like he spent much of his boyhood hanging around ballparks when his father starred with the Cincinnati Reds, Griffey has 22-month-old Trey Kenneth and 5-month-old Taryn Kennedy around him while he’s working.

During an exhibition game against the Chicago Cubs, Trey was with his mother, Melissa, in the seats behind home plate, playing with his toy truck. Taryn watched the game from her bassinet, playing with a silver Tiffany teething ring with a baseball attached, a gift from a woman who shares their box at the Kingdome.

Griffey said he and Taryn “haven’t bonded yet.”

“She doesn’t like me right now,” he said.

Taryn is one of the few around Griffey who doesn’t. With his easy smile and affable manner, he’s even a favorite among opposing players.

During batting practice and pregame stretching on any given game day, Griffey mingles happily with members of the other team, laughing and joking with them around the batting cage. All the while, he plays it humble, never claiming too much credit for his achievements. He evens tries to deflect credit for the A.L. West title, deferring to Buhner and Randy Johnson and Edgar Martinez, the team’s other leaders.

“They did all the work,” Griffey said. “They are the ones who really put this city on the map. They are the ones who got the numbers, they are the ones who hung in while I was hurt, played their hearts out for 73 days.”

This season, the Mariners hope Griffey will lead them the entire way, and baseball hopes he can lead it back into fans’ hearts.

MEMO: Two sidebars appeared with the story: 1. KEN GRIFFEY, JR. CAREER STATS AB R H HR RBI Avg. 1989, Seattle 455 61 120 16 61 .264 1990, Seattle 597 91 179 22 80 .300 1991, Seattle 548 76 179 22 100 .327 1992, Seattle 565 83 174 27 103 .308 1993, Seattle 582 113 180 45 109 .309 1994, Seattle 433 94 140 40 90 .323 1995, Seattle 260 52 67 17 42 .258 Totals 3440 570 1039 189 585 .302

2, GRIFFEY NATIONAL BANK By age 35, Ken Griffey Jr. will have earned more than $61 million from the Seattle Mariners. A breakdown of his yearly baseball income since joining the Mariners (*-salary deferred from 1997-2000 contract): Year Base Signing Bonuses Total 1989 $68,000 $0 $0 $68,000 1990 180,000 0 30,000 210,000 1991 535,000 0 50,000 585,000 1992 2,000,000 0 50,000 2,050,000 1993 3,500,000 2,000,000 150,000 5,650,000 1994 4,500,000 0 150,000 4,650,000 1995 7,000,000 0 100,000 7,100,000 1996 7,000,000 0 0 7,000,000 1997 6,000,000 1,000,000 0 7,000,000 1998 6,500,000 1,500,000 0 8,000,000 1999 7,000,000 0 0 7,000,000 2000 7,000,000 0 0 7,000,000 2001* 1,250,000 0 0 1,250,000 2002* 1,250,000 0 0 1,250,000 2003* 1,250,000 0 0 1,250,000 2004* 1,250,000 0 0 1,250,000 Total 56,283,000 4,500,000 530,000 61,313,000