The Rise and Sink of the USS Mariner

Before it was a blog, it was a ballpark attraction that distracted fans from the terrible baseball they were watching by going * boom *

Photo courtesy of Kurt Blumenau

When you’re in charge of sales and marketing for a really, really terrible baseball team you have a few options. You can use your talents for persuasion to convince your team’s owner to field a better team. You can quiet quit and put in minimal effort since the owner is basically doing the same thing. Or, you can make a lot of noise and hope no one notices the team is bad.

Bill Long, the Mariners’ vice president of sales and marketing in 1982, went with the third option. He must have thought that if they made a lot of noise when the Mariners did something good, people would only notice the good things. Worth a try, right?

The Mariners held their 1982 home opener with a few new attractions that promised to bring some pizazz to their dull games. The new attractions centered on Mariners home runs. After all, in 1981 the Mariners as a team hit 89 home runs (remember, it was a strike-shortened season) which was good enough for 6th in the American League, and fans like home runs. So Long worked out a celebration system.

First, after a player hit a home run the state-of-the-art Diamond Vision flashed the words “HOME RUN!” so everyone in the ballpark could understand what just happened. Then, lights installed on top of the dugout cycled red and blue while the PA emitted a whining siren. Nothing says “Congratulations on doing a good baseball thing!” quite like “Stop! Police!” (whatever crimes against baseball the 1980s Mariners were committing, I hope we can all agree the carceral system isn’t the best way to address them).

The centerpiece of the Mariners’ home run celebrations was tucked behind the center field fence.

Getting ready for a 3-hour tour.

It was 20 feet of gleaming replica sea faring vessel. Its hull, navy blue. Its masts rising in the form of oversized Louisville slugger baseball bats. From its rigging were strewn a variety of flags and from its stern fluttered a Betsy Ross flag. Meant to be a reproduction of the USS Constitution, the idea came from Mariners’ director of stadium operations, Craig Barrick, who spent his winter “researching nautical history and themes” and John Gurnee, “an otherwise rational building contractor”¹ who constructed the boat.

The real USS Constitution. Pretty sure nobody was going to get it confused with the USS Mariner.

Still more people had to be called in for the ship’s pièce de résistance: a real live working cannon on the starboard side.

The cannon was built by Carl Scripture, described in the Seattle Times as a “model-cannon nut” with an assist from an 82-year-old “basement gunsmith” and “volunteer ammunition expert”, Al Talbot.² The cannon was built to use white powder instead of the standard black powder because black powder burns. And styrofoam was used as the wadding.³

Long began the project thinking it would be fairly straight forward, telling the Seattle-PI, “when I started on this I thought all we had to do was to go into the Kingdome and fire a cannon.”⁴ To even test the homemade cannon, they needed fire department permits, fire marshals, and decibel meters. They wanted to make as much noise as possible, without straying too far to the other side of decency.

After all the testing the ship was ready and it was christened the USS Mariner.

On the Kingdome’s 1982 Opening Night, the cannons on the new ship were fired after the National Anthem, just in case no one managed a home run. But the crowd was given a special treat when right fielder Al Cowens smacked a 3-run home run in the fourth inning.

After the first season, the Mariners repainted the ship’s hull from navy to bright yellow and rethought the flags it displayed. It stood prominently in the background of the 1983 team photo:

Photo courtesy of Kurt Blumenau

The USS Mariner fired its cannon for every Mariners home run in the Kingdome for the rest of the 1980s. Here’s an example from Opening Night 1986, when Jim Presley hit two home runs to win it for the Mariners:

Fire!

Boom!

It wasn’t all fun times when the cannon fired; it once almost caused a national incident. Vice-President George Bush was in Seattle on July 8, 1987. After defending Oliver North to the media, he took in a Mariners game at the Kingdome. He caught an exciting game; the Mariners rallied to beat the Red Sox 11-5. But the excitement for Bush came in the bottom of the third inning when left fielder Phil Bradley led off with a home run. As Mariners President Chuck Armstrong remembered in 1999:

“We were up in the owners box and someone hit a home run and the cannon fired," Armstrong said. "About three Secret Service agents dove on the Vice President - no one had mentioned the cannon to them."⁵

The USS Mariner debuted on the same day as the bullpen cart Relief. As we’ve previously covered, the little bullpen cart was quietly retired after the pitchers refused to use it.

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The USS Mariner, on the other hand, was utterly despised by the fans and so it stuck around until the end of the decade. When George Argyros finally got out of the baseball business and sold the team to Jeff Smulyan in 1990, Smulyan had his staff send a questionnaire to fans to get an idea of where the team could improve. (Making the Mariners better on the field wasn’t an obvious answer, I guess.) Overwhelmingly, the fans said they wanted the USS Mariner gone.

(A family member of mine who attended quite a few games as a teenager in the 80s disagrees, saying “It was very exciting when the cannon went off!”)

The fans didn’t just request that the ship quietly sink into the night; they had more violent ideas in mind. They wanted it blasted, torpedoed, utterly destroyed and buried at sea where it could never rise again. The Smulyan Administration was basking in that “new baseball team” glow and had a brief moment of wanting to please the fans, so they started looking into a way to sink the ship with its own cannons.

The tried to get approval to do it in one of the area lakes, putting on a big show to let the fans know they were listening.

“The police asked us not to do it in any of the lakes,'' said Stuart Layne, new Mariner vice president of marketing. “We're working with the Coast Guard to see whether there's a way we could do it in the Sound.”⁶

Alas, the Coast Guard would not allow it.

I’m not sure what became of the remains of the USS Mariner. Like the bullpen cart, it lives on in periodic social media posts that never fail to lead to calls to “bring it back!” But they will only ever exist a long, long time ago in a place called the ‘80s.

Today, in Heavy-Handed Symbolism

The first water vehicle to bear the name USS Mariner was built in 1899. A steam tug that originally went by the name Jack T. Scully, it was delivered to the US Navy in September 1917. The United States was six months into the Great War and the Navy thought the Scully was “strongly built” and a “good sea boat”. They renamed it the USS Mariner and intended to use it as a minesweeper.

The tug left its first official duties, patrolling New York harbor, in February 1918 for Bermuda along with at least 13 other vessels. Sailing down the eastern seaboard, the tug “fell progressively astern.” The USS Mariner flew the breakdown flag and signaled that they were sinking fast. The crew was rescued and the tug sank in international waters off the coast of Washington D.C.⁷ never to be seen again.

Since We’re Talking About Boats in the Kingdome…

You’re welcome!

1. Meyers, Georg N. “Ka-Boom! Mariner ‘hardball’ explodes in the Kingdome tonight.” Seattle Daily Times (Seattle, Washington), April 16, 1982: 18.

2. Meyers, Georg N. “Ka-Boom! Mariner ‘hardball’ explodes in the Kingdome tonight.” Seattle Daily Times (Seattle, Washington), April 16, 1982: 18.

3. Owen, John. “‘Bingo’ launches the Mariner fleet”. Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Seattle, Washington), April 4, 1982: 21.

4. Owen, John. “‘Bingo’ launches the Mariner fleet”. Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Seattle, Washington), April 4, 1982: 21.

5. LaRue, Larry. "GOODBYE BASEBALLTHROUGH ALL THE YEARS, THE MEMORIES WERE BIG WINNERS." The News Tribune, June 20, 1999: C1.

6. SMITH, SARAH. "CHANGES UNDER M'S HATS?CHECK KINGDOME FOR SIGNS OF CLUB HEEDING FAN REQUESTS." THE SEATTLE TIMES, April 9, 1990: C6.

7. https://www.history.navy.mil/research/histories/ship-histories/danfs/m/mariner-i.html