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15 | Designated Hitters

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neof o ge Rge cARLin’s gReAtest Riffs compares baseball and

football: “Baseball is a 19th century pastoral game. Football is a

20 th century technological struggle. Baseball begins in the spring,

the season of new life. Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dy-

ing. Football has hitting, clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls,...

late hitting and unnecessary roughness. Baseball has the sacrifice.”^1

Though he has a reputation for playing tackle, Gorton laments that

politics today is more like football than baseball. He loves baseball. Al-

though he intervened decisively three times over a quarter-century to

save big-league baseball for Seattle, his heart belongs to those lovable los-

ers, the Chicago Cubs. He can close his eyes and see himself as a 10-year-

old at Wrigley Field in 1938; hear the roar of the crowd and the whack of a

bat launching a triple into left field. He can smell the peanuts and re-

member the snap of the casing when he took his first bite of a ball park

hot dog slathered with mustard and relish. He keeps a meticulous score-

card. Don’t interrupt him. It’s serious business.

Before Gorton helped Seattle acquire the Mariners, Seattle had a big-

league team for one not-so-golden year. The Seattle Pilots’ hapless 1969

season is immortalized in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, one of the best books—

many say the best—ever written about baseball. The Pilots traded the fu-

ture American League Rookie of the Year, a lippy kid named Lou Piniella,

to Kansas City at the end of spring training. You can look it up.^2

witho n AssuRAnce of a prime tenant if a domed stadium was built,

bond issues had failed in 1960 and 1966. Facing strike three, stadium

boosters enlisted American League representatives and heavy hitters, in-

cluding Boston outfielder Carl Yastrzemski, to campaign for the new pro-

posal that was part of the 1968 Forward Thrust package Gorton had

championed as a legislator. Voters backed the $40 million stadium pro-

posal and Seattle got the Pilots.

Old and undersized, Sick’s Stadium would be their home until the