The Yankees Are Here This Week

The Yankees opened a series against the Mariners at Safeco Park last night. When I visited Seattle in 2009, the M's were on the road, but there was still the opportunity to get some pictures of this really terrific ballpark.

I highly recommend taking the tour of Safeco. It ran 90 minutes and included plenty of stories behind its unique design. Who wouldn't enjoy learning of the technological feats that gave us this retractable roof?

Then to see it pulled back with the sun bathing the field borders on breathtaking.

Quite an upgrade over the oft-criticized Kingdome (which I visited back in '93 -- use the search engine to find some of those pictures).

The Mariners credit their fans for the boom in attendance that began with their first playoff appearance in 1995. That was  the year they came from two-games to none down to beat the Yankees in the opening round. The enthusiastic support convinced state and local officials to fund the ballpark that kept baseball in Seattle.

Over their nearly four-decade history, the Mariners have sported such stars as Ken Griffey Junior, Edgar Martinez, Randy Johnson, Jay Buehner and Ichiro Suzuki. Their current club is built around the pitching excellence of Felix Hernandez and all-around skills of Robinson Cano. Yet, there's this surprising statistic -- the Mariners are the only major league club never to have played in a World Series. In '95, after upending the Yankees, they fell to the Indians in the League Championship round. They made it back to the playoffs several more times, but it seems someone (the Yankees or Orioles) always stood in the way. We'll see if Cano's arrival, as King Felix glides into the prime of his career, changes that story.

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