Kingdome

While I was living in San Diego, my brother moved to Seattle and my friend Joe’s family lived in the area. One day Joe and I are talking and we decide we need to see a game at the Kingdome. This was one of the better Seattle lineups (1996) with Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, Alex Rodriguez, Jay Buhner, Randy Johnson, and Dennis Martinez. Raul Ibanez was a Mariner September call-up. We flew up and saw the last three regular season games against the A’s. The Mariners had already won the division by then and were just resting up against last place Oakland. This was the year Mark McGwire went to St. Louis from Oakland but they still had Jose Canseco, Jason Giambi, and rookies Miguel Tejada & Mark Bellhorn. The A’s took 2 of 3. Nothing spectacular happened in the games. In the second game Griffey hit #56 for the season and the big unit got the win #20 – pitching in relief.

This was my first domed stadium and it was bad. There was no natural light from the outside. When we walked out of the park it was weird seeing daylight. It was also really dark inside. The lighting in the seating area was particularly bad. Otherwise it was really no different than any other generic dual purpose stadium. When they destroyed the park, I didn’t really see it as a loss to baseball.