It’s Expos, not Griffey
SEATTLE – This is the weekend Seattle Mariners fans would have talked about all winter.
It’s the weekend Safeco Field would have been a sellout.
It’s a three-day period when the show of affection for a former star would have blown away the ovation Seattle fans gave Randy Johnson when he came back in 1999 with the Arizona Diamondbacks.
This is the weekend the Cincinnati Reds and Ken Griffey Jr. were supposed to play an interleague series against the Mariners at Safeco Field. That’s what the preliminary schedule showed as late as the third week of November, when the Mariners were just days away from announcing it to the public.
“Then we got an e-mail from the commissioner’s office advising us and the other clubs involved that there was a schedule change,” said Randy Adamack, the Mariners’ vice president of communications.
The Reds weren’t coming.
Griffey, who needs two home runs to reach 500 for his career, will continue the pursuit this weekend in Cleveland and not Seattle, where he played from 1989-99.
In the interest of building a natural rivalry between the two Ohio teams, Major League Baseball decided the Reds should be playing the Indians this weekend. The schedule was changed and the Mariners were left with a three-game series, beginning tonight, against the Montreal Expos.
The Mariners can’t project exactly what they have lost by the schedule change, but they’re sure ticket sales, TV ratings and the general buzz around town would have been substantial had Griffey come here.
Based on advance sales, the Mariners expect crowds in the low- to mid-30,000 range tonight and Saturday, and about 40,000 Sunday.
If Griffey had come here?
“I think it’s pretty fair to say that on a weekend in the middle of June, we’d be in the 40s if not sold out for the three games,” Adamack said. Safeco Field seats 47,447.
In Cleveland this weekend, the Indians are expected to draw between 33,000 and 36,000 for each of the three games at 43,389-seat Jacobs Field.
The Mariners and the other three teams in the American League West Division had known for almost a year that they would play interleague games this season against the National League Central. The N.L. Central is comprised of Cincinnati, St. Louis, Houston, Milwaukee, Chicago and Pittsburgh.
The Mariners played three games at home this week against the Houston Astros, and they will play at Milwaukee and Pittsburgh next week. They will host the San Diego Padres of the N.L. West the final weekend of this month, then play at St. Louis the first weekend in July.
The Mariners thought they would host the Reds this weekend; the original schedule – subject to late changes – showed that.
Adamack said the club hadn’t begun any firm efforts to promote Griffey’s return, but “we definitely had thought about what we were going to do. We wouldn’t have kept it a secret that he was going to play here.”
Everything changed when Adamack, who is responsible for issues with the Mariners’ schedule, received an e-mail on Nov. 25 from Katy Feeney, baseball’s senior vice president for club relations and scheduling.
“I opened the attachment and it basically stated that for this coming weekend, the Expos were coming here and the Reds were playing in Cleveland,” he said.
“I asked Katy Feeney, ‘How did this happen?’ ” Adamack said. “She said, in the interest of interleague play, the Indians had been for several years hoping to establish Cincinnati as their natural rival.”