Seattle Rainiers

Northwest League (1972-1976)

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Sick's Stadium T-Shirt

Sick’s Stadium, opened in 1938, took its name from Emil Sick, the owner of Seattle’s Rainier Brewing Company. For decades, the ballpark hosted the Class AAA Seattle Rainiers, named for the brewery. Emil Sick passed away in 1964, five years before his eponymous ballpark served its only and only season as a Major League stadium. MLB’s doomed Seattle Pilots played their one and only season at Sick’s Stadium in 1969. 

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Background

The original Seattle Rainiers were a popular Class AAA pro baseball outfit that won five Pacific Coast League between 1938 and 1964. The club took its name and logo from team owner Emil Sick’s Rainier Brewing Company. Sick’s own name adorned the Rainiers’ ballpark – the 11,000 seat Sick’s Stadium in the Rainier Valley district of the city. Sick sold the Rainiers in 1960 and passed away in 1964.

The California Angels of Major League Baseball acquired the club and re-branded it as the Seattle Angels in 1965. In February of 1968, Seattle and King County voters approved a $40 million bond issue to build a domed multi-purpose stadium. The referendum paved the way for the arrival of a Major League Baseball expansion franchise, the Seattle Pilots, in 1969 and displaced the Pacific Coast League club.  The Pilots infamously went bankrupt after just one season, doomed in part by having to use decrepit Sick’s Stadium as a temporary home while the dome project took shape. The Pilots moved to Milwaukee in March 1970 to become the modern-day Milwaukee Brewers.

Rainers Redux

As the 1970’s dawned, Seattle was without pro baseball for the first time since the summer of 1900. In 1972, a California businessman named Art Peterson acquired a short-season minor league ball club for Seattle in the Class A Northwest League. Peterson revived the Rainiers name and logo from the PCL days and managed to land an advertising sponsorship with Rainier Brewing as well. Like the original Rainiers, the Northwest League club would play at Sick’s Stadium. In November of that same year, contractors finally broke ground on Seattle’s long-delayed domed stadium project.

The Rainiers played the 1972 season as a Co-Op club, drawing low level prospects from a few Major Leauge organizations. The 1972 Rainiers last in their division and no members of the team ever made it to the Majors.

In 1973 and 1974 the Rainiers served as a farm club of the Cincinnati Reds. Future Major Leaguers Manny Sarmiento (Rainiers ’73), Mike Armstrong (Rainiers ’74) and Lynn Jones (Rainiers ’74) played for Seattle during the two-year affiliation with Cincinnati.

The Reds did not renew the partnership and the Rainiers operated as an independent club in 1975 and 1976. As in 1972, no players from the 1975 and 1976 independent clubs ever advanced to the Majors.

Demise & Epilogue

The 59,000-seat Kingdome opened in March 1976, initially as the home of Seattle’s NFL expansion franchise, the Seahawks, and NASL soccer team, the Sounders. But Major League Baseball was on the way for the spring of 1977. The Seattle Mariners were granted as settlement of a breach of contract lawsuit filed by Seattle, King County and the State of Washington against the American League over the move of the Seattle Pilots to Milwaukee. Heading into their final season of play in 1976, the Rainiers knew they would be displaced by the Mariners. The team’s souvenir program acknowledged that “1976 will probably be the final year of minor league baseball in Sicks’ Seattle Stadium.”

The 1972-1976 Seattle Rainiers were, indeed, the last team to play at Sicks’ Stadium. The 38-year old park closed after the 1976 season and was demolished in 1979. A Lowe’s Home Improvement store sits on the site of the old park today.

Pitcher Manny Sarmiento made 36 appearances for the Rainiers as a 17-year old teenager in 1973. One of three Northwest League Rainiers to ever appear in the Majors, he was the only one to return to Seattle to pitch for the Mariners. He made 9 appearances for the M’s during the summer of 1980.

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Pitchers of Beer

The Story of the Seattle Rainiers

By Dan Raley

 

In 1937, when local beer baron Emil Sick stepped in, the Seattle Indians were a struggling minor-league baseball team teetering on collapse. Moved to mix baseball and beer by his good friend and fellow brewer, New York Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, Sick built a new stadium and turned the team into a civic treasure. The Rainiers (newly named after the beer) set attendance records and won Pacific Coast League titles in 1939, ’40, ’41, ’51, and ’55. 

 

Mixing traditional baseball lore with tales of mischief, Pitchers of Beer relates the twenty-seven-year history of the Rainiers, a history that captures the timeless appeal of baseball, along with the local moments and minutiae that bring the game home to each and every one of us. Pitchers of Beer showcases fifty-two photographs of players and memorabilia from noted Northwest baseball collector David Eskenazi.

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Links

“Author Goes To Bat For Team’s History“, Carrina Stanton, The Chronicle (Centralia, WA), July 21, 2016

Northwest League Media Guides

Northwest League Programs

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