Thanks For The Memories, M’S

In the spring of 1988, Ken Griffey Jr. sat in a dugout at Tempe Diablo Stadium and worried openly about experiencing the setbacks of a major league camp.

What kinds of setbacks? I asked him.

“You know, outs,” he said.

It was our first interview - my first year covering the Seattle Mariners - and this lean, baby-faced kid was supposed to be the best player in franchise history. I knew that, he didn’t, and so he worried about what it would be like to make outs.

“I went a whole year in Little League without making one,” he said.

I laughed a lot that afternoon with Griffey. I have laughed a lot since, covering 10 years of Seattle baseball.

Watching Griffey and the team he played for grow up together, there have been moments I’ve written about - from the World Series earthquake in San Francisco to the endless road trip that was caused by falling Kingdome ceiling tiles and interrupted only by a season-ending strike.

And quieter moments.

A December afternoon in a silent house where Rod Carew wept for the life of a daughter he knew he could not save.

Randy Johnson in the back of a bus, heading to the team hotel from Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium after a bad game in 1989, leaning over to whisper, “I’m better than this.”

“I know you are. This team knows you are,” I whispered back. “You’re the only one you have to convince.”

Pete O’Brien, nearly alone in the Yankee Stadium clubhouse the day the Mariners released him. He had shaken hands with everyone, hugged more than a few, and now fought tears.

“You see it happen to other guys,” he said. “And you always think you’ll go out on your own terms. It doesn’t work that way.”

There have been so many farewells - Alvin Davis, Harold Reynolds, Scott Bankhead, Greg Briley, Jeffrey Leonard, Jerry Reed, Brian Holman, Omar Vizquel. Men I shared meals with, shared stories with, got to know.

Long before the Mariners had winning seasons, they had characters.

Rey Quinones once threatened to kill me until a teammate pointed out that the story that had so enraged him had been written by another writer for another newspaper.

“They all look alike,” Rey said.

Steve Trout asked me to write a travel book with him - “A Left-hander’s Look at Big-League Cities” - and asked me to listen to more than 20 hours of tapes he’d already recorded on the subject. Trout would carry a cassette recorder with him around the league, recording observations at each stop.

He was one of the funnier men I ever covered. But his idea of a travelogue began by listing the location of every post office in Cleveland. I listened to a few hours of tape - it was all the same - and gave him the tapes back.

The first day into Kansas City one season, the scoreboard operators were getting pictures of Mariners players to display during the game. Jeff Schaefer put on oversized sunglasses, put his cap on sideways and told them he was Dave Cochrane.

When Cochrane came to the plate for his first at-bat and the scoreboard flashed that picture of Schaefer mugging, no press box - or Mariners dugout - ever laughed harder.

There were awkward moments. When The News Tribune was told by postal authorities that it was holding a suspicious package addressed to Eric Anthony, I had to ask him about the possibility it was drugs.

Turned out, the post office dog had sniffed out a shipment of baseball caps from a Los Angeles charity Anthony had done work for. The post office never delivered the package - and never apologized.

“They ought to fire that damned dog,” Anthony said.

Late one night walking to the team hotel from the Metrodome in Minneapolis, I asked Ken Griffey Sr. what kind of father he’d tried to be with Junior.

“The kind my father never was,” Senior said. We talked for 20 minutes. By the end, I think his eyes were damp. Mine were.

One of the more remarkable games - and men - in Mariners history was Holman, who retired 26 consecutive Oakland batters one game, then lost a perfect-game bid on Ken Phelps’ pinch-hit home run with two outs in the ninth.

“Hey,” Holman said a few minutes later, “hits happen.”

I can’t remember all the games in any season, but have never forgotten most of the Mariners who played them.

Edgar Martinez talking about his grandparents and how they’d raised him - how he went home to see them every fall until their deaths - explained as well as anything why he was the man he had become.

When a colleague called about six years ago, he asked me to ask Harold Reynolds a question. His son had just committed three errors in a high school game. What would Reynolds tell him? he asked.

I told Harold and he laughed.

“I made four errors in a game once, and after the last out I sat down in center field and cried,” Reynolds said. “I look up and there’s my mother - she’d come out on the field - and I remember screaming, ‘Oh, MOM!”’

I thanked Harold and told him I’d pass the story on. He shook his head.

“Give me his phone number, I’ll call him,” Harold said. And did. He put in 20 long-distance minutes to make a kid he’d never met feel better.

In Griffey’s first year, there was a candy bar named for him, a handful of posters printed, and he was asked to sign posters for an hour one afternoon in a mall. He showed up and found the sponsor had advertised a 3-hour appearance - and there were thousands of fans waiting.

Griffey was 19. He signed for an hour and 20 minutes, then ran for his car and drove to batting practice at the Kingdome. On the way through the mall parking lot, kids yelled at him, parents cursed him. On the way to the dome, Griffey cried.

He has done much for Seattle - on and off the field - and for some it will never be enough.

Back in the Kingdome in October 1995, I was in the press box in the bottom of the 11th inning. Seattle trailed by a run, and in the end the game had come down to two great pitchers in relief, Johnson and Jack McDowell.

The Yankees broke through for a run in the top half of the inning and I turned to a colleague and admitted what I’d been thinking for 30 minutes.

“This might be the best game I’ve ever seen.”

So intense, so dramatic on both sides.

And then Joey Cora got on base. Griffey singled him to third. And Edgar lined a ball down in the left-field corner.

I have seen more games than I can count, certainly more than I can remember, and watching Griffey race around second, then third base, the hair on my arms rose. When everything but that magical Griffey smile was buried at the plate by celebrating teammates, it was the single most dramatic moment I’d seen in sports.

Perhaps it saved a franchise. Perhaps it made Seattle a baseball city.

For sure, it gave everyone in the Northwest at least one baseball memory on which to base all others - even those who sit in the press box and aren’t allowed to cheer.