THE EARLY DAYS by Maple Street Press

THE EARLY DAYS A Conversation With Lou Gorman by Jonah Keri

he Mariners headed into the 2010 season with plenty of question marks. But upgrading the offense, reloading the farm systems, and even the fate of Felix Hernandez pales in comparison to the task Lou Gorman faced 33 years ago. Led by the club’s managing partner, comedian Danny Kaye, the M’s hired Gorman to be the first general manager in franchise history. The Mariners were impressed by Gorman’s ability to turn the expansion Kansas City Royals into a winning team in their third year of existence. In a wide-ranging interview, Gorman detailed those early years in Seattle, the challenges he faced in building a ballclub from scratch, and the value of managing expectations. “I had to decide if I would stay in Kansas City as director of baseball operations or go to Seattle,” Gorman recalled. “I was happy with what we’d done in Kansas City. But Seattle was a good opportunity. When I met with Danny Kaye, he said, ‘Lou, how long will it take you to build a competitive club?’ I told him Kansas City wasn’t a good example, since it happened so fast. “So I told him you’re typically looking at about 11 years. Kaye looked at me and said, ‘You tell the other partners 12 or 13 years then. We don’t want them to get their hopes up too fast.’” Gorman’s theory of expansion team timeframes blended shrewdly pessimistic management of expectations with a bit of prescient forecasting. The Tampa Bay Rays had their first winning season in Year 11, going to the World Series in 2008. Meanwhile the Mariners didn’t enjoy their first

History

winning season or playoff berth until Year 15, with an 83–79 record in 1991. They didn’t make the playoffs until Year 19, with a strike-shortened 79–66 record in 1995. Precedent aside, the sheer magnitude of the task Gorman faced practically screamed, “Patience!” When he took over the job, Gorman had nothing—no farm system, no major league players, no scouts, no player development personnel, no support staff. The expansion draft represented the organization’s first major building block. “Every time each team [the Mariners and expansion Blue Jays] would draft, the team that lost a player could pull a bunch of guys back,” Gorman said. “That meant you had some good talent for the first few rounds, but by the fifth or sixth round, it was a grab bag.” The sheer number of viable available players wasn’t the only variable the fledgling Mariners had to handle. There was also the matter of player profiles. “We had to make a decision: Do we go after young players to build around? Or do we take veteran players right away? I felt the best approach was to take a couple of veterans in the early rounds, then focus on younger players so we could build for the long haul. Toronto—this was Pat Gillick as GM, Peter Bavasi as president—they took an older team.”

Infielder Julio Cruz began his major league career with the Mariners in 1977. 114 | Maple Street Press Mariners Annual 2010

Merely getting into position to do the expansion draft took up vast amounts of Gorman’s time and effort. Working 14 hours a day year-round, at a time well before such a breakneck pace was the norm, Gorman worked shoulder-toshoulder with his scouts in sizing up the expansion draft and the club’s first amateur draft. Finding those scouts was a challenge in itself. With no staff to make selections and most of the best scouts under contract with other clubs, Gorman had to leave no stone unturned in building his cadre of scouts. First, he hired Mel Didier to serve as scouting director. Didier would prove to be a fortuitous hire, helping the Mariners find a solid group of young players in the early years; more than three decades later, he’s still going strong as a newly-hired senior advisor for the Jays. Bob Kennedy became one of Didier’s senior lieutenants, coming over from the Cardinals. Meanwhile, Bill Kearns turned out to be the best pick of all; at age 88, he’s been scouting for the Mariners for every season of the team’s existence, and continues to birddog to this day. Gorman’s search for talent evaluators took him outside the baseball world too. The M’s tapped Dick Vertlieb to serve as executive vice president. Vertlieb lacked baseball experience, but he’d proven himself as a skilled operator in the NBA, manning the general manager spot for the Seattle SuperSonics and Indiana Pacers, and winning a championship and Executive of the Year honors with the 1974–75 Golden State Warriors. He would eventually take over as GM of the Mariners too. At the start, though, he served as a helpful foil for the M’s, offering new ideas on how to build a team, with opinions that differed dramatically from baseball orthodoxy. Gorman also aggressively pursued a small cadre of preferred coaches, none harder than Mel Stottlemyre. “Mel owned a sporting goods store in Yakima in those days. I wanted to convince him to get back into baseball. He had a son who had cancer, so it was difficult for him to go anywhere. We had a Triple A club in Spokane at the time, and I said I’d pay for his travel so he could stay close to his family. He finally agreed and became the pitching coach there. Then we made him our major league pitching coach. When I went to the Mets, I recommended him there too. He was a great guy and a terrific pitching coach.” With the expansion draft behind them, Gorman and his staff set out to ace the amateur draft. The team’s first pick in their inaugural 1977 draft turned out to be a winner: 14-year major league veteran outfielder Dave Henderson. Even allowing for the high failure rate of the draft, though, the M’s struggled to find impact players in the early years. Just one of the team’s top six picks in 1978, Dave Valle, ever played in the big leagues. Seattle’s top pick in 1979 did

Photo on previous page: Michael Zagaris/Getty Images Photo this page: B Bennett/Getty Images

MARINERS HISTORY

The Early Days

Photo: B Bennett/Getty Images

1977 was the best year of Leroy Stanton’s career. crack the bigs, but given that Al Chambers was also the top overall pick that year, his 57 career games played have to be considered a disappointment. In fact, the Mariners didn’t really register a big score in the draft until 1981, when they landed Mike Moore, Mark Langston, and Phil Bradley, part of a group of six big leaguers from Seattle’s top seven picks. By then, Gorman had moved on to become head of baseball operations for the Mets. If those early drafts didn’t quite go as planned, you could forgive Gorman, given the nature of his job. More than just a typical GM, he also had to wear the hat of a stadium architect, marketing consultant, and about 20 other roles. “The Kingdome was being built, and I had to decide on the layout of the infield and outfield, the sightlines, and ground rules. I wasn’t used to operating in a dome, so I had to find someone who was. I called Tal Smith with the Astros to ask for advice, since he’d dealt with the ground rules of the Astrodome. One problem we had was the speakers behind first base and third base and in left field and right field. The speakers were built in fair territory. I asked Tal about it, and he said a ball that hits a speaker should be in play.” Gorman recalled one game where the speaker quandary came back to bite the M’s in a way they never expected. “We were playing the White Sox, down one or two runs. One of their batters hits a towering fly ball to right field and it hits a speaker. Bruce Bochte was our first

baseman, Julio Cruz was our second baseman, and Leon Roberts was our right fielder—they were all chasing after it. They looked up... nothing. The ball never came down. “Nestor Chylak was the umpire who had to make the call. He didn’t know what to do. He asked me how I would call it. [laughs] I told him I really couldn’t say. So Chylak decided it was a dead ball. Chuck Tanner got really upset. He put the game under protest. But there wasn’t much anyone could do. There was no rule for what to do if the ball got stuck.” The Kingdome quickly became the bane of Gorman’s existence. Year after year, he used any means available to try and build a workable pitching staff: the expansion draft, the amateur draft, multiple trades. But the Mariners consistently ranked near the bottom of the league in run prevention in those early years, due not only to a lack of talent but also to an unforgiving home park. “We were taking BP that first year, and [5-foot-9, 165-pound second baseman] Julio Cruz was just launching home runs. Naturally, we thought this was unusual. So we went out to the outfield and measured the distance from home plate. Turns out the dimensions were short by ten feet compared to what we’d intended. And the right field fence was only about ten feet high at that time [the team would eventually raise the right field wall to 23 feet]. The Kingdome just was not a great facility to play baseball in.” Gorman did recognize the stadium’s potential to

Maple Street Press Mariners Annual 2010 | 115

MARINERS HISTORY 1977 Mariners Lineup Player

AVG

OBP

SLG

RBI

Bob Stinson

347

.269

.360

.394

Dan Meyer

639

.273

.320

.442

Jose Baez

333

.259

.305

.321

Craig Reynolds

455

.248

.277

.319

Bill Stein

600

.259

.299

.394

Steve Braun

544

.235

.351

.315

Ruppert Jones

663

.263

.324

.454

Leroy Stanton

505

.275

.341

.511

Juan Bernhardt

317

.243

.259

.354

“He said, ‘Patience is for losers, we’re going to win the pennant in three years.’ It still hasn’t happened.” A combination of battle fatigue and butting heads with Argyros and the new ownership group soured Gorman on the Mariners GM job and left him yearning for new opportunities. “The situation was so difficult, trying to build a winner from expansion, then dealing with that kind of owner. You’re going against clubs that have been established a long time. You’re starting from scratch. I went through it twice, in Kansas City and Seattle. You have to convince fans to give the team time to do it right. It just wasn’t going to happen in that environment.” Gorman went on to help assemble the nucleus of the great Mets teams of the mid-to-late ’80s. The Mets drafted and developed the likes of Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, Calvin Schiraldi, Rick Aguilera, and Kevin Tapani, among others. They also traded for key contributors like Ron Darling and Sid Fernandez. The team’s success peaked in 1986, when the Mets famously came back to beat the Red Sox, knocking off Gorman’s childhood favorites, and the team he would GM from 1984-93 Gorman speaks wistfully now of his days living in Seattle. He misses the city, and the fans who supported the team in those tough early years (the M’s went 246–400 in Gorman’s four years as GM). “I loved Seattle. The city was mesmerizing to me. We lived up in Cougar Mountain. You had the Cascades and the Olympics, there were always mountains in the background, no matter where you looked. Everything about that place I loved. The sports were great. College football had this rich tradition, basketball, NFL, all the arts and culture. I still miss it sometimes.” MSP

Jonah Keri has written about baseball for a variety of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, ESPN.com, and many other places. He’s writing a book about the Tampa Bay Rays and their Wall Street approach to the game for ESPN Books/Ballantine (Spring 2011).

Glenn Abbott, the closest thing the ‘77 Mariners had to an ace. 116 | Maple Street Press Mariners Annual 2010

Photo: B Bennett/Getty Images

produce star hitters, though. And of all the tough Pos breaks in Mariners history, Gorman has a fish C story that ranks high on the list. 1B “I hired Jerry Krause to work for me as a 2B baseball scout. This was well before he had all his SS 3B success as the general manager of the Chicago LF Bulls. He and Mel Didier said they saw this player CF who’d be the next Mickey Mantle for Seattle. I RF went to see him, and he was as great as they’d DH said. The player said he wanted to play baseball long term, but he also wanted to finish his college football career first; he promised to finish those four years, then not go to the NFL. “I talked to the owners about it. They didn’t want to guarantee money while he was playing college football, and he wouldn’t give up football. So Detroit ended up drafting him number one. It’s too bad. Kirk Gibson would have been dynamite in the Kingdome.” Gorman would serve four years as Seattle’s GM before leaving for Queens. His long-term approach to team building didn’t sit well with new owner George Argyros, who took over majority control of the Mariners in 1980.