Griffey leaves Seattle Red-faced

Sporting News, The, Feb 21, 2000 by Michael Knisley

Cincinnati's Jim Bowden--with a big assist from Ken Griffey Jr.--pulled off the trade of a lifetime last week, and Seattle's Pat Gillick was powerless to stop it

You can imagine Mariners general manager Pat Gillick suffering through one of those awful anxiety dreams, a nightmare that jolts you awake in a conniption fit. You know, the kind where you're up on age and the whole world is watching and you suddenly realize something is dreadfully wrong. Like your fly is unzipped, or your speech is in your other suit, or you forgot to pick up little Ernie at soccer practice and it's hailing outside.

Because here we are, a flail week after he started this knee-slapper of a story about trading away Ken Griffey Jr., arguably the best player in baseball, and Gillick still can't remember the punch line.

As the deal was announced last Thursday, Gillick got only this far: "In exchange for Griffey, the Mariners acquired Mike Cameron, Brett Tomko, Antonio Perez, Jake Meyer and ..."

That's where he apparently lost his train, of thought. That's where he stopped. And surely there is more. Surely, he's trying to remember the zinger, the other name or two, the players to persuade us the joke somehow might be on the Reds. Pokey Reese? Sean Casey? Scott Williamson? Denny Neagle? Travis Dawkins? Anybody?

You have to feel for Gillick. Through no fault of his own, he got fleeced last week more completely than Bo Peep's lost sheep at shearing time. For Junior Griffey, the man most likely to break Hank Aaron's all-time home run record, the game's most perfect all-around player in the prime of his career, the Reds gave Seattle ... bits and pieces, drips and drabs of major leaguers and wanna-bes. And Gillick was powerless to do anything other than say, in effect, "Thank you, sir. May I have another?"

This is a trade that won't soon be forgotten, like Frank Robinson for Milt Pappas, Jack Baldschun and Dick Simpson; or Lou Brock (and two throw-ins) for Ernie Broglio, Bobby Shantz and Doug Clemens; or Babe Ruth for $125,000; or the island of Manhattan for a couple of sawbucks and change in beads.

The most telling quote out of Seattle last week was team president Chuck Armstrong saying the players the Mariners got for Griffey are "four guys I wouldn't know if they walked into this room."

How did this happen? In concert but not collusion, Griffey and Reds G.M. Jim Bowden kept Gillick's back against the wall from the moment Griffey made it known he wanted to be traded back on November 2. Beginning then, the Mariners had next-to-no wiggle room; and as the process developed, even that lilliputian leverage shrank. By last Thursday, Griffey and Bowden had pulled off a sting worthy of Redford and Newman.

Griffey, who had the right to approve any trade by virtue of being in the majors for 10 years and with the same team for five, initially gave Seattle a list of four teams to which he'd go: Atlanta, the Mets, Cincinnati and Houston. That wasn't many options for the Mariners, but it was fair enough. In December, Gillick put together a swap with the Mets that would've brought outfielder Roger Cedeno and pitchers Octavio Dotel and Dennis Cook (and perhaps closer Armando Benitez) in exchange. In retrospect, that deal looks leaps and bounds better than the one Seattle eventually completed. But Griffey said no.

Suddenly, his list of four teams was down to one--Cincinnati, his hometown where his father is the manager-in-waiting. Gillick had a half-dozen offers from other teams, and each proposal was better than the players the Reds eventually gave up. In each case, Griffey stonewalled his old club. As time went by, Junior even manipulated and minimized what little chance Seattle had to keep him around for the 2000 season, making it clear his presence in the clubhouse would have made Randy Johnson's unhappy time with the Mariners in 1998 look like Camelot.

The last straw was the news two weeks ago that Griffey had received a death threat from a Seattle citizen. That clinched it. He wouldn't play for the Mariners. Now the Reds didn't even have to wait for next winter, when they could sign him as a free agent. Gillick had to trade him and had to trade him to Cincinnati. The Reds could have offered a bowl of chili and a Schoenling beer, and Gillick would've had to choke it down.

"It was not," Gillick admits in the understatement of the millennium, "an ideal situation in which to negotiate."

In that environment, Bowden's bargaining skills bloomed. He feinted and dodged Gillick's hollow demands like Barry Sanders in the open field. At least twice, Bowden made a public show of pulling out of the talks, including early last week, three days before the deal was done. He had absolutely no reason to offer Seattle anything more than a wink and a smile. Until Gillick came to grips with getting the debris of the Reds' roster, Bowden played hardball.

Bowden's most difficult task through all this, it turns out, wasn't striking a deal with Gillick. It was convincing his bosses, chief operating officer John Allen and principal owner Carl Lindner, that the dub could afford Griffey. And even the solution to that chore landed in Bowden's lap when Griffey's agent, Brian Goldberg, went public with word that Junior would join with the Reds at waaaaaaaaaaay below market value. The nine-year, $116.5 million deal Griffey signed is at least $30 million less than he could have banked as a free agent.