So on Saturday prior to the 6:10 p.m. game against the Brewers the Seattle Mariners will honor Ken Griffey Jr. by inducting him into the team’s Hall of Fame. He’ll be the seventh person so honored, joining “Mr. Mariner” Alvin Davis, Edgar Martinez, Dan Wilson, Jay Buhner, Randy Johnson and the late team broadcaster Dave Niehaus.
I was fortunate to cover the Mariners for the Bremerton Sun (now Kitsap Sun) when Griffey arrived as a 19-year-old. He would go on to play for the team for the next 11 seasons (1989-99) before trotting off to his home stomping grounds, Cincinnati where he played for eight-plus mostly injury-filled seasons (2000-2008). Griffey finished the 2008 season with the White Sox and then would return for a less glorious time with the Mariners.
Griffey played the 2009 season with the M’s, and then suddenly walked away from the game and the Mariners after just 33 games of the 2010 season, stunning just about everybody with his abrupt departure. He is now a part-time consultant with the team.
There is not a whole lot I can add to a career that will likely get him elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame when he is eligible in 2016 (a player must be retired for five season to be eligible). I can’t for sure say he will get in on the first ballot, after all Joe DiMaggio and the great Cy Young himself did not get elected the first year they were eligible.
Can you imagine Joltin’ Joe not being a first-ballot choice?
Me neither.
But such is the fickle nature of baseball writers, who often hold grudges or just don’t believe a player should automatic be inducted the first time around. How else do you explain the great Babe Ruth not being a unanimous selection in 1936, the first year writers voted for selection to Cooperstown?
Maybe a few writers didn’t like Babe eating all the ballpark hotdogs.
Some writers are saying, however, that Griffey will be a first-year ballot selection to the Hall. I’m not too sure because Griffey didn’t have the career he was supposed to have once he arrived in Cincinnati. Don’t get me wrong. He belongs in the Hall, and I will vote for him if I’m still lucky enough to be alive in December of 2015 when ballots are mailed out to us writers.
Without any doubt in my mind, he was the greatest centerfielder I seen in person. He was simply amazing. Griffey was a natural athlete (he likely could have played in the NFL if he had went that way) who seemed to do things others couldn’t, and do them with grace and as smooth and as powerful as a Cheetah running down a Gazelle.
He ran down so many long fly balls in centerfield that after a while we writers would ho-hum another great catch by him, while visiting writers would gasp in amazement. He was a joy to watch.
For me, and other writers, he also often was a joy to be around, especially in pre-game. A first-class jokester, he would hang out with us and goof off and say silly stuff that got us all laughing.
One pre-game he went around flipping our press passes that hung around our neck. Well, he did until he got to me. I wouldn’t let him touch it. I kept slapping his hand away, and finally I broke free and headed through the tunnel into the home clubhouse. I figured he would follow me, and he did.
Once inside the clubhouse, Griffey continued to try to get at my press pass. He soon learned I had faster hands then he did, and we started shadow boxing. Again, my hands were too fast for him.
That was the only thing I held that was faster than him. One night after a game at the Kingdome I was waiting for the red light over by the King Station to change when I heard this honking. It was Griffey in some supped up expensive car idling beside me and my beater of a car.
Griffey had that big grin on that he’s known for and he began motioning like he wanted us to run through the gears and race. I shook my head no in obvious defeat and slowly went through the light while he gunned away.
Writers are forbidden from getting autographs from players during the season. I disliked the practice period. I may have gotten three or four autographs over 27 years either covering the team or being MLB’s official scorer for Mariner games, and only one was for myself and that came about by accident.
Anyway, a friend of mine who shall go nameless asked me to get Griffey to autograph a Sports Illustrated that had Griffey on the cover. I kept begging off, but in a moment of weakness agreed to do it.
I dreaded it. I took the magazine, which was incased in glass, to the game and during a pre-game movement when Griffey was not too preoccupied and at his cubicle in the clubhouse, I approached and asked him if he would do this for a friend of mine.
Surprisingly, he did it without thinking twice about it, or as was more normal for him, making me pay for it with some embarrassing comments. But I vowed I would never do that again, even if it were the Pope or President who was asking me.
The same non-autograph unwritten rule applies to Spring Training. But on the last day of Spring Training, anything goes. My last Spring Training I decided I would try on the last day to get Griffey’s autograph and pass it on to my grown daughter as a gift.
Griffey was in the equipment manager’s office signing autographs for assorted club employees, most of them clubhouse boys. When he saw me come through the clubhouse door with a ball in my hands he started ragging on me, trying to embarrass me and make me feel bad.
But I could tell he was only half-heartedly doing it. So I kept walking across the clubhouse and walked into the office. He took the ball without comment, signed it, gave it back to me and flashed that smile.
Ah, only Junior could be Junior when he really wanted to be gracious and a true sweetheart.
I don’t know where that ball is, by the way. It probably got lost in the many moves my daughter has since made.
I won’t be at the game Saturday. My day has passed and it’s time to let it all go. Griffey would probably not recognize me now, anyway. He lives in a different world and a different life than me. I’m, to paint the picture, on the other side of the tracks, and Griffey is in the mansion on the hill.
It’s where he should be. He was the greatest defensive centerfielder, a tremendous home run hitter with one of those perfect swings that comes along just once in a blue moon. He made everything look so easy, even in drag racing.
When he was traded to Cincinnati, some writers suddenly got brave and took pot shots at him for, they say, being cuddled and impetuous and just being a big kid. I didn’t see him that way. He deserved to have a lounge chair and deserved to have two cubicles instead of one. He deserved all the star treatment.
He was the superstar to beat all superstars.
Now, if you asked me if he was a team leader, I would say no. He certainly was more gifted than any of his teammates, but he was a pretty quiet person who led by example. I will always contend the real leader on the 1995 team that pulled off that miracle run to the AL West pennant was “The Bone”, Jay Buhner. It was he who rallied the troops and kept things loose in the clubhouse, and had some big moments on the field during that mid-August to late September run that turned on a city, a region, and saved baseball for Seattle.
But quietly in the background was the guy who Saturday will get his just dues. And in three years the other half of the Hall of Fame shoe will likely drop for the Great One – Ken Griffey Jr.