Sicks' Stadium, Seattle, April 10, 1969 - From the very get-go, the Major League's first venture into the Northwest was an epic disaster after the league rushed the Pilots expansion team into the 1969 season. Here the night before the Pilots inaugural home opener against the Chicago White Sox, construction workers are feverishly still adding bleacher seats that would continue into the next day and after the first pitch, some fans had to wait until the third inning to get seated!
Despite the snags in getting Sick's Stadium ready, the Pilots did give their new but brief fans a 7-0 win as starter Gary Bell threw a 9-hit shutout and first baseman Don Mincher hit the first Major League home run in Seattle, his two-run blast in the third inning off Chicago's Joe Horlen gave the Pilots a 2-0 lead.
The win also improved the Pilots record to 2-1, in fact for an expansion team they played solid baseball for most of the first half of the season with a record just under the .500 mark. But as the 4th of July approached the losses started to come in bunches and pile up. They would finish their only season in Seattle with a 64-98 record and 33 games behind the first place Minnesota Twins.
And the bleachers and their win-loss record was just the tip of the iceberg on the issues that plagued the first year team in Seattle.
So the next season the franchise would move to Milwaukee and become today's Brewers and the one year debacle in the northwest was done with. Although this all reflected badly on the city of Seattle, it never should have, this was not their fault. Originally, Seattle's expansion team was not suppose to begin till the 1971 season along with the expansion Kansas City team (Royals). But an impatient politician in Missouri by the name of Stuart Symington would have none of that and insisted that the Royals start in 1969, and since the league would not let one team enter by itself they pushed an unprepared Pilots organization up two years, and chaos ensued as a result.
The only silver lining out of the 1969 Seattle Pilots season was it produced one of the great baseball books of all time called "Ball Four', written by the Pilots relief pitcher Jim Bouton.
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04-04-2024, 05:20 AM
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