Seattle Pilots

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The Seattle Pilots were an extremely short-lived AL expansion team (1969 only), immortalized in Jim Bouton's Ball Four, and transmuted into the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970.

The first major league game vortex of dissipation attended was this one (http://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/B05110SE11969.htm), when Don Mincher homered in the bottom of the ninth at Sicks Stadium to beat the Washington Senators. It was Bat Day - vortex still has his Gerry McNertney model Louisville Slugger.

External Links

• The Seattle Pilots Baseball Team (http://www.brandx.net/pilots/index.html) - a very good Pilots nostalgia site.
• The Seattle Pilots Story, by Carson Van Lindt (http://isbn.nu/0963259555) - 1993 book. Greg Franklin found it impersonal and badly written compared to Ball Four. It's a civic booster's portrayal of the Pilots, dominated by a monotonous (and lazy) chronology of hits struck and pitches thrown, as if cribbed from microfilm of the local newspapers. It doesn't substantively discuss the Pilots' troubles in Seattle or the personalities playing for and running the team. A photograph of a thirtysomething dark-haired Bud Selig is included in the book, and the pic looks nothing at all like the man currently the commissioner of baseball.