Tales from the Seattle Mariners Dugout

by Kirby Arnold

  “To this day, I hate the sucker,” Brett added, joking.

  Back-to-Back Thrillers

  There wasn’t a finer weekend in the early years than a two-day stretch in May 1981, when Tom Paciorek delivered a couple of the sweetest swings in the Mariners’ early history.

  Paciorek, a 34-year-old outfielder signed by the Mariners in 1978 after he’d been released by the Braves, started the ’81 season on a hot streak, batting .377 after three weeks. He’d cooled somewhat by the first of May, but still posed an offensive threat.

  May 8 and 9, he showed it.

  On a Friday night at the Kingdome, he led off the bottom of the ninth inning of a tie game against the Yankees and homered off Rudy May, giving the Mariners a 3–2 victory.

  The next night, May 9, the Mariners trailed 5–3 when Paciorek batted in the ninth again with two outs and two runners on base. This time he hammered a pitch from Ron Davis for a three-run homer that gave the Mariners a 6–5 victory and set off a wild celebration among the 51,903 fans.

  “Those were games you’ll never forget if you were a fan back then,” play-by-play announcer Dave Niehaus said. “When he hit that home run off Ron Davis, everyone in the Kingdome went crazy.”

  Armed with baseball bats given away on Bat Night, the crowd clanged their gifts off the metal bleachers during the game, and they continued to use them in the delirium after Paciorek’s winning homer.

  John McDonald, who covered the Mariners for the Everett Herald, had hurried from the press box to the Mariners’ clubhouse to get a few quotes from Paciorek. He and everyone else in the clubhouse were astounded at the rumbling they heard from above.

  “Everyone was still in the stands and they were banging their bats on the cement,” McDonald said. “It sounded like the place was coming apart out there, and it wasn’t stopping. Paciorek finally went back out for a curtain call, and that’s what it took before everyone stopped banging those bats.”

  But Can They Play in Vegas?

  The Mariners suffered through a meager existence in terms of success, although any joy they couldn’t find on the field, they certainly seemed to discover off it. From 1979 to ’83, the Mariners had such fun-loving players as Tom Paciorek, Joe Simpson, Bob Stinson, Larry Andersen and, the master of them all, Bill Caudill.

  “We had characters on those early teams, we didn’t have players,” second baseman Julio Cruz said. “We had funny guys. Some were good players who were funny. Others were just funny.”

  Bob “Scrap Iron” Stinson was an outspoken veteran catcher obtained from the Royals in the expansion draft, and his candid nature got him in trouble with manager Darrell Johnson right away in 1977. Asked by a newspaper reporter during the team’s first spring training when he thought the fledgling Mariners would be eliminated from the division race, Stinson answered honestly.

  “Opening Day,” he said.

  Johnson called Stinson into his office and chewed him out for making that statement, but not because Johnson disagreed. He simply didn’t want the Mariners’ fans to hear that kind of negative talk before they had a chance to get their hopes up for the new season.

  Later in the season, during a game at Milwaukee, Mariners pitcher Glenn Abbott was getting knocked around in the bottom of the first inning after the M’s had given him a lead. Pitching coach Wes Stock visited the mound and directed his first question at Stinson.

  “What kind of stuff does he have?” Stock asked. “I can’t tell you,” Stinson said. “I haven’t caught any of his pitches yet.”

  Back in the dugout, Stock relayed those words to Johnson, who was waiting when Stinson came off the field after the inning. He told his catcher that if he wanted to be a comedian, he should try Las Vegas.

  Always Room for JELL-O

  The ’77 team had its share of fun as the losses—and occasional victories—mounted. “They were just the normal pranks you’d find in any clubhouse,” pitcher Gary Wheelock said. “It was stuff like the three-man lift.”

  Otherwise, that first team was fairly benign compared with the hi-jinx of later years. The king of the early pranks was the Mr. JELL-O Mystery of 1982.

  Larry Andersen, a right-handed pitcher on the 1981 and ’82 teams, conspired with teammates Richie Zisk and Joe Simpson on a prank against manager Rene Lachemann, who was a character himself. Lachemann, for example, spent several nights in the Mariners clubhouse in the Kingdome, figuring it had everything he needed—cable TV, food, a comfortable couch—even though it exposed him to occasional pranks from his players.

  No prank gained as much notoriety as what Andersen, Zisk, and Simpson pulled on Lachemann on a road trip. After the team landed in Chicago, the three players went to a grocery store and bought 16 boxes of cherry JELL-O, then talked traveling secretary Lee Pelekoudas into giving them the key to Lachemann’s hotel room.

  They poured several boxes of JELL-O into the toilet, bathtub and sink, then mixed it with a bucket of ice to allow the JELL-O to solidify. That wasn’t all of it. They took every piece of the furniture from the room—beds, mattresses, tables and chairs—and crammed them in the bathroom. Then they removed all the light bulbs from the fixtures, took the mouthpiece from the telephone, unplugged the clock and strung toilet paper around the empty room.

  “Anything we could think of, we did,” Andersen said in a 2001 interview with astrosdaily.com, a website covering the Houston Astros, where he played in the late 1980s. “He came back from a night out and poof, his room was no longer a room.”

  Lachemann later praised the creativity of the prank, but not before he threatened to call the authorities and have the players fingerprinted and subjected to lie detector tests. Lachemann never followed through to that extent, even though the Mr. JELL-O mystery continued to have twists and turns the next few months.

  Play-by-play announcer Dave Niehaus took part in the shenanigans by telling Lachemann that he had gotten a confession on tape from those responsible. The problem, Niehaus told Lachemann, was that he accidentally erased the tape.

  Andersen had a fake newspaper page printed with the headline, “Jello-gate tapes lost, Lach baffled.”

  “Every place we went the rest of that season, there was JELL-O,” Lachemann said. “I had a meeting after a game one day with my coaches, Dave Duncan and Bill Plummer. We’d usually have a beer when we got together like that. Those two took one drink of their beer and then spit the stuff out. It turned out someone has gotten into our cans of beer and figured a way to pour out all the beer and replace it with JELL-O.

  “It was amazing.”

  Lachemann had become convinced that an accessory to the crime was outfielder Tom Paciorek, a former fun-loving Mariner who played that year for the White Sox. Because the prank occurred in Chicago, it seemed likely that Paciorek could have been involved. He wasn’t, but when the prank gained national attention and Paciorek’s name was linked with other suspects, his mother called Lachemann to apologize for the actions of her son.

  The pranksters didn’t reveal themselves until the Mariners held their season-ending party. Andersen, Simpson, and Zisk appeared with their heads covered by bags that were made to look like JELL-O boxes and taunted Lachemann a final time with a game of “What’s My Line?”

  “In all the years I’ve been in the game, that’s the best prank I’ve ever seen,” Lachemann said in 2006. “It was a great, great prank and it went on the whole year.”

  Bill Caudill and His Bag of Tricks

  Right-handed pitcher Bill Caudill brought legitimacy to the Mariners’ bullpen when he arrived in a trade with the Yankees just before the 1982 season. He also had a Sherlock Holmes cap, a pair of handcuffs, and a zaniness that helped keep the Mariners’ spirits up when the season went south.

  The Mariners fielded their first reasonably competitive (remember, that’s a relative term when talking about the early Mariners) team in 1982, and Caudill was a big part of it. Not only did he finish fourth in the American League with 26 saves, he also finished with 21 decisions, going
12–9.

  “He threw hard, 98 miles an hour, and when we needed a save, we went to him,” second baseman Julio Cruz said.

  The high point was July 8, when Caudill recorded his 17th save in a 4–3 victory over the Orioles at the Kingdome, pulling the Mariners seven games over .500 at 45–38 and leaving them just three games behind first-place Kansas City in the American League West.

  Bill Caudill. Photo courtesy of the Seattle Mariners

  “He was great in the clubhouse, but the main thing is that he was an outstanding pitcher,” manager Rene Lachemann said.

  Good times on the field, of course, didn’t last. These were the Mariners, after all.

  They lost seven of their next eight and fell from contention. As important as Caudill was on the mound during the Mariners’ successes, he played just as big a role, maybe bigger, off the mound when the team needed an emotional boost during hard times.

  Caudill was a cutup around the clubhouse, and the only times anything or anyone were truly safe from his antics were when he was on the mound.

  It started early in the season after the Mariners had lost seven of their first nine games. Caudill got hold of a Sherlock Holmes-style houndstooth cap and conducted an inspection of the Mariners’ bats as he searched for the missing hits responsible for such a poor start.

  Teammates began calling Caudill “The Inspector”—as in Inspector Clouseau of The Pink Panther—and a persona was born.

  Dick Kimball, the Kingdome organist, fed Caudill’s new image by playing “The Pink Panther Theme” when he entered games, and the fans got into it. They would send Caudill all sorts of items, and his box of goodies included an inspectors badge, magnifying glasses, a couple of stuffed pink panthers and a Calabash pipe.

  Caudill used those props to play pranks on teammates and others brave enough to venture near him before and after games. He also tried some unconventional tricks when everything else failed to shake the Mariners out of their losing ways.

  One night, after being called out of the bullpen to pitch a tight game against the Blue Jays in 1983, Caudill appeared with half a beard, talked into it by a teammate, pitcher Roy Thomas.

  In the opposing dugout, Barry Bonnell told his Blue Jays teammates that he would knock the other half of the beard off Caudill’s face when he came to bat. Bonnell nearly did, blistering a line drive off Caudill’s chest that deflected to second baseman Tony Bernazard, who threw out Bonnell at first base. Caudill ducked into the clubhouse after that inning and shaved off the rest of the beard, then pitched a scoreless ninth.

  Caudill did his greatest damage with a pair of handcuffs he acquired as a memento of a misadventure during a road series in Cleveland. He’d been in the lobby at the team hotel well past midnight after the team had arrived from New York. Security guards, wary of anyone lingering around the hotel at that time of day because of a series of car thefts in the vicinity, stopped Caudill and questioned him. Caudill’s answers apparently didn’t satisfy the security guards, who slapped a pair of handcuffs on him and threatened to call police. Word of the incident got upstairs to Lachemann, who reported to the lobby and talked the guards into letting him deal with Caudill.

  Lachemann guided Caudill to his room and the incident was over. Or so he thought.

  Mariners designated hitter Richie Zisk made sure the residue of that night remained forever, giving Caudill a pair of handcuffs. Caudill didn’t simply keep them around as a symbol of his episode in Cleveland, he put them to constant use.

  When Caudill wasn’t slapping those cuffs on an unsuspecting victim, he had everyone else wary of them. Soon, “The Inspector” acquired a second nickname: “Cuffs.”

  Before one game, Caudill had an idea for Lachemann.

  “When you call me down in the bullpen, give me the cuffs sign,” Caudill told his manager, holding up his wrists as if they were clasped together.

  Later that night, when Lachemann needed Caudill to warm up, he flashed the “cuffs” sign. Caudill got loose and Lachemann brought him into the game.

  “Then he gave up a three-run homer and blew the save,” Lachemann said. “We put that ‘cuffs’ sign on the back burner after that.”

  The handcuffs became a common sight at the ballpark, home and away.

  “He always had them with him, and he would walk up to you and just slap them on you,” Cruz said. “Or he would come up and say, ‘Let me see if these will fit,’ and cuff you, and then walk away. That’s how he got the owner’s wife.”

  Judie Argyros, wife of owner George Argyros, was in the Mariners dugout before a game at the Kingdome when Caudill demonstrated his handcuffs. He clasped one cuff on her wrist, the other to the dugout bench, and walked away. She remained stranded while players warmed up for the game, while the grounds crew prepared the field and while everyone else stood at attention during the national anthem.

  Just before the first pitch, Caudill freed her.

  Caudill never got those cuffs onto George Argyros, although he did pull a good one on the owner during contract negotiations with the Mariners. Caudill was represented by a budding young agent named Scott Boras, who was Caudill’s roommate when they played minor-league baseball together. Boras got Argyros to agree on a contract clause that allowed Caudill to throw a dozen balls into the crowd at each game.

  That was no small feat back then, because Argyros maintained strict control of expenses. He would station an employee in the press box to monitor players who threw baseballs into the crowd, and those who did would have the price of the balls deducted from their pay. All except Caudill, that is.

  Larry Andersen, a pitcher on the 1981 and ’82 teams, often was a partner in Caudill’s playfulness. Andersen had a Conehead mask—made famous by the old Saturday Night Live characters—that he kept throughout his major-league travels, and Caudill plucked it from his locker during a rain delay in Detroit. He pulled the Conehead over his head, stuffed his jersey so it was nice and plump, then entertained the crowd with an animated parody of fellow pitcher Gaylord Perry, complete with a mimicking of Perry’s reputed doctoring of the baseball.

  Perry was so agitated he tried to tear off the cone … with Caudill’s head still in it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Travel Travails

  IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG FOR THE MARINERS TO LEARN one difficult lesson about playing baseball in the Northwest corner of the country. Seattle isn’t close to anywhere, especially if the destination is another major-league city.

  Before the Mariners finished first in any meaningful baseball statistic, they led the league in mileage.

  They fly about 50,000 miles a year and, unlike the convenience and relative privacy of the chartered flights that today’s team uses, the early Mariners almost always flew commercial.

  Former owner George Argyros mandated it in order to save money, which it did. But traveling that way became horribly inconvenient, and the Mariners’ itinerary was dictated largely by airline schedules. They traveled numerous times on off days, and flying commercial meant they often had to take connecting flights that extended their travel time between cities.

  Flying commercial also forced the players to mix with the paying customers on flights, which made for some interesting moments. On most trips, the Mariners would fly bigger jets with enough first-class seats for the entire team, separating the ballplayers from the other passengers.

  “But a lot of times, especially when we would be connecting, we would stop in a city like Chicago and change planes, and we would take a smaller plane for the next leg of a trip,” said Lee Pelekoudas, the traveling secretary. “Then we’d have 12 first-class seats and the rest of the guys would be sitting in the coach section. There would be some interesting interaction with the public, some positive, some negative.”

  Frank Howard’s Pre-Fight “Announcement”

  Frank Howard, the Mariners’ hitting coach in 1988, decided to use his new headphones to listen to music during a flight to Southern California. The Mariners had climbed aboard an AirCal
jet, an older DC-9 that was configured with three seats on one side of the aisle and two on the other. The team would use most of the three-seat side of the plane, leaving the other side for the general public.

  Lee Pelekoudas sat in one row, and behind him were Howard and pitching coach Billy Connors, with clubhouse worker Pete Fortune in the middle seat between them.

  “Frank had gotten some headphones to listen to music, but he’d never worn headphones before,” Pelekoudas said. “Frank had a loud, booming voice anyway, and with the headphones on and the music playing, it made him talk even louder without realizing it.”

  Just before takeoff, just as everyone became quiet, a thought crossed Howard’s mind and he shared it with Connors. Plus just about everyone else on that flight.

  “Hey Billy!” Howard said, that deep voice carrying throughout the jet. “How ’bout when we get back to Seattle after this trip, we hit the town and … ”

  Let’s just say they weren’t going grocery shopping.

  “He said it so loud that the whole plane heard it,” Pelekoudas said. “I remember my head popping up and I was thinking, ‘Oh no, this isn’t happening.’”

  It was.

  Pelekoudas looked across the aisle to see an elderly woman’s jaw drop. Pete Fortune, sitting between Howard and Connors, looked across the aisle in his row to see a mother and her young son. She was covering the boy’s ears.

  Howard, of course, had no idea he’d offended anyone.

  “Frank was having a good old time,” Pelekoudas said. “It didn’t dawn on him what was going on until he took his headphones off and we told him.”

  Howard felt horrible and apologized.

  “Well, I’m sorry ma’am,” he told the elderly woman.

  “Frank was a very polite guy and he was very apologetic afterwards,” Pelekoudas said. “That was one of the dangers of traveling commercial.”