Ken Griffey Jr.
George Kenneth Griffey Jr., nicknamed "Junior" and "the Kid", is an American former professional baseball outfielder who played 22 years in Major League Baseball. He spent most of his career with the Seattle Mariners and Cincinnati Reds, along with a short stint with the Chicago White Sox. The first overall pick in the 1987 draft and a 13-time All-Star, Griffey is widely considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time. His 630 home runs rank as the seventh-most in MLB history. Griffey was also an exceptional defender and won 10 Gold Glove Awards in center field. He is tied for the record of most consecutive games with a home run.
Griffey signed lucrative deals with companies of international prominence like Nike and Nintendo; his popularity reflected well upon MLB and is credited by some with helping restore its image after the 1994 labor dispute. Griffey is one of only 31 players in baseball history to have appeared in major league games in four different calendar decades.
Following his playing career, Griffey joined the Mariners' front office as a special consultant. He was inducted into both the Mariners Hall of Fame and the Reds Hall of Fame. In 2016, Griffey was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, receiving 99.32% of the vote, breaking pitcher Tom Seaver's record of 98.84%, a record that had stood for 24 years.
Griffey is the son of former MLB player Ken Griffey Sr. and the father of former football player Trey Griffey.
Early life
Griffey was born in Donora, Pennsylvania, on November 21, 1969. His family moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, as his father, Ken Griffey Sr., made his MLB debut on August 25, 1973 for the Cincinnati Reds. Griffey Jr. was only three years old at the time. He was in the clubhouse during his father's back-to-back championships in the 1975 and 1976 World Series. When Griffey was a young child, his father instilled in him the pride of a team accomplishment rather than the individual performance: "My dad would have bopped me on the head when I was a kid if I came home bragging about what I did on the field. He only wanted to know what the team did." An incident during his father's tenure with the New York Yankees, where Griffey Jr. was told to leave the dugout while sitting with his father, while a white player's son was allowed to practice on the field, would lead to Griffey Jr. refusing to contemplate signing with the Yankees during his career.Griffey attended Archbishop Moeller High School in Cincinnati, the same high school as his future teammate Barry Larkin, where he was the U.S. high school baseball player of the year in 1987. He hit.478 with 17 home runs in his two seasons of high school baseball. Griffey also played football as a wide receiver and received scholarship offers to play college football for such programs as Oklahoma and Michigan.
Professional career
Draft and minor leagues
The Seattle Mariners selected Griffey with the first overall selection of the 1987 Major League Baseball draft, held on June 2, 1987. He received a signing bonus of $160,000. On June 11, 1987, Griffey joined the Bellingham Mariners of the Class A short season Northwest League. He made his professional debut on June 16 and hit his first professional home run the following day against the Everett Giants at Everett Memorial Stadium. A bronze plaque was installed at the approximate site of the ball's landing spot— from home plate. In 54 games with Bellingham, he hit.313 with 14 home runs, 40 runs batted in, and 13 steals. Baseball America magazine named him the Northwest League's best prospect.In 1988, Griffey joined the San Bernardino Spirit of the High-A California League. During his 58 games, Griffey batted.338, hit 11 home runs, drove in 42 runs, and stole 32 bases. Late in the season, Griffey was promoted to the Vermont Mariners of the Double-A Eastern League. He played the final 17 games with the club, hitting.279 with two home runs and 10 RBI. Griffey had a total of 129 games in his two seasons in the minor leagues, earning 103 total runs and 27 total home runs.
Seattle Mariners (1989–1999)
In his first 11 seasons with Seattle, Griffey established himself as one of the most prolific and exciting players of the era, racking up 1,752 hits, 398 home runs, 1,152 RBI, and 167 stolen bases. He led the American League in home runs for four seasons, was voted the A.L. MVP in 1997, and batted.297.Griffey's defense in center field was widely considered the standard of elite fielding during the decade, exemplified by his streak of 10 consecutive Gold Gloves from 1990 to 1999. His impressive range allowed frequent spectacular diving plays, and he often dazzled fans with over-the-shoulder basket catches and robbed opposing hitters of home runs by leaping up and pulling them back into the field of play. He was a frequent participant in the All-Star Game with the Mariners and led the American League multiple times in different hitting categories. He was featured on the Wheaties cereal box and had his own signature sneaker line from Nike.
On April 3, 1989, in his first MLB plate appearance, Griffey hit a line-drive double off Oakland Athletics pitcher Dave Stewart at the Oakland Coliseum. One week later in his first at-bat at the Kingdome, Griffey hit his first major league home run. Entering the majors, Griffey was a highly touted prospect. In 1989, he was the #1 card in Upper Deck's first set of baseball cards, with his card becoming one of the most popular cards of its era. He also licensed a chocolate bar in 1989 in Seattle that sold more than 1 million bars in its first year.
In 1990 and 1991, Griffey and his father became the first son and father to play on the same team at the same time. In his father's first game as a Mariner, on August 31, 1990, the pair hit back-to-back singles in the first inning and both scored. On September 14, the pair hit back-to-back home runs in the top of the first off California Angels pitcher Kirk McCaskill, becoming the first father-son duo to hit back-to-back home runs. On September 21, Ken Griffey Jr. stole a fly ball hit by Sammy Sosa from his father, who was playing left field, for the third out of the inning. Then-20 year old Griffey Jr. was subsequently grounded by his father in the dugout after the play for going inside the former's previously established "three square feet territory" in left field for fly balls and had his car keys confiscated. The duo played a total of 51 games together before Griffey Sr. retired in June 1991.
At the MLB Home Run Derby in 1993, held at Oriole Park in Baltimore, Griffey hit the warehouse beyond the right-field wall on the fly and he is still the only player ever to do so. As with every home run that hits Eutaw Street, each feat is honored with a circular plaque, embedded in the concourse's walkway, in the exact spot where the ball landed. In 1994, he led the league in All-Star voting. That season, which ended prematurely in August due to the players' strike, Griffey hit 30 home runs in the Mariners' first 65 games. He had four multi-home run games that year. Although his pace cooled somewhat in the final eight weeks of the season, his 40 home runs by August 12 led the American League, two ahead of Chicago's Frank Thomas and four ahead of Cleveland's Albert Belle.
One of the most memorable moments of Griffey's career with the Mariners came during the 1995 American League Division Series against the New York Yankees. After losing the first two games, the Mariners and Griffey were on the verge of elimination, but came back to win the next two games, setting up a decisive fifth game. In the bottom of the 11th inning of Game 5, with Griffey on first base, teammate Edgar Martínez hit a double. Griffey raced around the bases, slid into home with the winning run, and popped up into the waiting arms of the entire team. The 1995 ALDS kicked off a brief rivalry between the Yankees and Mariners. Griffey may have escalated it by saying that he would never play for the Yankees, because the Yankees allegedly treated his father, Ken Griffey Sr. badly. Also, when Griffey was a kid visiting his dad in the Yankee clubhouse, Yankee manager Billy Martin would, believing that children did not belong in the clubhouse, kick him out. Although the Mariners subsequently lost the ALCS to the Cleveland Indians, The Double and Griffey's run remains one of the most memorable events in Mariners history, capping a season that "saved baseball in Seattle", Seattle's improbable late-season playoff run that year, spurred by Griffey's return from injury, led to the construction of Safeco Field and the future security of a franchise rumored for years to be on the move. The play also inspired the title of the video game Ken Griffey Jr.'s Winning Run for the Super Nintendo.
In 1997, Griffey led the Mariners to the AL West title and captured the American League Most Valuable Player Award, hitting.304 with 56 home runs and 147 RBI during 157 games. On April 15, 1997, Griffey wore the number 42, which led to an MLB tradition started in 1999 known as Jackie Robinson Day. The next season, 1998, was a season which was followed closely by the national media as both Griffey and Mark McGwire entered the summer ahead of the pace of Roger Maris' home run record of 61. Despite Griffey falling short, Major League Baseball put forth an effort to draw a new set of young fans and regain those disenchanted by the 1994 strike focused on McGwire, Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa, and Griffey's pursuit of Maris' record. Griffey, however, fell out of the spotlight due to some nagging injuries and was surpassed by McGwire and Sosa, who both broke the record set by Maris. Despite falling out of the record chase, Griffey nearly duplicated his 1997 statistics, finishing with a.284 average, 56 home runs and 146 RBI in 161 games.
In 1999, he ranked 93rd on The Sporting News' list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players. This list was compiled during the 1998 season, counting only statistics through 1997. At age 29, he was the youngest player on the list. That year, Griffey was elected to the MLB All-Century Team. However, when TSN updated their list for a new book in 2005, despite having surpassed 400 and 500 home runs, Griffey remained at Number 93.
While with Seattle, Griffey was a 10-time American League Gold Glove winner, the 1992 All-Star Game MVP, 1997 AL MVP, 1998 ESPY co-winner for Male Athlete of the Year, 1999 Players Choice Awards Player of the Decade, and was named to the All-Century team in 1999.