SEATTLE – The scrum in right field three hours before Wednesday’s game wasn’t unusual. It was just another day of pre-game stretching until manager Don Wakamatsu came up and broke the news.

    Ken Griffey Jr. was retiring.

    It was not exactly unexpected, given the fact that Griffey was hardly playing anymore and his stats – including a .184 batting average and no homers – were a far cry even from 2009, which had been his previous statistical low-water mark.

    But the suddenness of it all was apparent – manager Don Wakamatsu had Griffey on his list of reserves for the game in his initial lineup card.

    “It was so surprising. I don’t know how to express my feelings,’’ right fielder Ichiro Suzuki said through an interpreter. “That was hard. And then when you get on the field in the game, I couldn’t forget Junior wasn’t there.’’

    Second baseman Chone Figgins said no one in a Mariner uniform should forget what it’s meant to play with Griffey, who is fifth on the all-time homer charts with 630 and who was a 10-time Gold Glove winner in center field.

    “Today was hard,’’ Figgins said. “But we all got a chance to play with not just a great player but one of the greatest players ever. And no one in here should ever forget it. Growing up, you just can’t imagine it.

    “It’s like winning the lottery of baseball. It’s like Willie Mays came back to play with you.’’

    Griffey, like Mays, in fact because of Mays, wore the number 24. And the Mariners put the number 24 on the field before Wednesday’s game with the Twins as a way of honoring Griffey. And the honor didn’t end there.

    Ichiro hit a 10^th-inning grounder that second baseman Matt Tolbert was able to smother on top of the “4.’’ His throw to shortstop J.J. Hardy was too late to get Mariner runner Josh Wilson coming from first base, and that enabled pinch runner Ryan Langerhans, who never stopped running, to score from second base as the Mariners scored a 2-1 win, the first extra-inning win of the season for Seattle.

    “Everybody here wanted to win this one for Junior, to honor him,’’ left fielder Milton Bradley said. “There were a lot of emotions tied up in this game.’’

    Griffey spent most of the day on the phone with his agent, Brian Goldberg, with Seattle club president Chuck Armstrong and with team CEO Howard Lincoln. The Mariner front office didn’t believe things would happen as quick as they did, but once Griffey had made up his mind, that was that.

    Manager Don Wakamatsu didn’t find out that Griffey wasn’t going to play again until just about 20 minutes before the club’s pre-game stretch.

    But things had been building toward this moment for a while now. A career .284 hitter and the owner of 1,836 RBIs, Griffey’s final year was 100 points worse – .184 with just seven RBIs in 98 at-bats. That level of performance – down from last year’s 57 RBIs, 19 homers and a .214 average – was bad enough.

    Things only got worse, however with the story in mid-May quoting two of his teammates about how he had been sleeping in the clubhouse during a game – an allegation that made him bristle and got all of his teammates’ hackles up.

    “You can question my batting average, my home runs or my RBIs,’’ he said recently. “You can’t question my baseball integrity.’’’

    That incident didn’t force Griffey’s hand, though. It was his relegation to an afterthought on the Seattle bench that did him in.

    At his peak, which lasted the decade of the 1990s, Griffey was as good as or better than anybody in the game. If you needed a wall-climbing catch, a walkoff grand slam or a game winning sprint from first to home in the playoffs, Griffey was your guy.

    He was never able to adjust to being just another player. That’s essentially what he was in 2009, but he played most days anyway, and he helped transform a toxic clubhouse into a place players were raving about. And the Mariners won 85 games. He and Ichiro Suzuki were carried around Safeco Field on the shoulders of their teammates on the final day of the season, a testimony to how much had changed since a 101-loss season in 2008.

     In 2010, however, Griffey wasn’t even just another player. He was an aging one-time superstar who commanding loud and raucous ovations at Safeco Field but who couldn’t get around on a fastball anymore. Mike Sweeney, who at one stretch had six homers in 10 games, got more and more of the time as the designated hitter, and when it wasn’t Sweeney, it was Bradley.

    Bradley was crying during one interview after the game. Griffey had been his favorite player growing up, and he didn’t want to believe Griffey would retire.

    “A little birdie told me something a couple of days ago,’’ Bradley said, “but I didn’t want to believe it.’’

    Ichiro, the Mariners’ superstar of this century much in the way that Griffey was the club’s superstar of the last, said it was important for everyone in the Seattle clubhouse to win this one for the retiring Griffey.

    “He’s a superstar, and not just because of his numbers and his stats,’’ Ichiro said, “but because of his personality. He was about caring for each other. It’s something we all need to learn from him, and it’s what makes him better than a superstar.’’

    Griffey had made just one start since May 18, and while manager Don Wakamatsu was apologetic about that, the manager was putting what he felt was his best lineup forward each time, and Griffey simply wasn’t part of that.

    And that was too much to take.

    “While I feel I am still able to make a contribution on the field, and nobody in the Mariners front office has asked me to retire, I told the Mariners when I met with them prior to the 2009 season and was invited back, that I will never allow myself to become a distraction,’’ Griffey said in his statement. “I feel that without enough occasional starts to be sharper coming off the bench, my continued presence as a player would be an unfair distraction to my teammates, and their success as team is what the ultimate goal should be.’’

    In the end, Griffey’s decision took some pressure off the Mariner front office. He told them it was over, which meant they didn’t have to think about whether or not to tell him it was over. If the Mariners had prodded Griffey to leave, there would be bad blood between them and the best player ever to wear the Seattle colors.

    And Griffey was not just an icon, he was the reason baseball still exists in Seattle. The Seattle Pilots played one year in the American League in 1969, then got 11^th-houred to Milwaukee by a local car salesman named Bud Selig. Seattle got a second chance at the big leagues with the introduction of the Mariners in 1977, but for the next decade, the club was a joke. That ended in 1987 when Seattle made Griffey the first pick in the draft.

    Two years later he was in Seattle, and while it took a while, he was the cornerstone around which a solid team was built, with everything coming together with the 1993 hiring of manager Lou Piniella. Under Piniella, Griffey, Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner, Tino Martinez and Randy Johnson the Mariners coalesced in 1995, the same year as the Mariners’ home, the Kingdome, was being considered for replacement.

    “Junior was one of the finest young men I’ve ever had the opportunity to manage,’’ Piniella said Wednesday from Pittsburgh, where his Cubs were playing a night game. “When we were in Seattle together, I believe he was the best player in baseball, and it was truly an honor to be his manager.’’

    Seattle fans loved Griffey, too, but they at first said no, thanks, to a new stadium. But then the Mariners went out and made up a 13-game deficit to the California Angels, to force a regular-season tie for the AL West title. Seattle became a baseball town during that September and October, and Safeco Field was cleared to be built.

    “The way they say Babe Ruth built Yankee Stadium, Junior built Safeco Field,’’ Armstrong said. “I appreciate Ken having come back to play here the way he did (in 2009). He started Safeco. We might not be talking (on the field at Safeco) without Ken.’’

    Indeed, the Mariners might have been moved – Tampa was a prime candidate – without a new ballpark. So Griffey is rightfully credited with keeping baseball in Seattle.

    What the Mariners did in 2009 was to bring Griffey back. But there was no way long term to keep Griffey in Seattle – not and win games, anyway.

    In the end, Griffey said in his parting statement that he owed it to his teammates to not be any kind of distraction.

    “My hope is that my teammates can focus on baseball and win a championship for themselves and for the great fans of Seattle, who so very much deserve one,’’ Griffey’s statement read.

    The Mariners had a brief ceremony on short notice before the game to celebrate Griffey’s career, and then took a break 4½ innings into their game with the Twins to have another. It’s likely that a full-blown celebration will be added to the schedule later this summer.

 

John Hickey is a National Baseball Writer for AOL FanHouse (www.fanhouse.com); follow him on Twitter: @JHickey3