Game 7. The two best words in sports.
The Mariners have played in three winner-take-all postseason games in their history, but all three were Game 5 of the Division Series.
They’ve never been this close to an elusive World Series berth, and when they take the field at the Rogers Centre in Toronto on Monday night, it will be the brightest lights that they’ve ever played under.
It’s a day that former U.S. Senator Slade Gorton battled for.
“He was such a baseball nerd,” J. Vander Stoep said.
During his stint as Gorton’s Chief of Staff in the early 1990s, Vander Stoep had a “front row seat” to witness Gorton’s hand in keeping the Mariners in Seattle, but Gorton’s fingerprints on baseball in the Emerald City go back to the very beginning.
In 1969, Gorton was in his first year as the Attorney General of Washington, and the Seattle Pilots played their first season in existence as a Major League Baseball franchise.
When the Pilots bolted for Milwaukee after just one year, Gorton sued the American League. That lawsuit dragged into the middle of the 1970s, when the league offered Seattle an expansion franchise to drop the suit.
In 1977, the Seattle Mariners debuted.
Fast forward to 1991, Gorton is in the U.S. Senate, and Vander Stoep is his Chief of Staff. Former Mariners owner Jeff Smulyan puts the team up for sale for $100 million, and the rumors of relocation run rampant.
Gorton began to form a group of local investors who were committed to keeping the team in Seattle, but it “was well short” of the mark. He reached out to a friend of his, Howard Lincoln, who was the North American head of Nintendo at the time.
“He calls Lincoln and says ‘Hey, would Nintendo want to participate in this,” Vander Stoep recalled.
At the time, the president of Nintendo was Hiroshi Yamauchi. Yamauchi had never been to the United States, he didn’t speak English, and he had never seen a Major League Baseball game.
Regardless, in a meeting on Christmas Eve 1991, Yamauchi agreed to buy a majority stake in the team.
Vander Stoep added that he originally agreed to foot the entire bill, but agreed to buying 51 percent to partner with the local buyers.
“Slade calls and tells me about this,” Vander Stoep said. “He says 'It was the best Christmas present I’ve ever had.'”
The team’s future in Seattle was more secure, but the team still needed a new stadium.
Four years later, Vander Stoep is preparing to teach a Sunday school class when his phone rings.
“I get a call from the woman who was his State Director at the time,” Vander Stoep said. “She goes ‘get up here. We’re gonna have a negotiation with the King County Councilmembers, and Slade wants you up here.’ I didn’t even work for him then. But I left.”
After a few rounds of negotiations, the County agreed on a deal, and construction for Safeco Field (now T-Mobile Park) began in 1996.
In the last month, T-Mobile Park has seen some of its best moments.
The Mariners won their first division title in 24 years on Sept. 24, the same day Cal Raleigh hit his 59th and 60th home runs of the season.
On Oct. 10, Jorge Polanco ripped a single to right field in the 15th inning to send the Mariners to the American League Championship Series. It was the longest winner-take-all game in MLB postseason history.
Last Friday, Oct. 17, Eugenio Suárez hit a go-ahead grand slam in the bottom of the eighth, a home run that put the Mariners one win away from the World Series.
And if the Mariners can win one more game in Toronto on Monday night, T-Mobile Park will host World Series games for the first time.
Gorton, unfortunately, will not be in attendance. He passed away on August 19, 2020, but his dedication to keeping baseball in Seattle will still be felt for generations to come.
“All of us in the region who are baseball fans have this team,” Vander Stoep said. “And thank goodness. I only wish they had this season four or five years ago when my mother was still alive, and Slade was still alive.”
