Ball One: Sick's Seattle Stadium Mystery Cache

The first in a series of Seattle baseball-themed caches.  This is a slighly non-standard two-stage multi-cache ending in a micro-cache.

Caches in the "Ball" series
Ball One: Sick's Seattle Stadium
Ball Two: Kingdome
Ball Three: Safeco Field
Ball Four

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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.

Check out some Seattle PI archived photos of the old Sicks' Stadium at this link

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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). The plate area is outside, but in under cover. It is not in a secure area -- so it should be available 24 hours per day. GPSr reception is spotty under the cover, so look in the area around N 47° 34.795 and W 122° 17.880

Once you locate the memorial, 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 standing on the sidewalk outside makes a magical shoestring catch just off the ground!

Your task is as follows: First, before you leave the home plate area, make sure you check out how home plate is laid out, so you can determine where the foul lines of the old park ran. Check the baseball hints below for additional help on where you should look.

Then, before you leave the memorial, make sure you visit the wonderful display case 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 (in the detailed description above) -- this is the location of the micro cache (bison tube).

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 just barely stayed fair, ending up only about .010 to the fair side of the line when it came to earth.

And, assume the distance it traveled from home plate to the kid's glove was 410 feet - which is .100 on your GPSr

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."