Once-Lovable Junior Shows His Flipside

Two snapshots: Junior at the bottom of the dogpile at home plate, belly down in the Kingdome dirt and face lit up with one of his popsicle-and-swimmin’hole smiles - an 8-year-old at Disneyland. The Yankees were dead, baseball in Seattle had been saved and the roar from this corner of the globe had never been louder. Ken Griffey Jr. was The Kid in his very own candystore.

And now this one - the smile Machiavellian, the backward cap on his head now Beelzebub red, his bat whittled down to a knife point and jabbed into the back of Mariners general manager Pat Gillick, hanging ten over the edge of the Safeco Field roof.

One picture cannot go into your scrapbook without the other, the same way coins come with two sides - the same way your own kids are both huggable and spankable. If you don’t like your superstars to be one-dimensional, you run the risk of them being two-faced.

So for us, Ken Griffey Jr. was a bottomless banana split of wicked baseball indulgence.

With a side of lye.

For 11 years, Mariners fans have been blessed with front-row seats to greatness - the Maysian kind, you could argue, or Aaronesque. This was long enough to make the most wide-eyed among us take it for granted, which was always one of Ken Griffey Jr.’s major complaints. But whether the M’s were 20 games out or had your soul knotted up in a pennant race, conversation stopped around the barbecue or in the barber shop when Griffey made his way to the plate.

Now, with the trade of baseball’s best player - by popular, if not unanimous, reckoning - to the Cincinnati Reds for the most anonymous quartet since Devo, we are left to lip-sync the most pitiful of wishes.

“We hope Ken decides to go into the Hall of Fame as a Mariner,” said Mariners president Chuck Armstrong.

You bet. If not him, then for sure Brett Tomko and Mike Cameron and Antonio Perez and Jake Meyer - first-ballot names, for sure.

If the election is for dog catcher.

Armstrong also said in the next breath that “we might not have baseball here except for Ken, and we might not have Safeco Field,” and while that’s the broadest of strokes, it’s not altogether false. For it was Griffey who grabbed our attention, and held it.

Alas, now we also have yet another lesson in what having baseball means.

It means that a player - the right player - can always hold a club and a city hostage, if he’s of a mind, and something suggests that Griffey was very much of a mind to turn this deal into a toxic stew once he’d had enough of the folly of Mariners management.

This was no hit-and-run. Griffey had invested 13 years in the Seattle organization, and twice signed contract extensions at less money than he might have earned at auction. And after the Mariners flirted with greatness in 1995 and ‘97, he saw management do absolutely nothing for two years to keep the window of opportunity open.

On the day he won the MVP award, he was upstaged by Armstrong’s announcement that the Mariners wouldn’t be re-signing Randy Johnson. He saw no personnel upgrades made at first base, or second, or third, and the revolving door continue in left. He saw the park that he built - or so they say - constructed with a different kind of baseball talent in mind, and then he saw himself and Alex Rodriguez used as sleazy leverage by the ballclub in its dispute with the city over who should pay for the pearl toilet seats in Safeco’s suites.

True, Griffey had been indulged by the Mariners at great lengths, too. That business of signing his father to play along side him may have been the most transparent butt-bussing in baseball history.

Still, by late in the summer of 1999, Griffey had made up his mind to go - and the only thing he ever changed was just how he was going to go about it.

Most fans have since dismissed his rationales that a) he needed to play for a franchise that was intent on winning, and b) he needed to be closer to his family. And if the premises have been perverted, perhaps they should be revisited anyway.

You don’t think the family stuff was serious? In a year or two in Cincinnati, his manager will be none other than Ken Griffey Sr., who will be able to bounce his grandson on his knee while he makes out the lineup card.

As for winning, it would hardly make sense for Griffey to force a trade and then see his future team gutted by the price of that trade.

Knowing Junior would not approve a trade elsewhere, the Reds were able to take Pokey Reese off the table, Sean Casey off the table, Scott Williamson off the table. Before it was all over, even Cincy’s best minor leaguer, shortstop Travis Dawkins - A-Rod’s replacement - was untouchable.

Hence the Faceless Four.

It is hard to know if Griffey’s mind, or his agent’s, is quite so devious, but you have to wonder if limiting Seattle’s dealings to just a single team was Griffey’s way of making sure he wasn’t batting third in a lineup of Triple-A callups.

Then, to add further insult, Griffey agreed to a nine-year contract with the Reds worth $116.5 million - or $23.5 million less than he’d been offered by his old club.

He stopped short of dissing Dave Niehaus, but that was about the only punch Griffey pulled.

Gillick’s machinations away from the Red phone this winter have probably made the Mariners favorites in the American League West this year anyway, even without Griffey.

But this trade leaves a void in Seattle that may never be patched. Griffey not only lent a national identity to the Northwest, but was a local icon beyond the scope of any previous sports figure. He may go into the Hall representing the Mariners, as Armstrong wishes, but he will have played in Seattle so long ago that an entire generation will have no memory of it.

And the generation before may still have a bitter taste from the way it ended.