JUNIOR WARNS MARINERS. . . : ‘Just Win’ : Frustrated Griffey Says Success Rate Must Improve for Seattle or He Might Leave

Ken Griffey, Jr. turns his cap backward and turns on that infectious grin. He jumps into the batting cage and begins slashing line drives off the Kingdome fences. Nothing unusual except that the left-handed hitter is swinging right-handed and challenging the right-handed hitting Jay Buhner to match him swinging left-handed.

They may never take the junior out of Junior. They may never ebb his ebullience.

But in a season when his home run pace has been compared to that of Roger Maris’ in 1961 and he has underscored his status as baseball’s best player, Griffey has found frustration intruding on his fun.

He is 24, younger than either of 1993’s rookies of the year, Mike Piazza and Tim Salmon, but it is easy to forget he is in his sixth year with a Seattle team that is 62 games under .500 during that span.

“The fun is in the winning and we’re not again, so it isn’t as much fun,” Griffey said. He was sitting in the leather lounger that serves as his private clubhouse chair, but he had stood up one other day, questioning his team’s heart and the future of the Mariners in Seattle, as well as his own future with the Mariners. The losing, he said, had begun to kill him. It was too easy, he said, for some players to roll over and quit.

The headlines rocked Seattle. The implication was that Griffey wanted out, had asked to be traded.

Forget his significance to the Mariner lineup. How would his departure affect proposals to build a new, retractable-roof stadium in the city? How would it affect downtown redevelopment and the proposed Niketown complex?

Doesn’t that line of shoes carrying his name make its debut next month? Doesn’t Nintendo, the money behind the Mariners, have a new baseball video game with Griffey’s name on it? Weren’t those corporate, civic and just plain citizens choking on their Frosted Flakes as they read the headlines?

The Mariners tried to douse the firestorm.

“Hell would have to freeze over before I traded Ken Griffey,” General Manager Woody Woodward said.

Manager Lou Piniella said: “You don’t trade the most talented and marketable player in the game.”

This day, Piniella is sitting in the Kingdome dugout, saying how proud he was of Griffey for showing the maturity and leadership to say things that needed to be said about the team.

“Hell, I even hugged him,” Piniella said. “He’s disappointed and disgusted. He’s frustrated with losing. When you get 25 players feeling that way, that’s when you’re headed in the right direction. But we’re still a little short. I mean, you’ve got to come to the park obsessed with winning, but we’re not totally there yet.

“The 162-game season is a grind. You’re going to get angry and frustrated. The only players worth anything are those that do, that care. Junior could collect his check and go home at night without saying anything, but he’s not that type player or man.”

Junior insists that some of it was taken out of context, but if teammates were offended, so be it. He’s always been his own man, he said, and they still have to respect what he does on the field.

“When I first came up, this was Alvin’s team,” he said of Alvin Davis. “Then it was Harold (Reynolds’) and Val’s (Dave Valle) team. Now it’s my team and I’m not going to stand for the losing. I expect more.

“I mean, all I want to do is win. All I want to be remembered as is a winner. Ernie Banks never won and that seemed to be fine with him, but he’s not me. I grew up in Cincinnati and saw what it was like with the Reds when my dad played for them. He has three World Series rings and has often told me it’s the greatest feeling in the world.

“Look at Joe Carter. He had great years, but all you would hear about him is how many times he had been traded. Then he got to Toronto and on a winner, and now what they talk about is what he did in the World Series. I just want people to understand where I’m coming from, not where I’m going.”

Is he going, going, gone, as the cover of USA Today’s Baseball Weekly suggested, blasting away from Puget Sound soon in his Ferrari F-40?

“I never asked to be traded and never said I wanted to be traded,” Griffey said. “I love Seattle and want to be on a team the city can be proud of, but things have got to change, and what people have forgotten in all of this is that I’ve volunteered to defer my salary (of $7 million a year) in 1995 and ’96 if it would help the team produce a winner.

“Where this started was that (a reporter) asked me if I would sign an extension as the situation exists now, and I said no--but my (four-year, $24-million) contract doesn’t expire until after the 1996 season, and I wouldn’t expect to be offered an extension until after next season. That’s the way it’s usually done.

“I also said that I don’t see how the Mariners can survive beyond 1996 (when the Kingdome lease expires) without better corporate support or how they can afford to keep me. I still don’t. I see a lot of good people leaving if we don’t win. Just look at myself, Buhner, (Chris) Bosio, (Randy) Johnson and (Edgar) Martinez. That’s five people making $22.5 million next year and the budget is $28 million. It doesn’t work.”

None of that, though, has seemed to affect his performance or approach.

Griffey is batting .327 and leads the American League in home runs with 23 and total bases with 153. His pace projects to 68 homers, which would break Maris’ 1961 record of 61, and 450 total bases, approaching Babe Ruth’s 1921 record of 457.

He is second in slugging percentage, extra-base hits and runs, and is among the top 10 in runs batted in with 46. In a 162-game span since May 30, 1993, the equivalent of a full season, he hit 58 homers, drove in 127 runs, had 35 doubles and batted .320--all this while seldom getting a decent pitch, particularly with the game on the line.

As Reynolds, the former Mariner second baseman now with the Angels, said when asked if he stays in touch with his former teammate: “I just tune in ESPN. He’s his own highlight film. It’s easy to stay in touch with him.”

Griffey is headed for his fourth straight season of 100 or more RBIs. He was second in the league with 45 homers last year, finished among the league leaders in 11 offensive categories and won his fourth straight Gold Glove for fielding superiority.

“You look at the six years and he’s done everything he’s supposed to do,” said Griffey’s dad, Ken, the 19-year former major leaguer who is a roving hitting instructor with the Mariners. “It goes without saying that if he’d been in a stronger lineup, his numbers would (have been) even better.”

Woodward said he expects Griffey’s numbers to continue improving as he gains more experience and maturity.

“I see an added dimension in the intensity with which he’s now playing and the ease with which he adjusts to pitchers and situations,” Woodward said. “I don’t at all suggest that what we’ve seen so far is the best he can be. I think he’ll get better.”

Said Piniella, raising an eyebrow: “He’s already the total package. How can he get better? The media try to create a monster at times. How good does he have to get to satisfy everyone? All he has to do is maintain.”

Griffey, of course, has always carried high expectations--his own and others’.

His mother, Alberta, tells the story of Junior never making an out in an organized game until he was 15 and reacting to it by telling her he wanted to quit.

“Why are you so upset?” she said. “Your dad makes outs all the time.”

“I’m not my dad,” Junior responded. “I don’t make outs.”

Then there was his debut with the Mariners, when he got a hit in his first at-bat and went hitless in his next 15.

“We were sitting there in Chicago--Junior, me and Alvin Davis--and Junior is in tears, saying he’ll never get another hit,” Reynolds recalled. “I felt like telling him, ‘Kid, if you only knew.’ I mean, I remember him when he was 17 or 18 and coming to work out with us, just after he was drafted, and rocketing balls into the seats. You could tell right then he was something special.”

The Mariners had the first pick in the 1987 draft but then-owner George Argyros, who lives in Orange County, wanted to select Cal State Fullerton pitcher Mike Harkey over the objections of the scouting department, which quietly beefed up the already flawless reports on Griffey to a level Argyros couldn’t resist.

The teen-age Griffey operated strictly on instinct and reaction. A veteran Mariner once tried to school him on the repertoire of pitcher Bert Blyleven, instructing Griffey that Blyleven liked to throw the back-door slider to left-handed hitters with two strikes.

Griffey listened, then asked: “Is Blyleven right- or left-handed?”

Griffey still likes to sell the “see it, hit it” routine, still likes to give the impression that he prepares by talking to hot dog vendors while in the on-deck circle, but Piniella says: “A lot of it now is experience and maturity, but Junior studies pitchers more than people think. Home runs aren’t muscle, they’re bat speed.

“You can pitch a lot of home run hitters a certain way and establish an edge. You can’t with Junior. He knows his strike zone, and it is basically without vulnerabilities and weaknesses.”

Griffey maintains that the home run isn’t his forte, that he is a line-drive hitter capable of hitting home runs, that he is basically following his father’s edict, “There’s money in left field, too.” Meaning: Use the whole field; pull only when the pitch is there.

“I’m not your traditional home run hitter,” Griffey said. “Look at guys like Jose Canseco and Cecil Fielder and Juan Gonzalez. They’ve got 19-inch biceps and I’ve got these puny 12-inchers, if that. I’m not big or small. I’m right in the middle.

“Traditional home run hitters spend all their time in the weight room. I was in there for 10 minutes during spring training, and they thought they were going to have to call the paramedics. My dad always told me, ‘Home runs are nice, but it’s what you do in the other 500 at-bats that counts.’ There’s more ways to beat a team than with a home run, and I’d rather get on base and set the table.”

Maybe, but his 45 homers last season left him only one behind the major league leaders, Gonzalez and Barry Bonds. He also tied a major league record by hitting homers in eight straight games and became the first player to hit a ball off the B & O warehouse behind the right-field stands at Baltimore’s Camden Yards during the All-Star home run contest.

This year, he set a major league record for homers through May with 22, breaking Mickey Mantle’s 1956 record of 20. Different pitchers, equipment and eras, Griffey said, refusing to draw comparisons to Mantle.

Maris is still out there, with all the inherent pressure, perhaps, of a summer-long pursuit, but Griffey said: “If it happens, it happens. I ain’t going to eat, sleep or drink 61. I’ve got to get to 30, 40, 50 and 60 first, and I’d like to have as much fun with it as I can. I mean, what do I have to prepare for? Instead of talking to three or four of you guys every day, once a day I’d have to talk to 50 of you.”

Besides, Griffey said, he’s conditioned to going sleepless in Seattle. Whether it’s relaxing with his late-night video favorite, Mortal Kombat, bowling with friends, romping with his four dogs or trying to keep his and wife Melissa’s 4-month-old son, Trey, quiet through the night.

“Pressure?” Griffey said with a laugh. “Pressure is trying to change diapers when the kid is throwing a fit.”

Griffey has always dismissed pressure. He grew up among Pete Rose, Johnny Bench and Tony Perez in the Reds’ clubhouse.

The major leagues were just another step in his baseball schooling. The senior Griffey said he tried to make sure his son remained a kid as long as possible, and Pete Rose told him: “If you play as a kid, you’ll always enjoy it.”

Now, however, the senior Griffey is a little concerned about some of the reaction to Junior’s recent comments and all the premature comparisons to Maris.

He said he has confidence in Junior’s ability to remain cool and consistent but added: “He’s out there playing and trying to have a good time, but there’s always people who want to screw it up. He’s not worried about the record or other garbage, but there’s still people interested in putting pressure on him.”

Griffey has homered in his last 12 games, once in his last eight. Reality tends to dim projections. A labor stoppage might intercede as well. Griffey said he will look at his numbers only when the season is over.

“You start to worry about this pace or that pace, or about what Mantle or Ruth or Maris did, and you start to doubt yourself,” he said. “I never was into baseball history. I never collected anything. I never was into records.”

Some have suggested that Griffey would be better off if he didn’t break this one because the expectations, already large in his case, would soar, but he doesn’t buy that.

“If I break the record and hit 30 next year, they can’t take the record away from me,” he said. “People will always remember I had a marvelous year in 1994, but they can’t expect me to repeat it every year. They’d be out of their minds if they did.”