T-Mobile Park
Near Woodinville, Washington
The ballpark just south of downtown Seattle was built for a team that had never made the playoffs and opened the year its best player left. What followed became one of baseball's most improbable stories.
T-Mobile Park, then called Safeco Field, opened on July fifteenth, nineteen ninety-nine. It replaced the Kingdome, the concrete dome where the Mariners had played since their expansion debut in nineteen seventy-seven. The new stadium cost five hundred seventeen million dollars, the most expensive baseball park ever built at the time, financed in part with public funds. It was designed in the neo-traditional style popular in the nineteen nineties: red brick, natural grass, and a retractable roof that can close in twenty minutes, a practical necessity in Seattle's climate. Ken Griffey Junior broke ground on the site in March of nineteen ninety-seven before a crowd of eight thousand on a cold and windy afternoon. He would be traded to the Cincinnati Reds before the park's first full season ended.
In two thousand one, the Mariners did something no American League team had ever done. Without Griffey and without their other departed star, Alex Rodriguez, a rebuilt roster built around Japanese outfielder Ichiro Suzuki won one hundred sixteen games, matching the record set by the nineteen oh six Chicago Cubs for wins in a modern major league season. Ichiro hit safely in all but fourteen games. He won the Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player awards in the same season, only the second player in American League history to do so. The Mariners drew three and a half million fans to this ballpark that year. They lost in the American League Championship Series to the Yankees.
Ichiro would play in Seattle for the next twelve seasons, becoming one of the most technically precise hitters the game has seen. The park was renamed T-Mobile Park in two thousand nineteen after the cellular company acquired a twenty-five-year naming rights deal. Edgar Martinez, whose double won the nineteen ninety-five playoff series in the Kingdome, had a street named for him just outside these walls.
