Sweet Lou's Baadassss Swan Song

Break out the gold watch for former Seattle Mariners manager Lou Piniella announced this week that he will retire at the end of the 2010 season.

Baseball fans -- and particularly the Wrigley Field faithful -- saw the end coming. The Chicago Cubs are 11 games out of first place in the competitive National League Central Division. Frustrated by four years of underachieving, Piniella said, "I don't want to lose. I don't think that anybody does. But what am I going to do, jump off the Hancock Building?"

If Piniella were a Genesee Park dog, he'd be a fiesty Dog de Bourdeaux (aka French Mastiff) popularized by Turner and Hooch, the 1989 comedy that Tom Hanks would prefer that you forgot. Piniella as a Genesee Park dog would be the large, sturdy, imposing and quick-tempered yard dog You'd never know whether his bark outmatched his bite.

Seattle denizens are well aware with Piniella's successes and disappointments. In 1993, Piniella took a team that lost 98 games the year before and transformed them into a .500 ball club -- the first winning season for the Mariners. Two years later, Piniella sat at the helm of the "Refuse to Lose" team that defeated the California Angels in a one-game playoff for the American League (AL) Worst division, and spanked the Damn Yankees by winning three-straight contests in the five-game divisional series. We didn't seem to mind that the Refuse-to-Lose group lost the AL title to the Cleveland Indians -- the home team gave us more than we could have expected.

Then, the Piniella-led teams were crushed by the Great Expectations created by a roster of future Baseball Hall of Famers (HOF) (Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Alex Rodriguez, Ichiro Suzuki) and serious HOF contenders (Edgar Martinez and Jamie Moyer). The Mariners' Attempted Murderers' Row -- Griffey, Edgar, A-Rod and Jay Buhner -- batted .203 (a humiliating 13-for-64) against Baltimore Orioles pitching in the 1997 divisional playoffs. The Mariners were lucky not to have been swept in the four-game series. The Y2K Mariners lost to the Damn Yankees four-games-to-two in the 2000 league championship.

And then there was the 2001 team that provided the bitterest pill to swallow. Eight Mariners (Ichiro, Garcia, Edgar, Brett Boone, John Olerud, Mike Cameron, Jeff Nelson and Kazuhiro Sasaki) made the AL All-Star roster at mid-season game at Safeco Field. Seattle won a major-league record 116 games during the regular season. And then the team faced the nemesis of post-season competition. Could you smell the destiny in the air? The club of destiny needed five teams to dispense with the Cleveland Indians... and then folded to the Damn Yankees in five games in the league championship.

Piniella stuck around for one more season. And the Mariners never returned to post-season play.

We wish you well, Lou in your "retirement", although one wonders whether you are really through with baseball. We appreciated the good times. You won a World Series title for Hitler admirer Marge Schott... we wish you could have taken us to one Fall Classic.