circa 1938, (c)
Seattle Museum of History and Industry
Caches in the "Ball" series
Ball One: Sick's Seattle Stadium
Ball Two: Kingdome
Ball Three: Safeco Field
Ball Four
Sick's Seattle Stadium opened in
1938 to serve as home field for the Seattle Rainiers baseball club
of the Pacific Coast League. It was considered one of the finest
minor-league stadiums at the time and it certainly offered the best
view of Mt. Rainier. For the next thirty years, many future greats
came to play at Sick's on their way up to the big
leagues.
By 1969, Seattle had become a "big-league" city, and won a bid
for a major league expansion franchise dubbed the Seattle Pilots.
Though planning for a new domed stadium began immediately, Sick's
Seattle Stadium would be the Pilots' first and only home. In their
first season, the Pilots got off to a good start by staying within
a handful of games of the division lead for the first two months of
the season before ultimately suffering the fate of most expansion
teams, a last place finish. Still the team was fairly popular, and
despite their poor play their home field attendance was greater
than two other American League teams that year.
Sadly, after only one year, a number of circumstances conspired
to move the Pilots out of Seattle. Not the least of these was the
poor condition of the rundown stadium. The Seattle Pilots became
the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970, and have remained so ever since. In
1979, at the apparent demand of progress, the once fine stadium was
demolished.
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You can still park your car where those old cars in the picture
above did. Go to the listed coordinates and park in the lot nearby.
If you go around lunchtime, you may think you can detect the old
familiar ballpark waft of hot dogs. You can! Follow your nose but
keep your eyes open for home plate, which has been very visibly
memorialized nearby (near the building entrance).
Step up to the plate and imagine yourself to be Hall-of-Famer
and 1969 American League MVP Harmon Killebrew. Smack the tar
out of an imaginary baseball, pulling a monster shot down the line!
There's no question it has the distance to clear the fence, 305 ft.
away, but will it stay fair? Yes it will -- a HOME RUN, hit over
the crowd and out of the stadium, where a kid with a baseball glove
waiting outside makes a magical shoestring catch!
Your fantasy must end there, I'm afraid, because if you were to try
to run the imaginary bases, you would plow into numerous
obstacles.
Your task is as follows: First, before you leave the home plate
area, make sure you check out the wonderful small "shrine" full of
Pilots and Rainiers nostalgia inside the exit foyer of the building
- the pictures and memorabilia provide a great glimpse into the
hisorical past of baseball in Seattle - definitely make sure you
check it out!
Next, you need to look for the cache at the point where your
imaginary home run came to rest in the kid's glove. The foul lines
of most baseball fields are (and those of Sick's Stadium were)
oriented roughly along the cardinal directions. For the sake of
this cache, assume the foul lines were precisely aligned. Also
assume the ball curled slightly around the foul pole, ending up to
the foul side of the line when it came to earth.
The cache is not on private property. Bring your own pen. Be
sure you jot down the the clue at the bottom of the log. It will be
used in conjunction with others in this series to find a final
cache.
By the way, Harmon Killebrew did hit a home run in Sick's
Stadium. It was in the top of the second inning against Pilots
hurler Skip Lockwood. It was number 48 of his league-leading 49
that year. As Annie from Bull Durham might say, "You can
look
it up."
