by Kevin Burton
Two score and 17 years ago, a marginal knuckleballer pitched a little, and took good notes.
Now at this long remove, Seattle is rejoicing, in some measure at least, in a World Series championship won years too late, and in a place far, far away.
And as the last out was recorded, I was there watching on TV and clutching a book.
If you’re old enough, you remember that the team they now call the Milwaukee Brewers, which won the World Series Wednesday, was for one glorious year, the Seattle Pilots.
I just called the 1969 season glorious for the Pilots, but it was only so in a literary sense and that, after the fact.
Jim Bouton, a Yankees flamethrowing World Series hero who had blown out his arm, was hanging on with the expansion Pilots, throwing a knuckleball. He won two games in the 1964 series for the Yankees, but that glory had long since faded. As the decade ended, he was pondering a post-baseball career in real estate.
I’m pretty sure he would only be remembered for his Yankees years, except that during 1969 he began taking notes for a book about his attempt to hang on in baseball.
That book, published in1970, is called “Ball Four.” It is a tell-all inside baseball book, the first of its genre. Even if you don’t like baseball, I highly recommend you read this book. It is beyond hilarious and has tremendous insights into the human condition.
Ball Four is “a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book,” said no less a literary authority than the late great David Halberstam.
Few at the time could have imagined something so sublime emerging from a season so ridiculous. The ‘69 Pilots were terrible on the field (64-98) and worse off it. So bad in fact that the team didn’t survive into the 70s.
“The Seattle Pilots were part of MLB’s 1969 expansion, joining the American League at a moment when baseball was adding teams, splitting leagues into divisions, and trying to grow into new markets,” reads an article on the website homerunswithoutborders.com.
The expansion Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres and Kansas City Royals all had their growing pains in 1969. But the Pilots lacked not just playing talent, Rickety Sick’s Stadium, the Pilots’ home field, was the physical manifestation of an organization which was in no way ready for major league baseball.
“The result was a club that felt temporary almost as soon as it arrived,” the article reads.
The Pilots were declared bankrupt on March 31, 1970. Shortly thereafter they began life almost 2,000 miles away in Milwaukee as the Brewers.
Imagine a big-league team headed north from spring training in Arizona, vans loaded with equipment, stopped in Utah, and waiting. Do we go northwest to Seattle, or northeast to Milwaukee?
There are plenty of players who reached the big-time, but lasted just a year, or even just a week. But a whole team as a one-hit wonder?
That is the legacy of the Seattle Pilots.
From those days to these, my Seattle baseball equation goes 69+77+82+95+26.
The Pilots’ lone season was in 1969. In ’77, the American League expanded again and awarded Seattle a team, the Mariners, in large part because the city sued MLB for stealing the Pilots. In ’82 the Brewers made the World Series for the first time, losing to St. Louis in seven games.
In 1995, the Refuse To Lose Mariners stormed back from 12½ games behind the California Angels to force a one-game playoff for the West division. They won that, then beat the hated Yankees in a Division series for the ages before losing to Cleveland in the ALCS.
That ’95 team saved the Mariners from going the way of the Pilots and leaving Seattle. At issue again, an antiquated stadium.
Then Wednesday, that team spirited away from the great northwest in 1970, still wearing the Pilots colors of blue and gold, finished off Tampa Bay.
I look at the Brewers, and see the Pilots. Such misfits and underdogs are close to my heart and deep in my memories.
“The Seattle Pilots lasted only one MLB season, but they became more than a footnote because their short life exposed so many hidden parts of the sport,” homerunswithoutborders wrote. “They were an expansion team, a failed business, a literary setting, a relocation case, and the beginning of the Milwaukee Brewers.”
“Baseball has had worse teams and stranger teams, but few have ever packed more history into less time.”
