How the Seattle Mariners traded Ken Griffey Jr. and … got better?

It came basically out of nowhere: One day in 1999, Ken Griffey Jr. told the Seattle Mariners, the only MLB team he’d ever played for, that he wanted to be traded closer to his family home in Orlando. Left with no other choice, the Mariners got to work finding a deal. It wasn’t easy with limited options, and Seattle’s first attempts at making a trade were either ill-fated or misguided. Cincinnati was the clear frontrunner, but they knew that about themselves and set the bar really high for getting a deal done. When that fell through, the Mariners agreed to a deal with the New York Mets … but then Griffey changed his mind about wanting to play in New York. A world in which the first Reds deal got done, or in which the Mets deal got done, OR in which the final trade included multiple teams … is very different than the world we live in. Somehow, after all that, it worked out quite well. Trading Ken Griffey Jr. was a big deal, but not in the way anyone anticipated.

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