The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

designAted hitteRs 135
Kingdome was erected. The site selection process proved controversial,
which mattered little in the larger scheme of things because unfortunately—or
maybe not—the Pilots were one and done. The club still holds
the dubious dual distinction of being the only team in Major League
Baseball history to move after one season and the first to declare bankruptcy.
At the end of spring training in 1970 the franchise was sold to
Bud Selig, a Milwaukee auto dealer destined to become commissioner of
Major League Baseball. Lock, stock and balls, the Pilots landed in Wisconsin
and were reborn as the Brewers. 3
“The Pilots were financed in such a way that they would have gone
bankrupt even if they had sold every seat in that ratty old minor-league
field,” Gorton says. “So all that fall and winter of 1969-1970 we were worried
about whether they were going to leave. Dan Evans was governor;
John Spellman was King County’s new executive and I was the new attorney
general. We went looking for a new owner. But this was pre-Gates;
pre-Allen; pre-Microsoft. There was no enormous wealth here then—no
angel to buy the team, keep the club in Seattle and do it right. Eddie Carlson,
the civic booster who had headed up the Seattle World’s Fair, and
some others advanced the idea that the Pilots should be communityowned,
an idea the Major League Baseball owners detested.”
In January of 1970, Gorton, Evans, Spellman, Carlson and Seattle’s
new mayor, Wes Uhlman, made a pilgrimage to Oakland where the owners
were having their winter meeting. “They assured us the Pilots were
going to stay in Seattle,” Gorton recalls. Not to worry. “We’ll find a way to
do it. We don’t want to move them. Thank you, gentlemen, for all your
hard work on behalf of baseball!” After the delegation departed, the owner
of the Washington Senators in essence declared, “Well, I hope we gave
those guys enough rope to hang themselves.”
When the moving vans were loaded a few months later, Gorton realized
he was on deck. “Isn’t there something we can do?” he said to himself.
Then he answered his own question: “Well, if there’s somebody who
is going to do it, it’s going to be the attorney general.” 4
to tAKe on MAJoR LeAgue BAseBALL, Gorton sent to the plate a designated
hitter destined for the Bar Association’s Hall of Fame. “Bill Dwyer
was perhaps the greatest trial attorney I’ve ever known,” Gorton says. It
was Dwyer who dazzled him when they squared off as young lawyers in
an antitrust case in 1958; and it was Dwyer who asked him to testify as a
character witness for John Goldmark in 1963 after the Okanogan Democrat
was smeared as a Communist and lost his seat in the Legislature.