Caches in the "Ball" series
Ball One: Sick's Seattle Stadium
Ball Two: Kingdome
Ball Three: Safeco Field
Ball Four
Our story continues in 1970 just after the Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee to become the Brewers. King County had voted for a domed stadium and early planning for it had already begun, but without a baseball team, there were annually eighty-one fewer events to justify the stadium. For this and other reasons, that same year, Seattle, King County and the State of Washington all sued the American League for allowing the move to take place. The case was continued over several years while the American League proposed to move another franchise to Seattle. Meanwhile, a site was chosen for the stadium just south of downtown and construction soon began. An interesting slide show of the construction can be found here. Anyhow, no teams had moved to Seattle by 1976 when the Kingdome was completed, so the trial began in earnest. Not long after, when the American League appeared to be losing, a decision was made to grant Seattle a new expansion franchise if the suit was dropped. The very next year the Mariners were born.
The Mariners toiled near the bottom of the American League West division for the rest of the 70's and most of the 80's. Attendance was never very good -- the M's finished in the bottom four of the fourteen-team league for all of those years except for 1977 when the novelty of the expansion team had yet to wear off. Every year, by the time the rains left, and often before, the M's had lost any hopes for a pennant that might have drawn crowds into that concrete mausoleum.
The 90's were different. In 1991, the Mariners had their first winning season. Fans started coming to games in larger numbers, and the Kingdome didn't seem such a dreadful place to watch a baseball game when the team provided a little excitement. When a labor strike cancelled the World Series in 1994 and shortened the 1995 season, the miraculous comeback of the '95 Mariners in the wild-card series over the New York Yankees was hailed by some as helping to save baseball. That is unlikely -- baseball has been a pretty resilient sport over the years -- but it is almost certain that the '95 team saved the Mariners. Ultimately, it also doomed the Kingdome.
The 1990's were the decade of the retro ballparks. Every year it seemed some team demanded a stadium that was an attendance draw in itself. The teams usually got what the wanted in the form of cozy brick-faceted baseball-only "mall" parks. The Mariners seized on the '95 season to make their ultimatum -- build a new stadium, or lose a second team. A lot could be said about the stadium referendum that was defeated by the public but passed by the legislature -- but we'll leave that topic for another forum. On June 27, 1999, the Mariners played their last game in the Kingdome, and soon thereafter, the Kingdome was spectacularly imploded.
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Here are some dates and statistics around Kingdome History:
The Kingdome officially opened March 27, 1976.
The new stadium, built on the site of the Kingdome, now called the Qwest Field and Event Center, opened in July 2002.
In it’s 24 year history they figure over 73 million folks attended events in the Kingdome.
The Seattle Seahawks were the first major professional sports team to call the Kingdome its home. They hosted their first game on August 1, 1976, a preseason game against the San Francisco 49ers.
The stadium hosted the NBA’s Seattle SuperSonics between 1978 and 1985. Many NBA attendance records were set.
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Here are some other Key Events that took place in the Kingdome . . .
Paul McCartney’s Wings concert, June 1976.
Led Zeppelin concert, July 1977.
The 1977 National Football League Pro Bowl.
The 1979 Major League Baseball All-Star Game.
Two Rolling Stones concerts, October 1981.
The 1987 National Basketball Association All-Star contest.
The 1989 NCAA Final Four basketball championship.
And perhaps the most memorable event, at least for me, was the Grand Slam Summer Jam concert, in 1983 I believe, with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Bryan Adams, Blue Oyster Cult, Loverboy, and Foreigner, each playing a full concert in one day .....
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I thought it would be fun to learn some fun facts about the Kingdome history, during the Mariner's tenure in that ugly bump in our landscape.
Your first objective is to find the year construction of the Kingdome started. This number will be ABCD.
The month, day and year of the Mariners first game will be E, F, GHIJ.
The number of people that attended motorcycle daredevil Evil Kneievel’s October 1976 shows will be KL, MNO.
The month and year the Kingdome was imploded will be P, QRST.
Now use this information to fill in the following coordinates to find the final.
47°35.FPJ' 122°19.BML'
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NOTE: NEW FINAL LOCATION January 2015 !!
ADD .025N to the calculations above. Final is in a pretty high-traffic area on many days, you are strongly encouraged to search at night or off hours.
Bring your own pen. Dont forget to look at the Clue for the Ball Four series on the log.