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29 | Back at Bat

“Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only

a hole in Arizona.”—George F. Will

I

nono of his swe h R At equity, Gorton has a seat in the owner’s box

at Safeco Field, home to the Seattle Mariners since 1999 and one of

the great baseball venues in America. That’s as good as it gets for

someone who became a certifiable baseball nut around age 8. If Gorton

hadn’t stepped up to the plate once again in 1991, the Mariners might be

in Tampa Bay as yet another offspring of Seattle’s shotgun marriage with

Major League Baseball.

The team Gorton put together to save big-league baseball for Seattle a

second time included old friends like John Ellis, the CEO of Puget Sound

Power & Light, and new high-tech millionaires like Chris Larson, one of

the young software wizards at Microsoft. The real savior, however, was

nearly 5,000 miles away.

Though they had never met, Hiroshi Yamauchi, the architect of Nin-

tendo’s emergence from domestic playing card producer to global power

in the burgeoning world of video games, was grateful to Gorton. The

senator had prodded U.S. Customs and the FBI to crack down on the

counterfeiters who were pirating Donkey Kong, the game that took Amer-

ica by storm. By 1992, Nintendo owned 80 percent of a $6 billion global

market. Its American division, overseen by Yamauchi’s talented son-in-

law, Minoru Arakawa, had 1,400 employees at its headquarters in the

Seattle suburb of Redmond, where Microsoft and McCaw Cellular were

also in the chips. From his seat on the Senate Commerce Committee

Gorton was a tireless protector of their intellectual property rights. His

fan club, in other words, included some of the wealthiest people on Earth.^1

whenffJ e sMuLyAn Bought the struggling Mariners in 1989, he de-

scribed himself as cocky. By 1991 he professed to feeling naïve, although

many suspected ulterior motives. The bottom line was that he was losing