Baseball's Brigadoon: the Seattle Pilots
This month there's a chance to revisit the 1969 season in Seattle's Sicks Stadium. That Summer at Sicks was a major league wonder that was both legendary and never to be repeated.
By Knute Berger
August 20, 2009.
The Stonewall riots, the Moon landing, Woodstock: This has been the the year of the big 40th anniversary. But the main show is yet to come for those who remember '69.
This is the anniversary summer of Seattle's entry into major league baseball, the one season played by the home town Seattle Pilots. Sicks Stadium on Rainier Avenue at McClellan was a sometime venue for rock concerts, from Elvis to Jimi Hendrix, but more familiarly home to the city's legendary Pacific Coast League Seattle Rainiers and later the minor league Seattle Angels (wretched name).
Seattle baseball fans were desperate for the bigs, and in '69, every mossboy's dream (other than driving the winning boat in the Gold Cup) came true. For me, I lived just a few blocks from Sicks, and the fact that the New York Yankees were going to be playing Seattle in my very own neighborhood was beyond belief. The stadium was expanded and upgraded, a bittersweet thing because it removed the notches that had been hacked into the outfield wall so that we kids could heckle and use our bean shooters on enemy outfielders. But the magic of major league baseball was a consolation.
I was in high school, mostly a hippie, but a baseball-lovin' hippie. On April 11, 1969 I sat in a loge box (Section 6, Row 21, Seat 24) next to my father on the first-base side of home plate for the opening day game against the Chicago White Sox. I spent many days and evenings of my childhood summers at Sicks watching the Rainiers, usually in the bleachers. But this was something special. My dad had sprung for the expensive ($4.50 per seat) tickets. It was so special that even the appearance of cast members from the awful TV show Here Come the Brides couldn't spoil the fun.
Seattle won that game, and a few others that followed. The season was mostly inglorious, but remarkable simply because it was. None of us then expected just how rare a treat: before the second season began, big league baseball shafted Seattle and the team was kidnapped to Milwaukee. (If you've ever wondered why Seattle fans boo creepy baseball commissioner Bud Selig so lustily, it's because he was one of the Grinches that stole baseball from us.)
To commemorate that year, the Pilots are having a reunion here on August 29. Former team-mates will gather at the Bellevue Hilton, then head down to Pyramid Ale outside Safeco Field, and then appear again (drunk, I hope) on the field before the Seattle Mariners game against the Kansas City Royals. Some details are here and here. The rare get-together will be a chance for fans to meet the veterans of a team they barely got to know 40 years ago.
If you can't make it, or even if you can, the best way to prepare is to re-read Pilots knuckleballer Jim Bouton's fabulous, funny, gossipy memoir of the season, Ball Four, which I've heard described as being the best baseball memoir ever written, yet about one of the worst (and certainly shortest-lived) teams in major league history. Bouton's book reads like it was written by Elmore Leonard or Donald Westlake: fast character sketches, salty dialogue, and great anecdotes (farting, drinking, fighting, pitching). You'll learn that Pilots rookie Lou Piniella even went to a fortune-teller during spring training. No word on whether he threw her crystal ball into the outfield when he didn't like what she said.
I doubt many Pilots fans made it to Woodstock, but we'll always have that summer at Sicks.
Comments:
Posted Thu, Aug 20, 8:05 a.m. Inappropriate
One of the best come-from-behind victories I ever heard in baseball (I was listening on the radio, so I can't say I saw it) was by the old Seattle Pilots during that one season.
It was early enough along in the season since I was listening in a dorm room in Bellingham, but exactly when or the opponent are beyond my ability to add or detract. Still, the Pilots came from something like an 11-run deficit to win in the ninth inning. Pretty good.
Sadly, I never made it to a game since the instant school was out I was on a train to Montana to work the summer at Glacier National Park. No more Pilots games even on the radio while there since all we could get was one very awful station out of Cut Bank, MT.
Maybe the best thing Slade Gorton ever did for Washington state was to sue Major League Baseball in order to get another team - and an All Star Game thrown in just to rub their noses in it.
Some contend that the massive PNW inferiority complex that lends folks in this neck of the woods to allow themselves to be beat up by bullies and special interests (though Greg Nickels political career may be coming to an end) stems from the whupping we all took after one season with the Pilots.
And it's not just Bud Selig who gets booed - the Milwaukee Brewers, who were the Seattle Pilots, are almost as hated as the NY Yankees. Almost...but not quite - the 1960 World Series was about the sweetest one ever.
I wonder how much nostalgia the decades-long Sonics tenure will generate? We seem more misty-eyed nostalgic over the Pilots than we do about the Sonics, or is the pain still too raw?
The Piper
Posted Thu, Aug 20, 5:39 p.m. Inappropriate
I remember going to a Pilots' game that year. It was only the third time I'd ever been to Seattle. The first was for the World's Fair. The second time was a trip to the post-fair Seattle Center, where I got to meet another short-lived Seattle phenomenon, KOMO's "Teeny the Clown." Whatever were they thinking?
Posted Thu, Aug 20, 8:09 p.m. Inappropriate
The name of the man who built the stadium was Emil Sick; he gave it the name Sick's Seattle Stadium, not "Sicks."
Also, the Forward Thrust commuter rail project voted down 40 years ago was for Heavy Rail, like the Sounder. Heavy rail is the way people actually get moved, like in Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. That was the occasion of the City settling for no medal at all. The rest is just creeps like Bud Selig, David Stern, Howard Schultz, and the current crop of politicians from Seattle and the County. Imagine, a college drop-out, blow-dried version of the Pillsbury Dough Boy for a pretense of a Mayor.
Posted Fri, Aug 21, 11:21 a.m. Inappropriate
I'm bummed that the place is now a Lowe's instead of a ball park. I could walk to a game in 5 minutes.
Scott, I can see not liking the Brewers (kind of, but not much since they are now in the NL) but I don't get the Yankee hatred in this city.
Why would not any Series loss of the Yankees do..., like 2001, when there already was MLB in Seattle...?
And if you have time you might find the details of the 11 run comeback on
www.retrosheet.org if you page through the details game by game.
Posted Tue, Aug 25, 3:55 p.m. Inappropriate
I hazily remember the details of a Rainier game against the SF Giants (PCL) where the R's were down 12-3 in the 8th. Their big hitter(Taylor?) had already hit a homer earlier and got another in the 8th. Finally -- Leo Lassen -- Artie Wilson at bat -- its a ground ball,,,through the hole,,, into right field (no, it wasn't a do or you don't and he didn't), the rest was Leo screaming the Rainiers take the lead 13-12. Good old Leo, the only sane voice reaching the far side of the peninsula in those days.
-skippa
Posted Thu, Aug 27, 1:28 p.m. Inappropriate
Knute, I hope you will be at the Pilots reunion on Saturday. Did you save any stuff from the Pilots, Seattle Angels or Rainiers? I'll be part of the show on Saturday, with my display of Pilots and Seattle sports memorabilia. I hope your readers will attend too.
Posted Sun, Aug 30, 12:52 p.m. Inappropriate
seattlebaseball: I wasn't able to make it due to illness. I did keep some souvenirs, including my opening day ticket stub and a Pilots button. Would love to see your stuff sometime, but I'm bummed I missed the event.