On the afternoon of April 11, 1969, fewer than fifteen thousand people showed up to watch something that had never happened before in Seattle: a Major League baseball game. The Seattle Pilots were playing the Chicago White Sox at Sick's Stadium, a minor league ballpark in the Rainier Valley that had been hastily expanded for the occasion. Some fans arrived to find that their seats had not been installed yet. Workers were still nailing and painting the bleachers that morning. The scoreboard had only been finished the night before. The stadium, it should be noted, was named after a man named Sick, which in hindsight feels less like a coincidence and more like a warning.
The Pilots won, seven to nothing. Gary Bell threw a complete game. It was, by a wide margin, the best day the franchise would ever have.
Three days later, 3,611 people came to watch them play the Kansas City Royals. Another April game drew 1,954.
Seattle was not new to baseball. Professional teams had played in the city almost continuously since 1898, when a former major league catcher named Dan Dugdale founded a club called the Braves. For decades, the city's team was the Rainiers, a Pacific Coast League club owned by Emil Sick, who ran the Rainier Brewing Company and built the stadium that bore his name. The Rainiers won three straight pennants from 1939 to 1941. They were good and they were loved and they were, unfortunately, minor league. By the 1960s, Seattle wanted what cities its size were supposed to have. It wanted the majors.
In 1967, the American League awarded Seattle an expansion franchise. The conditions were straightforward: a domed stadium had to be built within three years, and until it was ready, the Pilots would play at Sick's. This was already a stretch. Sick's had been a perfectly fine ballpark when it opened in 1938. By the late 1960s, the city had bought it and then done almost nothing to maintain it. When Charlie Finley, owner of the Kansas City Athletics, visited to scout the stadium as a possible home for his team, he took one look and called it a pigsty.
The Pilots were supposed to start play in 1971, which would have given everyone time to get the new stadium built and Sick's properly renovated. But a Missouri senator named Stuart Symington demanded that Kansas City's expansion team begin play in 1969, and Seattle had to match. Suddenly the Pilots were two years ahead of schedule with a stadium that was not ready, an ownership group that was underfunded, and a roster assembled from the players that twenty other teams had decided they could live without.
The stadium was the most visible problem. The expansion was supposed to bring capacity to thirty thousand seats. On opening day, somewhere between seventeen and nineteen thousand were ready, depending on who was counting and how generous they were feeling. The plumbing, it turned out, could not handle a crowd above ten thousand. Past that threshold, the toilets stopped flushing. Visiting players sometimes skipped the showers entirely and went straight to their hotels. Steve Whitaker, an outfielder who had been traded from the Yankees, summarized the situation with the restraint of a man who had seen better days: "After coming from Yankee Stadium, I mean come on, it was terrible."
The team finished 64 and 98, dead last in the American League West, thirty three games behind the Minnesota Twins. Fewer than 678,000 fans came through the gates all season, which placed them twentieth out of twenty four major league teams. This was not entirely the fans' fault. The ticket prices, despite everything, were among the highest in the majors. The Pilots were charging major league prices for what was, by every measurable standard, a minor league experience.
The real collapse, though, was financial. The ownership group, led by brothers Dewey and Max Soriano, had never brought in local business partners to help share the cost. They were, as one historian later put it, "at best, financed by a penny-pincher and, at worst, insufficiently capitalized." By midsummer, the Commissioner's office was already worried. A June 1969 memo about possible league realignment had Seattle quietly replaced by Milwaukee. The franchise was three months old and people were already planning its funeral.
The Pilots' relief pitcher Jim Bouton was keeping a diary. He wrote down everything: the losing streaks, the cold showers, the absurdity of playing major league baseball in a park where the plumbing gave out by the seventh inning. His book, Ball Four, published the following year, would become one of the most famous baseball books ever written. In it, he sized up Seattle's future with the confidence of a man who had seen the toilets: "I don't think this is a town that will ever draw 25,000 or 30,000 regularly."
He was wrong about that, but he would not live to see how wrong.
During the World Series that October, while the country watched the Miracle Mets shock Baltimore, Dewey Soriano met secretly with a car dealer from Milwaukee named Bud Selig. Selig had been trying to bring baseball back to Milwaukee ever since the Braves left for Atlanta in 1965. He was not a man who gave up easily. He offered $10.8 million. The Soriano brothers' partners turned it down. For a few desperate months, local Seattle investors scrambled to put together their own bid. A theater chain owner named Fred Danz led the effort. The American League approved the local sale, calling it a "formality."
Then it came out that the Sorianos had a $3.5 million loan from the Bank of California that nobody in the league knew about. The bank had already called it in. The local deal fell apart. The Pilots filed for bankruptcy.
On March 31, 1970, six days before the team was supposed to play its second opening day, a federal bankruptcy referee named Sidney Volinn ruled that the only viable offer was Selig's. The Seattle Pilots were going to Milwaukee. When the ruling came down, Bud Selig burst into tears. The team's equipment was sitting in a truck in Provo, Utah. The drivers had been waiting to find out whether to head north to Seattle or east to Wisconsin. They turned east.
The Pilots became the Milwaukee Brewers. They wore the same blue and gold uniforms with the name changed. The 1970 Topps baseball cards still showed players in Pilots jerseys because the move happened too late to reprint them. It was the only time in modern baseball history that a major league team left a city after a single season.
Where Sick's Stadium once stood, at the corner of McClellan and Rainier Avenue in the Rainier Valley, there is now a Lowe's hardware store. Inside the store, on the floor near the entrance, there is a small marker showing where home plate used to be. Most shoppers walk right over it on their way to buy lumber. Which, if you think about it, is the kind of detail that would have made Jim Bouton reach for his diary.
Seattle would not have major league baseball again for seven years. When it came back, the team would be called the Mariners, and they would play in the domed stadium that the Pilots were promised but never saw. That is a different story. But even decades later, the loss still had an edge to it. Seattle sports historian David Eskenazi, who was nine years old during the Pilots' single season and went to seven games, put it simply: "That memory is still painful for us old timers who were here when the Pilots were here."