The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

302 sLAde goRton: A hALf centuRy in poLitics
goRton wAs BLissfuLLy out of the loop. He’d said a temporary aloha to
politics for a week of sun in Hawaii with his family and a stack of good
books. He arrived back home the night of Ellis’ announcement. “At
SeaTac, every television camera in Seattle was waiting for me: ‘Senator
Gorton, the Mariners are going to move! What are you going to do about
it?’ And I go ‘Huh?’ I quickly learned that John Ellis had had it with the
County Council and the PFD, declaring, ‘I am never going to speak to
another politician for the rest of my life.’ Ellis was in a fury and genuinely
emotional.”
The next day, Gorton met with the members of the County Council,
whose phones were ringing off the hook. “They’re frantic that they’re all
going to be recalled: ‘Slade, can’t you do something? Ellis won’t return
our calls.’” By Monday Ellis had returned Gorton’s call and by Thursday
they had put together a “non-negotiable final offer.”
In a conversation both recall as terse, Gorton presented Sims with the
list of demands. Sims’ distress over his untenable dilemma was as palpable
as his chagrin at receiving his marching orders from the man he’d
failed to dislodge from the U.S. Senate just two years earlier. The angry
calls and e-mails had been relentless; his kids were being hassled at
school. He was being hammered from all sides—by taxpayers who saw
the project as a fat-cat subsidy as well as the baseball faithful and the
Chamber of Commerce. He seriously considered not becoming county
executive.
The County Council and the Public Facilities District Board ran up the
white flag two days before Christmas. Fifteen months later, Gorton and
Griffey wielded shovels at the groundbreaking for Safeco Field, which
opened on July 15, 1999.
“it tAKes At LeAst 25 yeARs to make a city a baseball city,” Gorton says.
“You have to have had a generation that has grown up watching Major
League baseball, then love taking their own kids to the games. The first
25 years are much the hardest. It’s very, very difficult to create and sustain
interest. But after that you turn into a baseball town. Seattle is still getting
there. Someday we’re going to have a team to match the best ball field in
Major League Baseball.”
Getting there is often as serendipitous as the way the Mariners survived
their three crises, Gorton says. You beef up the bull pen, make
some timely trades, find a great manager, then get hot—and lucky—from
August through October.
“Hiroshi Yamauchi, the great hero of all of this, has never seen his