Seattle Zack
Count each one
- Joined
- Aug 29, 2003
- Posts
- 1,128
NOTE: This is an article I've been working on -- er, procrastinating on -- for some time. The recent baseball chat in the forum inspired me to finish writing it. If you don't want to read 3000 words about a baseball game, get out now. Otherwise, any comments are welcome.
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The Game.
Talk to anyone in Seattle, they were at The Game. The Kingdome must have held half a million fans that night of October 8. In a sense, it did. It was the most electrifying four hours and nineteen minutes in the history of the city. The sense of togetherness, the unity, the collective yearning, hoping, praying, is something I’ve never experienced since; it’s what sports is all about, and why we love it. It’s the magic that only comes along once or twice in a lifetime. It’s why we watch grown men chase a ball.
The Season.
In July of 1995, the future of baseball in Seattle was questionable. Coming off the strike-shortened season, there was little interest in baseball around the country, and especially in Seattle with its notoriously fair-weather fans. Only finishing over the .500 mark twice in the past twenty years, the Ms had never made the playoffs. Ownership wanted to sell the team or move it to Tampa Bay. The voters had rejected a proposal to hike the sales tax to build a new stadium.
Ironically the 1995 roster featured some of the greatest talent ever to grace a baseball diamond – Ken Griffey Jr, Randy Johnson, and some kid from Miami named Alex Rodriguez. On Opening Day, Junior hit a game-winning, three-run, third-deck shot off Detroit’s Sean Bergman and the season was off and running.
On May 26, Junior went leaping into the outfield wall to catch a deep fly and fractured both bones in his left wrist. He underwent surgery the next day and had a four-inch metal plate and seven screws attached to the wrist. He would be out until September – the season was lost. By the way, he did make the catch.
Mid-August rolled around, only a month and a half until the end of the season, and the Mariners were trailing the first-place Angels by thirteen games. In a hundred years of baseball, only four teams had ever come back from a thirteen-game deficit with six weeks to go.
Then the magic started. The Mariners started winning. The Angels started losing. Junior returned two weeks early. When September began, Seattle was less than ten games back. The city began to take some interest. The wins were dramatic – walk off home runs, stellar pitching performances, incredible plays by the unlikeliest of heroes night after night. By the time the dust settled at season’s end, the M’s and Angels were tied for the division.
Baseball had expanded the playoff format for the 1995 season to include a five-game Division Series, followed by the traditional seven-game League Championship Series. The Mariners and Angels faced off in a one-game series in the Kingdome to determine who went on to the playoffs.
During September, with dramatic wins night after night, the unthinkable had happened: baseball fever gripped Seattle. The Mariners captured the hearts of the city. Groups of complete strangers at bus stops animatedly talked about the game the night before. Legal secretaries discussed the nuances of balks and pitch counts in the office elevators. Bullpen matches were argued about over three-hour business lunches. Not much work got done in that late Seattle summer, but no one seemed to care. “Visualize World Series” read the bumper stickers and signs everywhere you looked.
The day of the Angels-Mariners game, mysterious ailments cropped up around the city. Some businesses reported less than half of their workers showing up. Children stayed home from school. That afternoon, every television and radio was tuned to the game.
The M’s ace, Randy “The Big Unit” Johnson, was a perpetually scowling lefty with a nasty disposition and a nastier slider. He carried the team that day, feeding off the crowd, channeling the will and determination of every heart in the city. Johnson threw no-hit ball at the Angels into the sixth inning. His opponent was Mark Langston – ironically, a former Mariners ace whom had been traded for Johnson several years earlier.
The towering Johnson snarled fiercely at each batter; sometimes he seemed barely recognizable as human. He threw his head back and howled at the Kingdome roof. His fastball sizzled into the triple digits, thumping home so hard it seemed it must have broken the catcher’s hand. His slider curved and dipped, defying the laws of physics. As he glowered and stomped off the mound he looked up at the crowd roaring at him; screaming back, he raised his fists as if to gather their energy and thumped against his chest where his uniform read: MARINERS.
The Kingdome erupted. A torrent of emotion tore through the streets, the bars, the homes of the city. It was beautiful; it was primal; it was sport. "Sometimes," Johnson later said of his action, "things just come out you can't explain. This was one of them."
The M's finally got on the board with one run in the fifth and busted the game open with Luis Sojo's slam in the seventh. Johnson went back out. More than 52,000 Kingdome fans urging him on, he obliterated all three batters. The sound system blasted Steppenwolf’s "Magic Carpet Ride."
“This was his game. No one was going to take it away from him," said Manager Lou Piniella.
No one did. Seattle scored four more runs for a final score of 9-1.
The Series.
The Yankees: the dreaded mystique, the pinstripes, the dozens of World Series championships. The Bronx. In 1995, the division series was a two-three affair: two games in New York, then three back at the Kingdome.
The managerial grandmasters Buck Showalter of the Yankees and “Sweet” Lou Pinella of the Mariners set their pieces on the board. The Mariners were exhausted; the Seattle fans were drained; the hated Yankees were primed and ready to go.
The series began on October 3 at Yankee Stadium. Bottles and batteries were thrown at the pitchers warming up. Yankee Stadium was rocking, partying as only New York fans can. The M's, never having experienced a playoff game, seemed tentative and unsure. The Yankees took a 2-0 lead in the third and never looked back. Although Griffey homered twice, Jeff Nelson and Bobby Ayala gave up a combined four runs in the seventh inning of a 9-6 loss.
Another reason to love sports: you never know when you’ll see something unprecedented, something historic: a series of events that is so totally inconceivable it’s impossible to imagine. So it was with Game 2.
The longest game in baseball playoff history lasted well past one o’clock in the morning in the rambunctious confines of the Bronx Zoo. It was a roller-coaster heart-wrenching back-and-forth battle that showcased the best of baseball, and illustrated perfectly why we love it so.
The Mariners were up 2-1 when back-to-back home runs by Ruben Sierra and Don Mattingly gave the Yankees a 3-2 lead in the sixth. The Bronx fans went wild, unleashing a shower of trash from the outfield so bad that Piniella momentarily pulled his team from the field.
The M’s took a 4-3 lead in the seventh, but the Yankees came back and tied it in the bottom of the inning. All over Seattle, people were riding a wild wave of emotion. To go down 0-2 to the Yankees meant the season was virtually over. Every at-bat, every pitch seemed so critical it was almost surreal. The voice of the Mariner’s announcer, Dave Niehaus, blasted from every car window. Fingernails were chewed, cigarettes were smoked, beer was consumed by the kegful. The ninth inning ended with the score tied.
Inning after inning rolled by. It was after midnight in New York. A screaming line drive homer from Junior in the twelfth put the Mariners ahead 5-4. The city erupted in a collective cheer, but the euphoria was short lived.
Reliever Jeff Nelson hurled a knee-buckling 2-2 slider to Wade Boggs in the bottom of the inning that barely missed the corner. Boggs eventually walked and Jorge Posada came in to run for him. Ruben Sierra, whose home run had sealed Tuesday's game, belted an opposite-field shot that appeared destined for the same fate. Seattle held its breath. The ball bounced a foot from the top of the wall.
An outstanding relay through shortstop Luis Sojo barely got Williams at home to keep the game alive. Catcher Chris Widger made the tag on Bernie Williams. The 5-5 game continued, the tension mounting minute by minute.
Pinella brought in Belcher, the fifth pitcher he had used that night. Belcher struggled through the 13th and 14th. The Yankees did their part, holding Seattle until the 15th, when Edgar Martinez and Buhner singled with one out. But the devil himself, Mariano Rivera, struck out Doug Strange and Tino Martinez flied out on a 3-0 green light.
With one out in the bottom of the inning, Belcher walked Pat Kelly. He then had to come in with a 2-0 pitch against Jim Leyritz. Randy Johnson had hit Leyritz with a pitch on May 31, and Leyritz had been looking for payback all season.
He got it.
Even as Leyritz started his swing, you could tell it was a home run. In the bottom of the fifteenth, Leyritz crushed the ball. New York went crazy, and the Mariners returned home; they were down 0-2 in the series to the powerful Bronx Bombers.
Randy Johnson was spent. The Mariners were spent. Seattle was spent. Against the talent of the Yankees, the end seemed inevitable. There were a few hearty “We can come back!” and “Well, it was a good ride!” conversations at the sports bars, but the energy had disappeared into the night along with that long Leyritz homer. The magic was dead.
In Game 3, the M's were facing “Black” Jack McDowell, a formidable opponent who had owned the Mariners his whole career. McDowell had been sitting for fifteen days with a back problem, so he was kind of a question mark. Perhaps the Ms had a chance after all. Despite the layoff, McDowell allowed only one hit in the first four innings.
It was obvious Johnson didn’t have his best stuff and he was replaced in the sixth. The M’s bats came alive in the bottom of the inning, as they forced Jack McDowell from the game and came away with a 7-4 win. Despite Junior going hitless, it was their first postseason victory.
Although the Yankees scored five runs in the first three innings of Game 4, the Mariners blasted back to take a 6-5 lead at the start of the eighth. New York tied it in the top of the inning, but the M’s scored five runs in the bottom of the eighth, highlighted by Edgar Martinez’s grand slam.
Little-used Bill Risley came in to save the game in the top of the ninth with Yankees on every base, one out and the Mariners holding an 11-7 lead. He faced Wade Boggs, a career .371 hitter with the bases loaded. Risley got Boggs to hit into a fielder's choice, with one run scoring. Bernie Williams came up, representing the tying run. The night before, Risley had given up a towering home run to Williams. On a 3-2 count, Risley launched a fastball that Williams hammered deep toward center field. Griffey caught it on the warning track 400 feet away. Game over. Series tied.
The Game.
All or nothing. Do or die. This was it. Win or go home. The magic was back. Seattle dared to start hoping again. With only two days rest, Randy Johnson had told manager Lou Pinella that he could pitch “a batter or two” in relief if needed. McDowell said the same, and both ace pitchers started the game in their respective dugouts.
David Cone started Game 5 for the Bronx Bombers, and he pitched brilliantly. Unwilling to leave the mound, he threw and threw and threw until his arm began to smolder. The Mariners took the lead in the third, then the Yankees took it back in the fourth; the M's tied it up, then the Yankees took a two run lead in the sixth. It was exhausting to watch – every time it seemed like it was over, somehow, incredibly, the M's came back.
For Game 5, I was in a bar about ten blocks from the Kingdome. The place was packed, as was every place that night: wall-to-wall people, fans spilling out onto the sidewalk. There was almost no traffic. The radio broadcast blared from every open window at top volume. It was a giant, city-wide block party – but we were all waiting for the party to start.
The tension was growing. It could all end so quickly. After about 150 pitches, Cone finally tired in the eighth inning and surrendered an upper-deck home run to Ken Griffey Jr., loaded the bases, then walked home the game-tying run. Everyone for miles sighed with relief.
As the ninth started, the television camera flashed on the six-foot-ten Johnson, shambling around in the dugout, looking for all the world like Frankenstein’s monster. We all looked at each other. The crowd at the bar, the people on the street grew eerily silent. It seemed that even to speak might break the spell, but we all had the same collective thought. Would he? Should he? Could he?
Lou stepped out of the dugout in the top of the ninth and tapped his left arm, the unmistakable signal. The bar, the street, the city went absolutely crazy. The Kingdome sound system began blasting "WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE!" as the mulletted Johnson strode in from the dugout, the perpetual scowl on his face.
It was an incredible scene. Everywhere, people were yelling, crying, hugging each other. Cars were honking their horns. For hundreds of miles around, millions of people were literally screaming their lungs out. This was it, the climax – this wild, unbelievable, exhilarating, heartwrenching bobsled ride would finally end, one way or the other. And how else could it end? It had started with Johnson, now it would end with Johnson. It was fitting; it was right; it was sport.
The Big Unit had thrown 126 pitches and beaten the Yankees two days ago. Six days earlier, he had thrown 116 against the Angels. He entered the ninth with nobody out and two runners on base, facing Wade Boggs. "Were there two runners on?" Johnson later asked. "I thought there was only one." He fanned Boggs, then got Bernie Williams and Paul O'Neill to pop out.
Countering Pinella’s move, Showalter brought in McDowell for the ninth. This was the hated Black Jack McDowell, who as a White Sox or Yankee had never lost in Seattle (6-0 lifetime) and was 10-1 against the Mariners overall. McDowell retired the Ms in order.
In the tenth, Johnson struck out the side: Sierra, Mattingly and Gerald Williams. Johnson’s control was faltering, though; it was obvious the Big Unit was running on nothing more than determination. Johnson walked Mickey Stanley to open the eleventh. Tony Fernandez bunted pinch-runner Pat Kelly over and Randy Velarde singled to make it 5-4.
Everyone groaned in dismay. We forgave Johnson instantly – how could we not? The collective will of Seattle was a living, breathing thing. People who had never seen a baseball game before were praying, crying, holding hands with complete strangers. No way was this going to get away again. We urged the team with our hearts and our dreams. We had endured so long, been through too much joy and tragedy, to let it slip away now.
The Yankees must have felt that they had finally triumphed after getting a run off the unhittable Johnson, but the Mariners weren’t done yet. Down to three outs left in the season, Cora, Griffey, and Martinez were due up in the bottom of the eleventh.
Little Joey Cora, who had homered in the third for Seattle's first run, laid down a surprise bunt. The ball bounced a couple of times, then rolled. Black Jack had no play on it. Mattingly scrambled to reach it, pick it up, then swung to his left to try to tag Cora, who stepped a bit wide to avoid the tag. Mattingly's swipe just missed him as Cora dived safely for first.
Griffey, he of the sweetest swing in all of baseball, nonchalantly blasted a line-drive single to center that moved Cora to third.
It was a huge hit. A monster. Again the city roared its approval. The Kid, the phenom, the face of the team, had come through in the clutch. The table was set. Even a fly ball would tie the game. The American League batting champion, the man everyone on the team called “Popi,” Edgar Martinez, followed.
Edgar, a spry 32 at that time, seemed focused as he stepped into the batter’s box, despite more than 57,000 people standing and cheering as loud as humanly possible.
Edgar had had a chance at McDowell in the ninth when Black Jack entered the game with two men on. He fanned "on a bad pitch" high, Martinez said, embarrassed even after the game. This was despite finishing the series with a .571 average, 12 hits, 10 RBI and 6 runs scored. "I was thinking what he'd throw me instead of just trying to make contact."
After Edgar’s last at-bat, reliever Norm Charlton approached him and said, "You're going to get another chance.” Edgar nodded, as if to say, “I know."
Black Jack checked the runners and fired a fastball for a strike. Edgar didn’t even flinch. McDowell got the signal, wound up again and threw the 0-1 pitch.
To this day, if you ask anyone in Seattle where they were at that time, they can tell you every detail, down to who they were with and what they were wearing. It was the greatest moment in Seattle sports history, surpassing even the Sonics’ championship. Seattle’s incredible week, the Mariner’s unbelievable season, the whole amazing journey that we all took together distilled into one moment: Edgar’s swing in the bottom of the eleventh inning, down by one run, the season on the line.
He laced Black Jack’s 0-1 split-finger fastball into the left-field corner.
A wall of noise went up from everywhere, the final collective release that had been pent up for so long. I can still see the image today, as clearly as I did then. Little Joey Cora scampered in to score the tying run standing up.
A-Rod was standing in the on-deck circle, screaming like a mad thing as Junior sprinted around second base. Griffey didn’t even glance at the third-base coach; he was going home. Brent Musburger was screaming, "Grif-feeeyy's flying around third!" The relay throw was coming in.
Griffey tucked his leg and slid home, beating the relay throw for the winning run. 57,411 fans in the Kingdome and millions of people went wild as the Mariners headed to their first American League Championship Series.
The pigpile on top of Griffey, laying on home plate, a huge grin on his face is such an enduring image that there’s a mosaic of it at Safeco Field. The Yankees were dead. The Mariners had done it.
During this greatest week in Mariners history, Johnson went 3-0, 19 innings pitched, 8 hits, 4 earned runs, 7 walks, 28 strikeouts, a 1.90 earned-run average. And what a week it was. There may never be another like it.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/griffey/photo.asp?SubID=27&PhotoID=488
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The Game.
Talk to anyone in Seattle, they were at The Game. The Kingdome must have held half a million fans that night of October 8. In a sense, it did. It was the most electrifying four hours and nineteen minutes in the history of the city. The sense of togetherness, the unity, the collective yearning, hoping, praying, is something I’ve never experienced since; it’s what sports is all about, and why we love it. It’s the magic that only comes along once or twice in a lifetime. It’s why we watch grown men chase a ball.
The Season.
In July of 1995, the future of baseball in Seattle was questionable. Coming off the strike-shortened season, there was little interest in baseball around the country, and especially in Seattle with its notoriously fair-weather fans. Only finishing over the .500 mark twice in the past twenty years, the Ms had never made the playoffs. Ownership wanted to sell the team or move it to Tampa Bay. The voters had rejected a proposal to hike the sales tax to build a new stadium.
Ironically the 1995 roster featured some of the greatest talent ever to grace a baseball diamond – Ken Griffey Jr, Randy Johnson, and some kid from Miami named Alex Rodriguez. On Opening Day, Junior hit a game-winning, three-run, third-deck shot off Detroit’s Sean Bergman and the season was off and running.
On May 26, Junior went leaping into the outfield wall to catch a deep fly and fractured both bones in his left wrist. He underwent surgery the next day and had a four-inch metal plate and seven screws attached to the wrist. He would be out until September – the season was lost. By the way, he did make the catch.
Mid-August rolled around, only a month and a half until the end of the season, and the Mariners were trailing the first-place Angels by thirteen games. In a hundred years of baseball, only four teams had ever come back from a thirteen-game deficit with six weeks to go.
Then the magic started. The Mariners started winning. The Angels started losing. Junior returned two weeks early. When September began, Seattle was less than ten games back. The city began to take some interest. The wins were dramatic – walk off home runs, stellar pitching performances, incredible plays by the unlikeliest of heroes night after night. By the time the dust settled at season’s end, the M’s and Angels were tied for the division.
Baseball had expanded the playoff format for the 1995 season to include a five-game Division Series, followed by the traditional seven-game League Championship Series. The Mariners and Angels faced off in a one-game series in the Kingdome to determine who went on to the playoffs.
During September, with dramatic wins night after night, the unthinkable had happened: baseball fever gripped Seattle. The Mariners captured the hearts of the city. Groups of complete strangers at bus stops animatedly talked about the game the night before. Legal secretaries discussed the nuances of balks and pitch counts in the office elevators. Bullpen matches were argued about over three-hour business lunches. Not much work got done in that late Seattle summer, but no one seemed to care. “Visualize World Series” read the bumper stickers and signs everywhere you looked.
The day of the Angels-Mariners game, mysterious ailments cropped up around the city. Some businesses reported less than half of their workers showing up. Children stayed home from school. That afternoon, every television and radio was tuned to the game.
The M’s ace, Randy “The Big Unit” Johnson, was a perpetually scowling lefty with a nasty disposition and a nastier slider. He carried the team that day, feeding off the crowd, channeling the will and determination of every heart in the city. Johnson threw no-hit ball at the Angels into the sixth inning. His opponent was Mark Langston – ironically, a former Mariners ace whom had been traded for Johnson several years earlier.
The towering Johnson snarled fiercely at each batter; sometimes he seemed barely recognizable as human. He threw his head back and howled at the Kingdome roof. His fastball sizzled into the triple digits, thumping home so hard it seemed it must have broken the catcher’s hand. His slider curved and dipped, defying the laws of physics. As he glowered and stomped off the mound he looked up at the crowd roaring at him; screaming back, he raised his fists as if to gather their energy and thumped against his chest where his uniform read: MARINERS.
The Kingdome erupted. A torrent of emotion tore through the streets, the bars, the homes of the city. It was beautiful; it was primal; it was sport. "Sometimes," Johnson later said of his action, "things just come out you can't explain. This was one of them."
The M's finally got on the board with one run in the fifth and busted the game open with Luis Sojo's slam in the seventh. Johnson went back out. More than 52,000 Kingdome fans urging him on, he obliterated all three batters. The sound system blasted Steppenwolf’s "Magic Carpet Ride."
“This was his game. No one was going to take it away from him," said Manager Lou Piniella.
No one did. Seattle scored four more runs for a final score of 9-1.
The Series.
The Yankees: the dreaded mystique, the pinstripes, the dozens of World Series championships. The Bronx. In 1995, the division series was a two-three affair: two games in New York, then three back at the Kingdome.
The managerial grandmasters Buck Showalter of the Yankees and “Sweet” Lou Pinella of the Mariners set their pieces on the board. The Mariners were exhausted; the Seattle fans were drained; the hated Yankees were primed and ready to go.
The series began on October 3 at Yankee Stadium. Bottles and batteries were thrown at the pitchers warming up. Yankee Stadium was rocking, partying as only New York fans can. The M's, never having experienced a playoff game, seemed tentative and unsure. The Yankees took a 2-0 lead in the third and never looked back. Although Griffey homered twice, Jeff Nelson and Bobby Ayala gave up a combined four runs in the seventh inning of a 9-6 loss.
Another reason to love sports: you never know when you’ll see something unprecedented, something historic: a series of events that is so totally inconceivable it’s impossible to imagine. So it was with Game 2.
The longest game in baseball playoff history lasted well past one o’clock in the morning in the rambunctious confines of the Bronx Zoo. It was a roller-coaster heart-wrenching back-and-forth battle that showcased the best of baseball, and illustrated perfectly why we love it so.
The Mariners were up 2-1 when back-to-back home runs by Ruben Sierra and Don Mattingly gave the Yankees a 3-2 lead in the sixth. The Bronx fans went wild, unleashing a shower of trash from the outfield so bad that Piniella momentarily pulled his team from the field.
The M’s took a 4-3 lead in the seventh, but the Yankees came back and tied it in the bottom of the inning. All over Seattle, people were riding a wild wave of emotion. To go down 0-2 to the Yankees meant the season was virtually over. Every at-bat, every pitch seemed so critical it was almost surreal. The voice of the Mariner’s announcer, Dave Niehaus, blasted from every car window. Fingernails were chewed, cigarettes were smoked, beer was consumed by the kegful. The ninth inning ended with the score tied.
Inning after inning rolled by. It was after midnight in New York. A screaming line drive homer from Junior in the twelfth put the Mariners ahead 5-4. The city erupted in a collective cheer, but the euphoria was short lived.
Reliever Jeff Nelson hurled a knee-buckling 2-2 slider to Wade Boggs in the bottom of the inning that barely missed the corner. Boggs eventually walked and Jorge Posada came in to run for him. Ruben Sierra, whose home run had sealed Tuesday's game, belted an opposite-field shot that appeared destined for the same fate. Seattle held its breath. The ball bounced a foot from the top of the wall.
An outstanding relay through shortstop Luis Sojo barely got Williams at home to keep the game alive. Catcher Chris Widger made the tag on Bernie Williams. The 5-5 game continued, the tension mounting minute by minute.
Pinella brought in Belcher, the fifth pitcher he had used that night. Belcher struggled through the 13th and 14th. The Yankees did their part, holding Seattle until the 15th, when Edgar Martinez and Buhner singled with one out. But the devil himself, Mariano Rivera, struck out Doug Strange and Tino Martinez flied out on a 3-0 green light.
With one out in the bottom of the inning, Belcher walked Pat Kelly. He then had to come in with a 2-0 pitch against Jim Leyritz. Randy Johnson had hit Leyritz with a pitch on May 31, and Leyritz had been looking for payback all season.
He got it.
Even as Leyritz started his swing, you could tell it was a home run. In the bottom of the fifteenth, Leyritz crushed the ball. New York went crazy, and the Mariners returned home; they were down 0-2 in the series to the powerful Bronx Bombers.
Randy Johnson was spent. The Mariners were spent. Seattle was spent. Against the talent of the Yankees, the end seemed inevitable. There were a few hearty “We can come back!” and “Well, it was a good ride!” conversations at the sports bars, but the energy had disappeared into the night along with that long Leyritz homer. The magic was dead.
In Game 3, the M's were facing “Black” Jack McDowell, a formidable opponent who had owned the Mariners his whole career. McDowell had been sitting for fifteen days with a back problem, so he was kind of a question mark. Perhaps the Ms had a chance after all. Despite the layoff, McDowell allowed only one hit in the first four innings.
It was obvious Johnson didn’t have his best stuff and he was replaced in the sixth. The M’s bats came alive in the bottom of the inning, as they forced Jack McDowell from the game and came away with a 7-4 win. Despite Junior going hitless, it was their first postseason victory.
Although the Yankees scored five runs in the first three innings of Game 4, the Mariners blasted back to take a 6-5 lead at the start of the eighth. New York tied it in the top of the inning, but the M’s scored five runs in the bottom of the eighth, highlighted by Edgar Martinez’s grand slam.
Little-used Bill Risley came in to save the game in the top of the ninth with Yankees on every base, one out and the Mariners holding an 11-7 lead. He faced Wade Boggs, a career .371 hitter with the bases loaded. Risley got Boggs to hit into a fielder's choice, with one run scoring. Bernie Williams came up, representing the tying run. The night before, Risley had given up a towering home run to Williams. On a 3-2 count, Risley launched a fastball that Williams hammered deep toward center field. Griffey caught it on the warning track 400 feet away. Game over. Series tied.
The Game.
All or nothing. Do or die. This was it. Win or go home. The magic was back. Seattle dared to start hoping again. With only two days rest, Randy Johnson had told manager Lou Pinella that he could pitch “a batter or two” in relief if needed. McDowell said the same, and both ace pitchers started the game in their respective dugouts.
David Cone started Game 5 for the Bronx Bombers, and he pitched brilliantly. Unwilling to leave the mound, he threw and threw and threw until his arm began to smolder. The Mariners took the lead in the third, then the Yankees took it back in the fourth; the M's tied it up, then the Yankees took a two run lead in the sixth. It was exhausting to watch – every time it seemed like it was over, somehow, incredibly, the M's came back.
For Game 5, I was in a bar about ten blocks from the Kingdome. The place was packed, as was every place that night: wall-to-wall people, fans spilling out onto the sidewalk. There was almost no traffic. The radio broadcast blared from every open window at top volume. It was a giant, city-wide block party – but we were all waiting for the party to start.
The tension was growing. It could all end so quickly. After about 150 pitches, Cone finally tired in the eighth inning and surrendered an upper-deck home run to Ken Griffey Jr., loaded the bases, then walked home the game-tying run. Everyone for miles sighed with relief.
As the ninth started, the television camera flashed on the six-foot-ten Johnson, shambling around in the dugout, looking for all the world like Frankenstein’s monster. We all looked at each other. The crowd at the bar, the people on the street grew eerily silent. It seemed that even to speak might break the spell, but we all had the same collective thought. Would he? Should he? Could he?
Lou stepped out of the dugout in the top of the ninth and tapped his left arm, the unmistakable signal. The bar, the street, the city went absolutely crazy. The Kingdome sound system began blasting "WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE!" as the mulletted Johnson strode in from the dugout, the perpetual scowl on his face.
It was an incredible scene. Everywhere, people were yelling, crying, hugging each other. Cars were honking their horns. For hundreds of miles around, millions of people were literally screaming their lungs out. This was it, the climax – this wild, unbelievable, exhilarating, heartwrenching bobsled ride would finally end, one way or the other. And how else could it end? It had started with Johnson, now it would end with Johnson. It was fitting; it was right; it was sport.
The Big Unit had thrown 126 pitches and beaten the Yankees two days ago. Six days earlier, he had thrown 116 against the Angels. He entered the ninth with nobody out and two runners on base, facing Wade Boggs. "Were there two runners on?" Johnson later asked. "I thought there was only one." He fanned Boggs, then got Bernie Williams and Paul O'Neill to pop out.
Countering Pinella’s move, Showalter brought in McDowell for the ninth. This was the hated Black Jack McDowell, who as a White Sox or Yankee had never lost in Seattle (6-0 lifetime) and was 10-1 against the Mariners overall. McDowell retired the Ms in order.
In the tenth, Johnson struck out the side: Sierra, Mattingly and Gerald Williams. Johnson’s control was faltering, though; it was obvious the Big Unit was running on nothing more than determination. Johnson walked Mickey Stanley to open the eleventh. Tony Fernandez bunted pinch-runner Pat Kelly over and Randy Velarde singled to make it 5-4.
Everyone groaned in dismay. We forgave Johnson instantly – how could we not? The collective will of Seattle was a living, breathing thing. People who had never seen a baseball game before were praying, crying, holding hands with complete strangers. No way was this going to get away again. We urged the team with our hearts and our dreams. We had endured so long, been through too much joy and tragedy, to let it slip away now.
The Yankees must have felt that they had finally triumphed after getting a run off the unhittable Johnson, but the Mariners weren’t done yet. Down to three outs left in the season, Cora, Griffey, and Martinez were due up in the bottom of the eleventh.
Little Joey Cora, who had homered in the third for Seattle's first run, laid down a surprise bunt. The ball bounced a couple of times, then rolled. Black Jack had no play on it. Mattingly scrambled to reach it, pick it up, then swung to his left to try to tag Cora, who stepped a bit wide to avoid the tag. Mattingly's swipe just missed him as Cora dived safely for first.
Griffey, he of the sweetest swing in all of baseball, nonchalantly blasted a line-drive single to center that moved Cora to third.
It was a huge hit. A monster. Again the city roared its approval. The Kid, the phenom, the face of the team, had come through in the clutch. The table was set. Even a fly ball would tie the game. The American League batting champion, the man everyone on the team called “Popi,” Edgar Martinez, followed.
Edgar, a spry 32 at that time, seemed focused as he stepped into the batter’s box, despite more than 57,000 people standing and cheering as loud as humanly possible.
Edgar had had a chance at McDowell in the ninth when Black Jack entered the game with two men on. He fanned "on a bad pitch" high, Martinez said, embarrassed even after the game. This was despite finishing the series with a .571 average, 12 hits, 10 RBI and 6 runs scored. "I was thinking what he'd throw me instead of just trying to make contact."
After Edgar’s last at-bat, reliever Norm Charlton approached him and said, "You're going to get another chance.” Edgar nodded, as if to say, “I know."
Black Jack checked the runners and fired a fastball for a strike. Edgar didn’t even flinch. McDowell got the signal, wound up again and threw the 0-1 pitch.
To this day, if you ask anyone in Seattle where they were at that time, they can tell you every detail, down to who they were with and what they were wearing. It was the greatest moment in Seattle sports history, surpassing even the Sonics’ championship. Seattle’s incredible week, the Mariner’s unbelievable season, the whole amazing journey that we all took together distilled into one moment: Edgar’s swing in the bottom of the eleventh inning, down by one run, the season on the line.
He laced Black Jack’s 0-1 split-finger fastball into the left-field corner.
A wall of noise went up from everywhere, the final collective release that had been pent up for so long. I can still see the image today, as clearly as I did then. Little Joey Cora scampered in to score the tying run standing up.
A-Rod was standing in the on-deck circle, screaming like a mad thing as Junior sprinted around second base. Griffey didn’t even glance at the third-base coach; he was going home. Brent Musburger was screaming, "Grif-feeeyy's flying around third!" The relay throw was coming in.
Griffey tucked his leg and slid home, beating the relay throw for the winning run. 57,411 fans in the Kingdome and millions of people went wild as the Mariners headed to their first American League Championship Series.
The pigpile on top of Griffey, laying on home plate, a huge grin on his face is such an enduring image that there’s a mosaic of it at Safeco Field. The Yankees were dead. The Mariners had done it.
During this greatest week in Mariners history, Johnson went 3-0, 19 innings pitched, 8 hits, 4 earned runs, 7 walks, 28 strikeouts, a 1.90 earned-run average. And what a week it was. There may never be another like it.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/griffey/photo.asp?SubID=27&PhotoID=488
