On This Day: October 8, 1995 — Edgar Martinez’s The Double

Thirteen days before the first pitch of Game 5, Seattle voters had rejected a sales tax increase to fund a new ballpark. The Mariners had an October 30 deadline to either secure public stadium money or go up for sale, likely to a buyer who would move the team out of state. Nobody in the Kingdome that night needed the backstory explained — 57,411 fans showed up anyway, and 78% of television sets in western Washington were tuned to the game. The franchise’s entire future rode on four innings of baseball nobody had asked them to play.

A Team That Almost Wasn’t There

The Mariners had posted exactly two winning seasons since joining the American League in 1977. Original owner Jeff Smulyan nearly sold the club to Florida investors in 1992 before a local ownership group, fronted by Nintendo chairman Hiroshi Yamauchi, bought the team to keep it in Seattle. That rescue bought three years, not a permanent fix. The Kingdome itself made the case against staying put: in July 1994, ceiling tiles tore loose and crashed 180 feet into the seats behind home plate, closing the building for repairs and forcing the Mariners onto a 22-day road trip just to keep playing. By September 1995, the Kingdome’s lease and the team’s finances were tangled up in the same unresolved question: who pays for a new stadium, and what happens if nobody does. Baseball as a whole was still climbing out of a hole, too — a labor dispute had wiped out the 1994 World Series entirely, and plenty of fans hadn’t come back yet.

Then the 1995 Mariners started winning anyway. On August 2, Seattle sat 13 games behind the California Angels in the AL West. “Refuse to Lose” became the unofficial team slogan as they reeled off comeback after comeback through August and September, caught the Angels on the final day of the regular season, and beat them in a one-game tiebreaker just to reach the playoffs. The underdog run was already a story before October started. Game 5 against the Yankees turned it into something the whole region couldn’t look away from.

The Kingdome, 1985 — Seattle’s concrete dome hosted the Mariners from 1977 until the team moved to Safeco Field in 1999.

Down Two Games to None, Then Back From the Brink

New York had won Games 1 and 2 at Yankee Stadium, including a 15-inning marathon that ran past 2 a.m. and left both bullpens gutted. Most best-of-five series end there. Seattle took Games 3 and 4 back home at the Kingdome — Edgar Martinez hit a grand slam in Game 4 alone, part of a series in which he batted over .500 with two doubles, two home runs, and eight RBIs. That forced a winner-take-all Game 5, pitting Yankees manager Buck Showalter against Mariners manager Lou Piniella with a trip to the ALCS on the line.

A Back-and-Forth Game That Wouldn’t End

Don Mattingly’s two-run double in the sixth put New York ahead 4-2, and for a while it looked like the Yankees would close it out quietly. Seattle tied it 4-4 in the eighth, and the game pushed into extra innings with both managers burning through their bullpens. Yankees starter-turned-reliever Jack McDowell came on in the ninth for an unusual relief appearance. In the top of the 11th, Randy Velarde singled home Mattingly off Mariners ace Randy Johnson, pitching in relief on short rest, and New York led 5-4. Three outs stood between the Yankees and the ALCS.

The Double

Joey Cora led off the bottom of the 11th and dragged a bunt down the first-base line for a single. Ken Griffey Jr. followed with a base hit to right-center, sending Cora to third. That brought up Edgar Martinez against a tiring McDowell. On a 1-1 pitch, Martinez lined a ball down the left field line. Cora scored easily. Griffey, running the moment contact was made, rounded third and dove headfirst across the plate just ahead of the throw. Mariners 6, Yankees 5. Series over.

Radio voice Dave Niehaus’s call is still replayed across Seattle sports media three decades later: “Here comes Joey! Here is Junior to third base… The throw to the plate will be… late! The Mariners are going to play for the American League Championship! I don’t believe it, it just continues! My oh my!” Television audiences got a different image burned into memory — Griffey disappearing under a dogpile of teammates at home plate, visible only as a pile of white jerseys.

“The Hit, the Run, the Game, the Series and the Season”

That’s how Piniella described it afterward, and the phrase stuck because it undersold nothing. The Mariners went on to lose the ALCS to Cleveland in six games, which matters less to the franchise’s history than what happened off the field. Public opinion on the stadium question flipped almost overnight. The Washington State Legislature called a special session that October and approved an alternative funding package for a new ballpark — the same deal voters had rejected weeks earlier suddenly had a political path forward once the team gave Seattle a reason to care.

Safeco Field opened in 1999. The Kingdome was imploded the following year, on March 26, 2000, in a demolition that still ranks among the largest building implosions in history by volume. Without Game 5, baseball executives and Seattle historians generally agree there’s a real chance the Mariners play somewhere else today — Tampa and northern Virginia were both floated as landing spots during the relocation talk of the early 1990s. The Mariners sold out Opening Day 1996 and kept selling out for most of the next decade, a complete reversal from a franchise that used to play in front of a half-empty Kingdome on a Tuesday night.

New York paid a price for the loss, too, though it worked out fine for them in the end. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner fired Buck Showalter within weeks of the Game 5 defeat and replaced him with Joe Torre, a move widely mocked in the New York tabloids at the time. Torre went on to win four World Series titles in his first five seasons. It’s a strange footnote to a game Seattle fans remember as pure triumph — the loss that ended one dynasty’s near-miss accidentally built another one three time zones away.

Where to See It Today

T-Mobile Park, the Mariners’ current home, has two bronze statues standing about a hundred feet apart outside the main gate. One is Griffey, frozen mid-follow-through on a home run swing. The other, unveiled in 2021, is Martinez — captured mid-swing from the exact at-bat that won Game 5, jersey number 11 facing the street that now bears his name, Edgar Martinez Drive.

Inside the ballpark, a mural by artist Thom Ross titled “The Defining Moment” depicts Griffey’s slide across home plate, part of the park’s permanent art collection. None of it exists in a vacuum — the statues, the street name, the mural — without one swing in the bottom of the 11th on a Sunday night in October. Walk the concourse on any given night and you’ll still see fans in jerseys with “11” or “24” on the back, three decades after both men retired, because this is the franchise’s origin story as much as any opening-day roster.

Why the Moment Still Gets Replayed

Dave Niehaus himself called it the signature moment of his 34-year broadcasting career when the Baseball Hall of Fame inducted him in 2008. Griffey, Martinez, Johnson, and Piniella are all now either in Cooperstown or on the franchise’s short list of all-time legends, and every one of their Hall of Fame tributes circles back to this single at-bat. When MLB Network ranked its 20 Greatest Games in 2011, this one landed at No. 15 — not bad for a franchise that didn’t have a single playoff appearance to its name before that October.

For a team that spent its first two decades fighting to stay relevant, let alone stay put, calling this a founding myth isn’t an exaggeration — it’s closer to a literal description, box score attached. It belongs in the same breath as the decade’s other defining baseball nights, from Mark McGwire’s 70th home run to George Brett’s Pine Tar Game a decade earlier. The difference is that nobody’s franchise depended on those games surviving the week.

Sources

• SABR Games Project: October 8, 1995 — Detailed box score account from the Society for American Baseball Research.
• The Double (Seattle Mariners) — Background on the stadium funding context and aftermath.
• SABR BioProject: Edgar Martinez — Career biography and 1995 season statistics.
• MLB.com: Mariners Unveil Statue of Edgar Martinez — Details on the 2021 statue unveiling outside T-Mobile Park.