"Sure I do, and if someone paid you $6,000 a game, you'd have fun to."
--Pete Rose, when asked if he enjoyed playing baseball
Stadiums
Sick's Stadium
By Patrick Mondout
Sick's Seattle Stadium (a.k.a. Sick's Stadium) was a
baseball stadium built at the end of the Great Depression and used for one
year by the ill-fated expansion Seattle Pilots. It was located on the
corner of S. McClellan Street and Rainier Avenue S.
1938:
Left Field - 325 ft
Left-Center - 345 ft
Center Field - 400 ft
Right-Center - 345 ft
Right Field - 325 ft
Backstop - 54 ft
1969:
Left Field - 305 ft
Left-Center - 345 ft
Center Field - 402 ft
Right-Center - 345 ft
Right Field - 320 ft
Backstop - 54 ft
The stadium was built during the late 1930s as a replacement for
Dugdale Field, which had burned down after a July 4th fireworks display in
1932. Dugdale had been home to the Pacific Coast League's Seattle Indians.
Emil Sick, the owner of Rainer Brewing Company, purchased the PCL
franchise in late 1937 and renamed them the Seattle Rainers. The franchise
had played at the barely adequate Civic Center since 1932, which was
actually located at the current site of Key Arena. Emil built a stadium
for his team which he modestly called Sick's Seattle Stadium. Sick's
opened on June 15, 1938 and baseball fans in Seattle had a respectable
ballpark by contemporary standards for 30 years while they patiently
waited to get a Major League team.
Fly
to the site of Sicks Stadium!
If you have Google
Earth installed, click here
to be "flown" to the site of the Sicks Stadium. Of course
the stadium is no longer there, but you can see the Lowe's that has
been built on the site. (If you do not have it installed, get
it from Google. It allows you to view virtually anywhere on
Earth in 3D using satellite imagery.)
Their waiting ended in October 1967 when the American League announced
that it had awarded Seattle and Washington D.C. new expansion franchises.
(Neither would last in their new cities more than three years.)
Seattle-area voters had passed a bond issue to finance a $40M domed
stadium and Sick's Stadium was seen as a stop-gap until construction on
that stadium could be completed. Sick's and the Seattle Pilots opened for
business on April 11, 1969 with a 7-0 victory over the White Sox.
The aging stadium, however, was not without problems. Renovations took
longer than anticipated and some seats for fans with advance tickets were
not even ready by the time Washington Senator (the non-baseball type)
Warren Magnuson threw out the first pitch. But that was the least of the
fan's concerns. When the attendance was above 10,000, the water pressure
in the stadium would lower rendering the restrooms, as a local newspaper
put it, disgraceful. Fortunately that rarely happened as fans grew tired
of the empty promises and bickering over whose fault it was and largely
stopped showing up. The Pilots were eighth in a ten team league in
attendance. Unfortunately, the lack of a true Major League facility and
accompanying attendance figures (and a lawsuit by the PCL, which had lost
one of its strongest franchises) left the new owners bankrupt.
Primary
research by Jim Herdman & David Vincent
Courtesy of Retrosheet.
After only one season in Seattle, the Pilots were moved to Milwaukee,
Wisconsin and renamed the Milwaukee Brewers (at the end of Spring Training
1970). A lawsuit that took nearly a decade to settle followed with
concessions to the city from Major League Baseball. In the interim,
Seattle had to settle for a class A Northwest League team, which it did
not receive until 1972.
Major League Baseball finally returned to Seattle in the form of the
expansion Mariners in 1977 and in the brand new multipurpose Kingdome.
Sick's Stadium was finally demolished in 1979 and is now the site of a
Lowe's Home Improvement Center. There is a sign marking the position of
the stadium on the corner of Rainer and McClellan and a replica of home
plate near the exit of the retailer.
If you would like to visit the stadium today, but can't afford a trip
in a time machine, you can visit Nat
Bailey Stadium in Vancouver, British Columbia. SaBR member Tom
Hawthorn points out that this stadium was built in the early 1950s from
the blueprints of Sick's Stadium and even features hand-operated
scoreboard that was salvaged from Seattle's park in 1979.
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