The Seattle Pilots: The MLB Team That Lasted Only One Season

On October second, nineteen sixty nine, major League Baseball team, the Seattle Pilots, play their last game in Seattle inaugural season as an expansion team. Not only did they struggle on the field, they struggled in the financial and political world. That caused the Seattle to lose their team after just one year, and they would have to wait another eight years before getting another team in Seattle. We're going to dive into how a team lasted only one year before having to relocate today on Daily Sports History. Welcome to Daily Sports History. I'm eating your guide as you daily go through sports history to increase your sports knowledge. And today's trivia question to listen out for is what team would the Seattle Pilots become after relocating After nineteen fifty eight when the Giants and Dodgers moved to California, really opening up Major League Baseball's reach across the country and allowing the West Coast to be an option for many teams. Seattle seemed prime to get their very own team, as they had had successful minor league teams there that played in the Pacific League in the Seattle Rainiers, who had been playing there on and off since nineteen oh three, and at the time, Seattle was the third largest city in the West Coast, and they actually got courted by multiple teams as the Cleveland Indians considered moving in nineteen sixty four to Seattle to try to strong arm Cleveland into a new stadium, and the Kansas City Athletics were doing the same thing looking for their best option, but ended up in Oakland instead of Seattle. So after losing out against possible relocating teams, Seattle looked to push for an expansion team and they put together a financial group known as the Pacific Northwest Sports, Inc. Led by Dewey Soriano, who was a former Seattle Rainiers pitcher and general manager and was the president of the Pacific Coast League, so he had his hands in baseball as well as being a successful businessman. But to have a team you need a lot of cash, and he added a lot of local businesses they had to partner with in order to raise the money for the expansion fee, and originally Pritchard League Baseball wasn't going to expand until nineteen seventy one. However, the ownership group put pressure with the support of Senator Stuart Sigmington of Missouri as the Athletics have left, and he didn't want Kansas City to be without a team, so he helped push up the expansion and that year in nineteen sixty nine, the American League got the Kansas City Royals and the Seattle Pilots, and the National League got the Montreal Expos and the San Diego Padres. But the problem was that Seattle was struggling for a stadium. They had the stadium known as Sixth Stadium, where the Seattle Rainiers had played, but in getting a new team, they had sold the Rainiers to the Boston Red Sox but had to pay the Pacific Coast Leafs a million dollars due to the loss of a standing team. But a year before, the County of Seattle had voted to put together a dome stadium that would become the Kingdome, and so they thought they were all set and they told the MLB they could increase the Sixth Stadium from being about eleven thousand, and they actually increased it to eighteen thousand before the season started, and by mid season they were able to get it to twenty five thousand seats. But this wasn't a permanent structure and it didn't have the facility it needed, as if there was more than ten thousand fans in attendance, the toilets would back up, so they needed a new stadium, but that wasn't the worry at the time. Time they needed a good team on the field, and they actually did okay. They won three out of their first four games, but they struggled throughout the season as they didn't have a whole lot of star power on their team, and they finished with the record of sixty four and ninety eight, thirty three games behind the division leader, and only the Cleveland Indians had a worse record in the American League, but they did do better than the National League expansion teams, the Montreal Expots and the San Diego Padres both lost one hundred and ten games, But that was okay, as many expansion teams struggle their first year and it takes a few years to have a minor league system and have your players developed to have a good team. That's very common for expansion teams, but that's not why they only last one season. It was due to the stadium and the city new as if they finished as the Pilots finished with six hundred and seventy seven thousand people in attendance that season, which was twentieth out of the twenty four Major League teams. And that first season, the Pilots actually lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the new stadium that was supposed to be built had a petition going up to halt the project, as it was going to be built on where the Worldfair was held and they wanted that to be preserved, so they had to find a new location for the stadium, which would put back a new stadium even further. And the ownership group was struggling financially, and that year during the season, major League Baseball was already worried, and by June they already had it talks to possibly move the team to Milwaukee, and during the off season, the ownership group met with a car salesman, Bud Selig, who had been working to bring a team to Milwaukee ever since the Braves had moved. They met in secret for over a month, and during Game one of the World Series in nineteen sixty nine, Soriano agreed to sell the Pilots to bud Selig and his group for ten point eight million dollars. And though there were some local business owners in the Seattle area that quickly tried to jump in and try to help buy out Soriano and take some of his stake, although they didn't quite have enough money to match what bud Celik has as that they would have to have alone as a part of it, and even in January nineteen ten, twenty nine, a nonprofit group put together an organizational structure like the Green Bay Packers, where there would be no owner and it would be more of the city owned the team, but the American League rejected that idea and the team, the Seattle Pilots, actually declared bankruptcy just seven days before the start of the nineteen seventy season, clearing the way for them to move to Milwaukee, where they actually had the equipment drivers waiting in Utah to decide whether they were going to Seattle or Milwaukee. And when they arrived in Milwaukee, they changed their name to the Brewers and became a mainstay in baseball to this day. But luckily, just eight years later, after the Kingdome was finally built, Seattle was able to get a new team in the Seattle Mariners, who have been beloved by the city ever since. And if you want to learn more about baseball history, check out This Day in Baseball, a daily baseball history podcast where your host Tom goes through all that happened this day in baseball history. We'll put a link in the description below for you to check it out. And if you liked this episode, make sure you share it with a friend so they can learn all about the sports history that you just learned. And come back tomorrow for more daily sports history and the answer to today's trivia question, what team would the Seattle Pilots become after relocating? And the answer is the Seattle Pilots became the Milwaukee Brewers.