Another memory is that of listening to a Pilots-Twins game on July 19, the night before my tenth birthday. The game kept going and going and going until the one o' clock curfew suspended it. I remember thinking how great it would be to call play-by-play like Jimmy Dudley and Bill Schonley. Twenty-eight years later, I got my chance when I called eight Grays Harbor Gulls games on a college radio station in Centralia. True, it was independent ball on a tape delay basis for no money. So what? For one year, I was the "Radio Voice of the Gulls."
One last memory is of April 1, 1970. Not a good memory, needless to say, learning the Pilots were moving to Milwaukee. I've loathed Bud Selig ever since. Grandpa died about a year later. Natural causes, the doctors said. A broken heart, I say.
I'm so glad I found this Web page. It brings back memories of a time when I first came to love baseball, thanks to Grandpa and the Pilots. I miss them both.
This is truly the definitive Seattle Pilots Web site!
The first baseball game I ever attended was a Seattle Pilots-Baltimore Orioles game on 8/18/69. I was ten years old and went to the game with my grandfather, who was the head groundskeeper at Sick's Seattle Stadium from 1938 to 1960. He took me down to the tunnel just outside the visitors clubhouse, where I got to meet George Bamberger and Billy Hunter, a couple of O's coaches Grandpa knew from when they played for Vancouver in the P.C.L. Then we sat through a 12-to-3 Helmet Night drubbing at the hands of Baltimore. Jim Bouton came in to pitch, and Grandpa tried to explain how a knuckleball worked. I wondered how anybody could hit a pitch that did that, until I learned that sometimes they straighten out and get drilled for very, very long distances.
—baskin
I grew up on Chicago's South Side and have been a White Sox fan since a friend of the family put a 1959 Sox American League Championship pennant in my hands when I was five years old. Over the years and despite moving away from Chicago in 1978, I have remained a die-hard, and long-suffering Sox fan. My wife, daughter and I moved to Olympia, WA almost five years ago. Yesterday afternoon we attended the third and final game of the ALDS between the Mariners and Sox at Safeco. Witnessing yet another Sox post-season disappointment left me waxing nostalgic on the drive home. I gave my wife and daughter a brief history of the Pilots as I remembered them from playing the Sox in 1969. I drove by the Eagle Hardware and showed them where Sick's Stadium once stood (is that the stadium's original double-deck concrete parking lot that is located on the property adjacent to Eagle?). The Sox were experiencing lows both financially and in the standings in 1969. The Tommy Davis/Russ Snyder/Pete Ward "murderer's row revisited" experiment of 1968 had failed miserably, and the Pilots picked up Davis in the expansion draft. While the Sox toiled with young talent in 1969 that would eventually pay off in the early seventies, the Pilots fielded a decent veteran team that had potential to compete in 1969. I remember catching the Sox games against the Pilots on local television in Chicago during that season, and becoming very perturbed over Davis' sudden productivity - especially against his former team. I also remember shots of fans in the stands at Sick's, waving their "Ray Oyler Fan Club" banners and enthusiastic about major league baseball in Seattle. Your team history sheds light on some of the unfortunate political and financial circumstances that led to the team's shocking relocation. I enjoyed the visit to your site and will return. Keep up the good work!
—bob
NOTE FROM MIKE: No, the double-deck parking garage by Eagle Hardware (now actually a Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse store) was built for the store; the Sick's Stadium parking lot was flat.
I live in Massachusetts and I have a complete collection of Wheeldon Red Sox prints. There were 12 done: Petrocelli, Yaz, George Scott, Tony Conigliaro, Jim
Lonborg , Ray Culp, Dyd O' Brien, Russ Gibson, Mike Andrews, Dalton Jones.
Reggie Smith , and Sparky Lyle.
They were given away by the Atlantic Richfield Co. I believe when you bought
gas, you received one portrait...my dad got them for me. In 1970, they used
photos without hats in front of a brick building for a similar promotion. I
know in 1970, they also did that for the Phillies. I never knew they did the
Wheeldon portraits for any other teams.
—SRG242762
NOTE FROM MIKE: If you have any additional information about the Wheeldon prints, please let me know.