MLB | The City That Sued Its Way Back Into Baseball (Sick's Stadium site, Seattle)

Seattle had professional baseball from 1901 to 1969 and then, in the space of a fortnight, did not. The Pilots were an American League expansion club, awarded to Seattle for 1969 after the Athletics left Kansas City for Oakland. They played one season at Sick's Stadium in Rainier Valley, a ballpark Emil Sick had built in 1938 for the minor-league Rainiers. It was expanded for the majors and was not ready. Workmen were still building seats during games. Water pressure was so poor that visiting players showered at their hotels, and once the crowd passed about ten thousand the lavatories stopped flushing. Some seats had no view of the field. Ticket prices were among the highest in baseball. Fewer than 678,000 people came all year, twentieth of twenty-four clubs. The team finished 64-98. Jim Bouton spent the season taking notes, which became Ball Four. The ownership was undercapitalised from the start. During the first game of the 1969 World Series, a Milwaukee car dealer named Bud Selig secretly agreed terms with the Soriano brothers to buy the club. The sale was announced in March 1970 pending league approval, Washington went to court to stop it, and on 1 April a federal bankruptcy judge in Seattle declared the club insolvent and approved the sale. Papers were signed the next day. With Brewers stitched onto the shirts, the team opened the season in Milwaukee on 7 April, six days after the ruling. There is a circularity here worth noticing. Milwaukee had lost the Braves to Atlanta after 1965 and took Seattle's team to replace them. Selig later became commissioner of baseball. Seattle's response was to sue. Washington's attorney general Slade Gorton took the American League to federal court, arguing the league had broken faith with King County voters who had agreed to fund a domed stadium on the strength of having a team. After six years the league settled in January 1976 by granting Seattle an expansion franchise. The Mariners began play on 6 April 1977 in the Kingdome, the stadium the Pilots were supposed to move into. This is the only time in the modern era a major-league club has left a city after a single season, and the only case where the aggrieved city litigated its way to a replacement. Sick's Stadium came down in 1979. A Lowe's home improvement store stands on the site, and inside it there is a replica home plate set into the floor with markings showing where the bases and the mound were. Coordinates are the store on the ballpark site at 2700 Rainier Avenue South, from OpenStreetMap. Cover: Sick's Stadium in 1965, four years before the Pilots. Seattle Municipal Archives, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: an aerial view of the stadium about 1972, after the club had gone. Seattle Municipal Archives, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.