Underdog Stories / Sports analysis & explainers

How Did the 1995 Mariners Save Baseball in Seattle?

How did the 1995 Mariners save baseball in Seattle: a 13-game comeback and one Game 5 double that pushed a stadium deal through.

By Brett Hanson · Underdog Podcasts · October 14, 2026

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Ask longtime Seattle fans which Mariners season mattered most, and many skip the 116-win team of 2001. They go back to 1995, a 144-game season shortened by the previous year's strike. Rick Rizzs, the broadcaster who retired in September 2026 after 41 seasons with the club, made that case on the "Sports With Friends" episode "551. Seattle Mariners Retiring Broadcaster Rick Rizzs". For him, 1995 outranks every other year because "without that team... we wouldn't be here."

His claim is bigger than a good pennant race. The idea is that one October run kept major league baseball in the Pacific Northwest. Here is how that happened.

How did a team 13 games back in August catch the Angels?

The Mariners had never made the playoffs. They had produced only two winning seasons since beginning play in 1977. Then came the injury Rizzs describes as the first blow. Ken Griffey Jr. crashed into the Kingdome wall in right-center field and broke his left wrist. Rizzs remembers a plate and several screws and about three months of recovery. Club records list the date as May 26, with two broken bones in the wrist, and a return on August 15, two weeks ahead of schedule.

Without Griffey, the team hovered around .500. On August 3, the Angels were 56–33, and the Mariners, at 43–46, trailed them by 13 games. Rizzs puts it plainly in the episode: teams don't come back from 13 games down with two months left.

Seattle did, partly because California fell apart. On August 21 the Mariners were 12½ games back. Two weeks later the gap was 5½. The Angels won 1 and lost 12 in that stretch, while Seattle won 8 and lost 5. Seattle won 25 of its last 35 games. The two teams were level on September 21. The Mariners then lost their final two games at Texas. The Angels won their last five and tied them at 78 wins and 66 losses.

What happened in the one-game playoff against the Angels?

The tiebreaker was played at the Kingdome on October 2. Rizzs recalls the matchup as Randy Johnson against Mark Langston. The pairing carried some history: Langston was the former Mariners ace who had been traded to Montreal for Johnson in 1989.

It stayed close for a long time. Seattle held a 1 to 0 lead at the seventh-inning stretch, then broke the game open and won 9 to 1. Luis Sojo's bases-clearing double in the seventh did the most damage. Johnson finished the season with 18 wins and 2 losses. Rizzs's point holds up. When the Mariners needed a win, he was the one who got it.

What did Lou Piniella promise at 3 a.m. after Seattle fell behind 0-2?

The Yankees were next in the best-of-five Division Series. The first two games in New York went to the Yankees, including a 15-inning game that ended on Jim Leyritz's two-run home run.

Rizzs tells the next part from his own seat on the team flight home, and it is his recollection alone. At about 3 or 4 a.m., with the cabin dark and everyone asleep, he was at the front of the plane when manager Lou Piniella came up the aisle. He remembers Piniella telling him, with a look in his eyes Rizzs describes as flames, that the Mariners were going to win the series. Rizzs agreed. They had Johnson ready for Game 3, and he thought they could get him back for Game 5.

Piniella was still saying it years later. He called Martínez's eventual hit "the hit, the run, the game, the series and the season that saved baseball in Seattle."

How did Seattle win Games 3, 4 and 5 against the Yankees?

Johnson won Game 3, as Rizzs says. Game 4 belonged to Edgar Martínez. The Mariners came back from five runs down to level the series at two games apiece. Rizzs remembers Martínez hitting a three-run homer early and a grand slam later, in an 11 to 8 win. He places the slam in the seventh inning. The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) places it in the eighth and calls it his second home run of the game. Either way, it was the swing that turned the game.

“They proved not only can the Mariners survive in Seattle, but they could thrive in Seattle.”
— Seth Everett, on Sports With Friends

Game 5 made the franchise. The Yankees led 4–2 in the eighth, until Griffey homered and Doug Strange drew a bases-loaded walk to tie it at 4–4. Johnson came out of the bullpen, and the game went to extra innings. Rizzs recalls that Jack McDowell had struck Martínez out on a forkball in the ninth. In the 11th, the Yankees took the lead when Randy Velarde's single scored Pat Kelly.

Then came the Seattle half of the inning, in Rizzs's telling and in the record. Joey Cora beat out a bunt, and Griffey singled to put runners on first and third. Martínez then doubled down the left field line, scoring Cora to tie the game and Griffey to win it. The final was 6 to 5. Rizzs puts the crowd at 56,000. SABR lists the sellout at 57,411, with 78 percent of western Washington households watching on television.

The Mariners went on to lose the ALCS to Cleveland in six games. By then the series that mattered had been won in the ALDS.

Why did a baseball game affect a stadium vote?

The Mariners played in the aging Kingdome, and their owners were running out of patience. On September 19, King County voters rejected a sales tax increase for a new stadium. The ownership group answered with a deadline: come up with a financing plan by October 30 or the team goes up for sale. Team officials said they would leave without a new stadium. They meant it.

The playoff run changed the politics. While the Yankees series was underway, Governor Mike Lowry called a special session of the Legislature. Without a public vote, it approved a tax package to fund a $320 million ballpark with a retractable roof. There was anger over that. Many people who had voted down the earlier plan protested. The last step came on October 23. The Metropolitan King County Council approved the financing plan eight days before the deadline. The ballpark, now called T-Mobile Park, opened in July 1999.

Rizzs names Lowry, Senator Slade Gorton and Nintendo's Hiroshi Yamauchi as the people who made it happen. His argument is that the crowds showed Seattle could support a team. In his words in the episode, the Mariners proved they could thrive, which beat merely surviving. Team president Chuck Armstrong later recalled that Bud Selig said the Mariners and Cal Ripken were the two main things that brought baseball back after the strike.

How do Tampa Bay and Nintendo fit the timeline?

Rizzs mentions that the team was close to becoming the "Tampa Bay Mariners," with shirts already on sale in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area. Nintendo's involvement is part of that story, but it came earlier than the 1995 playoffs.

The threat of relocation goes back to 1991 and 1992. Owner Jeff Smulyan tried to sell the team, which could have meant a move. A legal fight forced him to give local buyers a chance first, before outside buyers such as those in Tampa Bay could move in.

Senator Gorton helped find a group of Seattle-area businessmen, led by Nintendo chairman Hiroshi Yamauchi, to buy the team. Yamauchi offered the money not because he cared about baseball but out of gratitude to the community that had helped his company succeed. He never attended a live Mariners game. Baseball approved the purchase in June 1992, on the condition that John Ellis, not Yamauchi's representatives, ran the team.

So there were two rescues. The 1992 sale kept the Mariners from leaving at that moment. The 1995 season is what kept the Yamauchi-led owners willing to stay. They had said they would sell if no ballpark plan was in place, and the stadium it produced is the reason the team has a long-term home. Rizzs said in a 2023 MLB.com retrospective that people only later realized the impact the team had on Seattle and baseball.