Pitching Change
Soundgarden was suspicious of the commercialization of everything around them. At the height of their popularity as the local NBA team did battle with Chicago in the NBA Finals, the alt-rockers were a musical guest on Saturday Night Live in May 1996. With “GO SONICS” plastered across Matt Cameron’s kickdrum, they performed the hit “Pretty Noose,” its lyrics decrying the “diamond rope, silver chain” keeping its narrator tethered to a life of “pretty pain.” In the song’s final measurers, singer Chris Cornell’s voice drops a pitch to a sonic snarl, telling the materialist demon of his worldly affection: “I don’t like what you got me hanging from.” Record execs obliged by cutting the cord, ditching Seattle grunge in favor of faddish boy bands from LA and Orlando in the later 1990s. All that glittered wasn’t gold, and Seattle wouldn’t be glittering so much anymore at the turn of the century.
Sure as nimbostratus clouds cover the sun, the media spotlight on Seattle dimmed. After the World Trade Organization protests in late 1999, popular magazines reevaluated Seattle’s status as urban America’s trendiest city. The New York Times bristled at flash-bangs and pepper spray on the streets of “the happiest, mellowest city on the planet.”1 The British periodical Independent said: “Seattle may never be the same again.”2 Frontier Seattle’s innocent façade had been punctured. Shortly thereafter, the tech sector of the US stock market peaked in March 2000, then collapsed, erasing the fortunes of some of Seattle’s richest individuals. The city’s bustling coffee shops and bookstores emptied; recession resulted in area population decline.3 Seattle’s sports simulated the city’s rise and fall.
After losing to Chicago in the 1996 NBA Finals, the SuperSonics signed so-so white center Jim McIlvane to a massive contract, making him one of the highest-paid players on the team. That McIlvane made as much money as Seattle’s star player, Shawn Kemp, alienated Kemp terribly. Sonics management dealt away their disgruntled employee, and the team’s subsequent slide into mediocrity had fatal consequences for the future of men’s professional basketball in Seattle.
When he began playing for the Seattle Mariners in 2001, Ichiro Suzuki renewed a long tradition of Japanese American baseball in the city. Though segregated, Issei and Nisei ballplayers established thriving leagues in the Progressive Era. Courtesy of the Seattle Municipal Archives, item 177018.
Briefly at the turn of the century, the Seattle Mariners were a bright spot. Ken Griffey Jr. felt slighted when Seattle management didn’t incorporate his suggestions for the team’s new ballpark. Junior wanted a stadium with short outfield fences, in hopes of one day catching Hank Aaron’s career home-run record.4 Instead, new Safeco Field was a pitcher-friendly stadium with faraway outfield fences and a canopy design that deadened deep balls in the thickly moist Seattle air. Fed up, Griffey departed for his home team Cincinnati Reds in early 2000. The Mariners prospered with a new core of Alex Rodriguez, Ichiro Suzuki, and pitchers Jamie Moyer and Freddie Garcia, making it to the 2000 American League Championship Series. Although they fell short to the eventual champion New York Yankees, fans were excited for the following year. After Rodriguez jumped ship in the offseason, the Mariners got even better.
When Seattle defeated the Anaheim Angels on Monday, September 10, 2001, their record improved to a dazzling 104–40. Seattle led their division by seventeen games, threatened to break the league record for regular season wins, and were clear favorites to win the World Series. The next morning, two passenger airplanes struck the World Trade Center in New York City. Eyewitnesses saw another plane hit the Pentagon. Still another, believed to have been bound for the US Capitol, crashed in rural Pennsylvania. After the terrorist attacks, professional baseball and football were delayed a week; when they returned, pregame rituals and halftime displays showcased a wave of performative patriotism. During baseball’s seventh-inning stretch, the singing of “God Bless America” became customary.5 A new nationalist tide took over American sports, its waves reaching from sea to shining Seattle.
Born October 22, 1973, Mariners outfielder Ichiro Suzuki became a case study on the state of American nationalism in the post-9/11 moment. Where in past seasons Seattle slugged home runs with Ken Griffey Jr. and Jay Buhner, this new iteration of the squad was tailored around the skills Suzuki picked up as a veteran in Japan’s competitive baseball leagues: less power hitting, more base hits, better defense. Suzuki made highlight reels by sprinting to turn routine ground balls into singles. Pundits turned him into a parable about postindustrial America. In the same way that Japanese cars outlasted American autos with smaller frames and better gas mileage, Ichiro was framed as the cagey batter whose cunning efficiency conquered the national pastime. “Good riddance to stats-obsessed behemoths,” said the New York Times on September 16, 2001. “Ichiro’s Pacific Rim virtues of modesty and understatement mask a fierce devotion to success. [He’s the] Honda that replaced the Oldsmobile.”6
Just as many white Seattle audiences were wary of Japanese baseball excellence during the Progressive Era, fetishism of Ichiro often lapsed into bigotry. Sports Illustrated put him on the cover of its July 2002 edition, making his Asiatic physiognomy seem simultaneously intimate and foreign with an ogling close-up, while saying he had “no power, no peer, and no personality.”7 Behind the scenes Seattle sportswriters grumbled about Ichiro’s standoffishness; fans wondered if he was pretending to not know how to speak English. Nobody could complain much: from 2001 to 2011, Ichiro won ten Gold Gloves, was one of baseball’s best hitters, and missed only 34 of 1,782 regular season games. Still, there was a feeling among Seattle fans that though he was in the city, he wasn’t of it. “I’ve struggled to understand what so much of Seattle had against Ichiro,” wrote Mariners beat writer Geoff Baker. “After reading Lauren Hillenbrand’s book about the Air Force experiences in a Japanese POW camp during World War II, it made sense. I believe people carry that sentiment over—even subconsciously—when looking at Ichiro.”8
Although the Mariners won a record 116 games in the 2001 regular season, the vibes were all off after 9/11. Seattle made it back to the playoffs, advancing to face New York again in the American League Championship Series (ALCS)—but they had barely beaten Cleveland in a first-round series that highlighted the team’s tendency to score fewer runs in their own new ballpark than they did on the road. The Yankees, meanwhile, looked like a team of destiny, riding high on sympathetic press attention that framed them as America’s team after 9/11. An aura of guilt emanated from Seattle manager Lou Piniella as he sat in the dugout; once a beloved Yankee, he now had to deliver sports heartbreak to a New York fan base in search of something to feel good about after the bloodiest day on US soil since the Civil War battle of Antietam in 1862.
After dropping the first two games of the 2001 ALCS in Seattle, the Mariners stormed back to win 14–3 in New York. In a pivotal Game Four played on October 21 at Yankee Stadium, the Mariners took a 1–0 lead on a Bret Boone home run in the top of the eighth. On the mound, former Yankee Jeff Nelson had his old team completely smothered, wielding his knowledge of New York’s hitters at the most opportune moment possible. Inexplicably, Lou Piniella made a pitching change. Seattle’s bullpen surrendered three runs after Nelson left the game. The Mariners lost 3–1, then gave up twelve runs a day later to lose the series.
A symbol of their city’s declining national esteem, the Seattle Mariners wouldn’t return to the playoffs for another twenty-one years. When they made their next postseason run in 2022, American cities were two decades at war with an anti-urban turn in US politics.