COMMENTARY : Seattle Rallies Around Mariners

The taxi driver was a native of Jordan and a recent convert to baseball. What impressed him most about the first postseason series played here was not so much what the Mariners accomplished on the field but the joy they brought to his adopted city. The celebration of the team’s advance to the American League Championship Series was not limited to the drab confines of the Kingdome.

In the aftermath of an emotionally taxing victory over the New York Yankees on Sunday night, the streets in the adjacent neighborhood of Pioneer Square were crowded with revelers who toasted passing cars and each other. Drivers honked their horns in acknowledgement and generally behaved in uncharacteristic fashion for citizens whose passion had heretofore been reserved for the next cup of caffe latte. For the first time, the Mariners amounted to more than a hill of beans.

“Many call in sick,” the cabbie said to his passenger on the morning after. “That is to be expected. People party until 2 o’clock. They have good time. No damage. Sport is supposed to bring people together, yes?”

It is and it did in numbers that belied the economic condition of baseball, the absence of a collective bargaining agreement and a commissioner, the hangover from an unpopular strike and the tepid support historically generated by the Mariners. The legacy of the five-game series was that it not only revitalized the season in New York, however briefly, but may have saved the Seattle franchise. The pressure on Washington state legislators to finance a new ballpark for the team increases with each success.

And the manner of the Mariners’ triumph, rallying from defeats in the first two games and overcoming deficits in all three potential elimination contests at the Kingdome, was an elixir for all of baseball. Although the stage was relatively small, one of a quartet of simultaneous series comprising an additional round of playoffs, the characters and the performances were outsized and unforgettable.

Consider that the services of the Cy Young Award winners from 1994 (David Cone) and 1993 (Jack McDowell) as well as those of the man who almost certainly will be the recipient for 1995 (Randy Johnson) were enlisted in the finale. Cone, the winning pitcher in Game 1, carried a 4-2 lead into the eighth inning and gamely threw 147 pitches for the Yankees before Buck Showalter made the first of two trips to the mound. When Lou Piniella reached into his bullpen in the ninth for Johnson, the intimidating left-hander who pitched seven innings in victory two nights earlier, Showalter summoned his Game 3 starter, the gritty McDowell.

Their duel raised the stakes a notch and pushed the decibel level of the arena to unprecedented proportions. “That’s what it should come down to,” Showalter said later. “Two warriors going at it ... one guy with probably as good stuff as there is in baseball and the other guy with as good a heart as there has been in the game.”

Johnson outlasted McDowell but perhaps only because he enjoyed the stronger supporting cast. The Yankees featured the league’s finest hitter for the last decade, Wade Boggs. The Mariners boasted the league’s best hitter in 1995, Edgar Martinez. The latter doubled home the tying and winning runs in the bottom of the 11th after homering twice in Seattle’s 11-8 comeback victory on Saturday night.

“He got you this time, you get him next time,” relief pitcher Norm Charlton told Martinez after McDowell struck out the designated hitter with two runners on base in the ninth. “I remembered that before I went to bat (in the 11th),” Martinez said. “He kept repeating to me that I was going to do it and I was positive. I was telling him that this was my chance.”

The series may have capped the career of the oldest postseason rookie, Don Mattingly, and it assuredly speeded the development of baseball’s most compelling young player, Ken Griffey Jr. Mattingly staged an encore of his past hits, homering in the last game at Yankee Stadium, doubling with the bases loaded to stake Cone to that 4-2 lead on Sunday and batting .417 with a team-high six RBI. He validated the affection of teammates and the respect of opponents.

Still, the final scene of a memorable week in October was provided by Griffey, completing a personal comeback from a broken wrist suffered in May. After hitting his fifth home run of the series three innings earlier, equaling the postseason record set by Reggie Jackson in 1977, Junior singled Joey Cora to third in the 11th and raced home with the winning run on Martinez’s drive into the left-field corner. His slide elevated the franchise to a higher level of public acceptance.

The Mariners’ first appearance in the sport’s prime time, subdivided as it may have been by The Baseball Network, was a revelation. They triumphed in a series that set records for home runs (22), elapsed time (more than 20 hours) and sudden swings of momentum. The teams exchanged leads in all but the first game, when the Mariners tied it twice before the Yankees staged a seventh-inning outburst. The first club to score lost three of the five games. Two contests were decided on the final swing in extra innings and Bernie Williams, who emerged as the Yankees’ leading hitter with a .429 average, almost turned Game 4 upside-down with a two-out, ninth-inning drive to the warning track with a pair of teammates on base.

“It was great baseball every day,” Piniella said after Showalter offered his congratulations in the Mariners’ clubhouse. “I told Buck, ‘It’s a shame there has to be a loser in this series because it was so well-played and competitive.’ ”

The tension and excitement both exhausted and invigorated players and left their audience in a constant uproar. “Who says Seattle’s not a baseball town?” demanded a banner on display in the Kingdome. After 19 years of general disinterest, it appears, the residents have awakened and smelled more than the coffee.