The Full Biography
Ken Griffey Jr. Center fielder. The Kid in the backwards cap who made Seattle a baseball city and then spent a decade trying to go home.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a swing so clean it looked like a rumor, a cap turned backward, a man hanging over a padded wall with a baseball in the webbing and a grin already starting. Sometimes it is the slide at home on October 8, 1995, in the Kingdome, the city on its feet, Edgar Martinez’s ball still rolling in the left-field corner. What the still cannot show is George Kenneth Griffey Jr. of Donora, Pennsylvania, a Big Red Machine son raised in Cincinnati, a seventeen-year-old who once decided he did not want to live, and a career of 630 home runs that never once ended in a World Series.
He was born on November 21, 1969, in Donora, a steel town on the Monongahela twenty miles south of Pittsburgh. Stan Musial had been born in the same town, on the same calendar day, forty-nine years earlier. His father, George Kenneth Sr., was already in professional baseball. His mother, Alberta, called Birdie, held the house. A brother, Craig, and a sister, Lathesia, followed. The family moved to Cincinnati when Senior reached the Reds. Junior grew up in clubhouses at Riverfront Stadium, a small uniform among Pete Rose and Johnny Bench, learning that the game was work and that the work belonged to his father first.
The first pressure was the name. At Archbishop Moeller High School he was the best prospect scouts had seen in a generation. He hit. He ran. He played football well enough that Oklahoma and Michigan offered scholarships. He wanted the first overall pick more than he wanted the extra money. In June 1987 the Seattle Mariners, coming off a last-place season, took him first. He signed for $160,000 so the club would not blink. He wanted the number everyone would remember. He wanted his father to see it.
The door was not Cooperstown. It was Bellingham in the Northwest League, then San Bernardino in the California League in 1988, a nineteen-year-old in a dusty park whose swing already looked finished. In January of that same winter, at seventeen, he swallowed hundreds of aspirin in Mount Airy, Ohio, and woke in intensive care. He has told the story himself so the next kid would hear it. Father and son fought in the hospital corridor. Birdie knew where the yelling had started. He moved into his own place. He kept hitting.
On April 3, 1989, Opening Day in Oakland, he was nineteen and the Mariners’ starting center fielder. Dave Stewart was on the mound. Griffey doubled on the second pitch he saw. A week after that, in his Kingdome debut, he hit his first major-league home run, the first pitch from Eric King of the White Sox. Seattle, which had never had a reason to treat baseball as a civic fact, invented one. They sold a candy bar with his name on it. He was allergic to chocolate. Nearly a million bars moved anyway.
In 1990 the glove became as famous as the swing. On April 26 at Yankee Stadium he went above the wall and took a home run from Jesse Barfield, smiling before he landed. That August the Mariners signed his father. On August 31 the two Griffeys became the first father and son to take the field as teammates. On September 14, in Anaheim, they hit back-to-back home runs off Kirk McCaskill. Senior first. Junior after him. They embraced at the bat rack. For fifty-one games the backyard and the big leagues were the same grass.
The decade that followed is the file the country still plays. Ten Gold Gloves in a row, 1990 through 1999. Thirteen All-Star selections. The 1992 All-Star Game MVP. Home Run Derby nights that turned a batting-practice stunt into a television event. In 1993 he homered in eight straight games and became the first man to reach the B&O warehouse at Camden Yards in the Derby. In 1994 he had 40 home runs when the strike shut the sport. He was not yet twenty-five.
May 26, 1995: the catch they called Spiderman, a broken left wrist, seventy-three games gone. He came back in August. The Mariners, left for dead, won the West. In the American League Division Series against the Yankees he hit five home runs. In Game Five, October 8, Joey Cora on third, Griffey on first, Martinez doubled into the corner. Sammy Perlozzo at third told him to keep going. He did. The pile at the plate is why a city still exists as a baseball town. They lost the Championship Series to Cleveland. There was never a ring. There was a new ballpark. People called it the house he built.
1997 was the peak the numbers can hold. Fifty-six home runs. One hundred forty-seven runs batted in. Unanimous American League Most Valuable Player. In 1998 he hit 56 again. He reached 400 home runs in April 2000, on his father’s fiftieth birthday. He reached 500 on Father’s Day in 2004, in St. Louis, with both parents in the seats. He reached 600 in 2008, in Miami, off Mark Hendrickson. When he stopped he had 630, seventh on the list as it then stood, with 1,836 runs batted in and a .284 average. The swing never looked like effort. The body, after 2000, looked like a bill coming due.
What the 1990s also held, under the swing, was a club that could not quite finish. Randy Johnson, Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner, Alex Rodriguez for a stretch — talent stacked in the Kingdome and then in the new park, and still no pennant. Safeco Field opened in July 1999. People called it the house he built. He played there one partial season and then asked out. The 1995 Championship Series loss to Cleveland, in six games, is the closest the file comes to a ring. He hit .391 in that series and it was not enough. The country remembers the slide. The empty October after that is the honest rest of the trophy case.
The Cincinnati years are the chapter Seattle fans treat as a wound and Cincinnati fans treat as a homecoming the body would not honor. He missed huge pieces of 2002, 2003, and 2004. In 2005 he hit 35 home runs and won the Comeback Player award, a civic object that also reads as an apology from the calendar. At the 2008 trade deadline Cincinnati sent him to the Chicago White Sox. He threw a runner out at the plate in the one-game playoff against Minnesota. Chicago lost the Division Series to Tampa Bay. On June 2, 2010, he drove toward Orlando and retired by telephone so he would not become a distraction in the clubhouse. He was forty. The last box score is not the point. The point is that he left the room before the room had to ask.
That is the turn, and it is easy to miss because the public remembers the cap, not a trade request. He was a ten-and-five man. He could refuse a deal. He refused the money that would have kept him in Seattle and asked for Cincinnati. On February 10, 2000, the Mariners sent him home for Mike Cameron, Brett Tomko, and two young arms. He signed nine years and $112.5 million and said he was finally home. The first Reds season was 40 home runs and a hamstring he played through. After that the file is a list of parts: patella, ankle, shoulder, hamstrings again. He won a Comeback Player award in 2005. He did not win a pennant. In 2008 the Reds sent him to the White Sox at the deadline. He threw a man out at the plate in a one-game playoff. Chicago lost the Division Series. He went back to Seattle for 2009 and 2010 because Willie Mays and his daughter Taryn told him that was how a story should end. On June 2, 2010, he drove to Orlando and retired. He was forty. He said he would not become a distraction.
Six things most people never knew
- He shares a birthday and a town with Stan Musial. Donora, November 21. Forty-nine years apart. Two swings from the same riverbank.
- The Mariners’ psych test said no. He posted the worst score the club had seen. A scout re-gave it at the kitchen table so they would still take him first.
- At seventeen he tried to die. January 1988. Hundreds of aspirin. An ICU in Ohio. He put the fact in the papers himself so it would not stay a rumor.
- He could not eat his own candy bar. Chocolate allergy. Seattle sold them anyway, by the hundreds of thousands.
- Jackie Robinson Day as a league habit started with his request. In 2007 he asked Bud Selig, and Rachel Robinson, for leave to wear 42. Selig opened the number to everyone.
- There is no World Series ring. Six hundred thirty home runs. The 1995 slide. Ten Gold Gloves. No ring. That is the honest trophy case.
He married Melissa Gay, a Seattle woman, in 1992 in Kirkland. Their children are Trey, Taryn, and Tevin, the last of them adopted, all three carrying the same initials. Senior remained the weather in the family: the man Junior had wanted to please, fight, and play beside. Craig came through the minors. Colleagues in Seattle — Randy Johnson, Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner, then Ichiro Suzuki on the return — learned that the smile was real and that criticism landed like a spike. He did not forget slights. When he came back to Seattle as a visitor in 2007, in a Reds uniform, Safeco stood for four minutes. He nearly could not finish the speech.
The later years
Cooperstown called on the first ballot. On January 6, 2016, he received 99.32 percent of the vote, 437 of 440, a record that broke Tom Seaver’s mark and stood until Mariano Rivera and then Derek Jeter posted their own numbers. A flag with 24 went up the Space Needle the morning the vote landed. The induction at Cooperstown that July was a family afternoon: Senior in the room, the kids in the room, a speech that thanked Birdie and the Mariners and did not pretend Cincinnati had been a simple joy. The Mariners retired 24. The Reds put him in their hall as well. He took a job as a special consultant in the Seattle front office: drafts, kids, the version of the sport that still thinks a center fielder can look like joy.
Home has been Florida more often than the Northwest — Orlando weather, the same direction he drove the day he quit. He flies his own plane. He takes photographs. He sits in college stands for Trey’s football at Arizona and Taryn’s basketball. Trey had a brief turn in the Mariners’ minor-league system; the name is a weight a son has to decide whether to carry. Harold Reynolds, who once sat him down in Toronto and told him to have fun again, has said the home runs were never the first ambition. The first ambition was to be a father the way Senior had been a father — present, in the building, after the last out. He appears at spring training, at the All-Star Game, on MLB Network, anywhere a franchise needs the swing explained to a child who only knows the video-game version. Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball on the Super Nintendo is how a generation learned his stance. He lets them keep it.
He is in his fifties. The swing still appears in rec-league imitations that do not come close. He has been a face for the draft, for suicide-prevention talks that treat the aspirin night as a fact a boy should hear, and for the Mariners’ claim that a last-place club can invent a city. He does not owe anyone a World Series correction. He owes the next kid in a too-big cap a look at the work. He lets them try.
The Mariners still bring him north for first pitches and draft tables. Cincinnati still claims the hometown chapter, injuries and all. Cooperstown still has the plaque with the swing that did not look like effort. He does not live in any of those rooms full time. He lives in the Florida house, flies the plane, and shows up when the franchise needs the face that invented a city. That is the job after the last box score.
After the spotlight moved
It has not fully moved. Every June some child in a too-big cap turns it around. Every October in the Northwest someone runs the 1995 clip. The Kingdome is gone. The bricks behind the new park still say the house belonged to him. Cincinnati kept the hometown chapter, injuries and all. Cooperstown kept the plaque. The Yankees never got him. He had decided that in a corridor when he was a boy, and he kept the decision.
He came out of Donora and Cincinnati, went first in the draft so his father would see it, jumped a wall in the Bronx, slid home in 1995, left the city he had saved, broke in the town he loved, and still finished with 630 and a plaque almost nobody could refuse. If you only remember the backwards cap, you have the still. If you remember the aspirin, the father in left field, the empty Series column, and the four-minute standing ovation on the way back through town, you have him.
Portrait: Unknown · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons