2001 Seattle Mariners: The American League Championship Series

Baseball is haunted by the ghosts of the past in October. They whisper from beyond the outfield fences. They beckon to each player who digs in at the plate. They flit and float through every pitcher’s windup and delivery.

Every team in the postseason wants to join them. Every player yearns for their feats to echo in Octobers that follow. October baseball is the tension between the history that has already been made and the history that is brewing.

That tension was taut in the 2001 American League Championship Series, between an ongoing Yankees dynasty and the surprising Mariners, record-setting winners in the regular season. The teams had a playoff history with each other, meeting in the 1995 Division Series and the 2000 ALCS; the Mariners won the first, the Yankees the second.

The Yankees were in their 40th postseason as a franchise. They had 26 World Series trophies in their display case, representing over a quarter of the championships ever played. Two of those trophies were won in the two prior seasons, 1999 and 2000. They were imbued with the Yankee Mystique, a deep history that made Yankee Stadium in October a haunted house for their adversaries. Sportswriters and pundits gushed about how the Yankees became better, more formidable, nearly unbeatable in the postseason.

Mariners manager and former Yankees outfielder Lou Piniella agreed. The Yankee Mystique was “a big advantage. I know we felt that way when I played there.”1

Piniella was now at the helm of the Mariners, who had completed a once-in-a-lifetime season and were playing in only their fourth postseason. Over the previous three years they had lost future Hall of Famers Randy Johnson and Ken Griffey Jr. and young superstar Álex Rodríguez. Instead of faltering at the bottom of the standings in 2001, they began winning and didn’t stop, tallying 116 wins. It was an American League record that bested the 1998 Yankees’ mark of 114 wins and tied the 1906 Chicago Cubs for the most regular-season wins.

The 1998 Yankees won the World Series. But losing their respective World Series, the 1906 Cubs and the 111-win 1954 Cleveland Indians were the spectral shiver in every mention of the Mariners’ journey through October.

Formidable as baseball history may have been under any circumstances for the Mariners that year, the real world was another undeniable element in the 2001 postseason. The September 11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C. paused the major-league season for a week. Games began with patriotic songs and enhanced security measures, and baseball was tasked with helping heal the nation.

As the hometown playoff team for the city most affected, the Yankees became “America’s Team.” The Mariners found themselves staring down baseball history and the mystique that swirled perpetually around the Yankees, along with the grief that newly enveloped the entire country.

Game One: Wednesday, October 17
Yankees 4, Mariners 2
Safeco Field, Seattle

Of all the opponents – real and psychological – the Mariners battled in the 2001 playoffs, the most daunting may have been themselves.

They had come back to beat Cleveland in the Division Series, but the offense that led the major leagues during the regular season slashed only .247/.326/.373.2 Most concerning was Bret Boone, who led the American League in RBIs during the regular season. He reached base only three times against Cleveland while striking out 11 times and driving in no runs.

The faltering offense was bad news for Aaron Sele, the Mariners’ Game One starter. Sele pitched well during the regular season, winning 15 games. However, he had a history of playoff losses, particularly against New York; three of his four losses came at the hands of the Yankees, including the series-ending loss in Game Six of the 2000 ALCS. His playoff struggles were largely the result of his teams failing to score runs in his starts. Going into the 2001 ALCS, he had never had more than two runs of support in a playoff game.

The Mariners hoped to spark their offense against Yankees starter Andy Pettitte. During the regular season, they scored 15 runs (11 earned) against him in his two starts against them.

The series began in Seattle, in a two-year-old ballpark, away from the baseball ghosts that haunted old Yankee Stadium. But it must have felt as though the ghosts traveled with the Yankees, as the game unfolded with a bounce here and an inch there in favor of the team from the Bronx.

In the top of the second inning, Chuck Knoblauch hit a sharp groundball off of David Bell’s lunging glove at third base, bouncing into foul territory. Bell tripped over his spikes chasing it down, too late to prevent Jorge Posada from scoring the first run of the series.

Yankee luck struck again in the fourth inning when Posada tested Ichiro Suzuki’s arm on his base hit to deep right field. The throw beat Posada, but umpire Gary Cederstrom ruled that shortstop Carlos Guillén failed to apply the tag. In the next at-bat, Sele left a sinker over the plate to Paul O’Neill, who crushed it for a home run and gave the Yankees a 3-0 lead.3

The Yankees would score only once more, in the top of the ninth inning when catcher Dan Wilson called for a pitchout but couldn’t get a grip on the ball as Alfonso Soriano easily beat the throw to second base. David Justice drove him in.

The regular-season Mariners would have won this game easily. The postseason Mariners didn’t hit safely or score a run until the fifth inning, when Edgar Martínez scored on John Olerud’s groundout.

The Mariners mounted a comeback against Yankees closer Mariano Rivera in the bottom of the ninth inning. Ichiro smoked a one-out double. Then, in an uncharacteristic sequence from Rivera, Ichiro advanced to third on a wild pitch and scored on the very next pitch, also wild.

But that was all the Mariners got, and the Yankees captured the first game.

Game Two: Thursday, October 18
Yankees 3, Mariners 2
Safeco Field, Seattle

A ghost from the Mariners’ past came to haunt them in the flesh. Mike Mussina won two games and destroyed their postseason dreams in the 1997 Division Series with Baltimore. He started for the Yankees in Game Two and shut the Mariners down again.

The only Mariners runs in the game scored when Stan Javier launched a two-run home run in the bottom of the fourth inning. The Mariners were shut down for the rest of the game, unable to create a single scoring threat.

The Yankees, likewise, mounted few scoring threats. Their only runs scored in the top of the second inning. Mariners ace Freddy García, starting on three days’ rest for the third time in his career, yielded a leadoff single to Tino Martinez and then walked Posada. Scott Brosius took advantage of the opportunity, driving in both runners with a double. He scored when Knoblauch knocked a line-drive single to center field. Center fielder Mike Cameron thought he made a shoestring catch for the third out and did not throw home. However, the umpire – confirmed by replay – ruled that it hit the ground first.

Cameron redeemed himself in the top of the third, robbing Bernie Williams of a home run and saving two runs. But the bounces had gone New York’s way, and the Yankees again won a game the regular-season Mariners would have taken easily.

The Mariners were now down in the series 0-2 and heading to New York, the heart of the Yankee Mystique and the terror attacks.

Lou Piniella wasn’t about to entertain the idea that his team was falling apart, that they would crumble in the atmosphere at Yankee Stadium. He certainly wasn’t going to calmly field questions from reporters about being down 0-2.

He opened his postgame remarks snapping, “I want you all to hear this: We’re going to be back here to play Game Six. You don’t have to ask any questions. Just print it.”4

It was a bold statement. No team had ever come back to win a league championship series after losing the first two games at home. Piniella didn’t care.

“We’ve gone to New York and beaten this team five out of six, and we’re going to do it again.” He said he wasn’t impressed by the Yankees so far. “I haven’t seen anything so dominating over there. They’re a team ready to get beat if someone goes out and beats them. We have to start hitting the damn ball, and we’re fully capable of doing it.

“I’ve got confidence in my club.”5

Game Three: Saturday, October 20
Mariners 14, Yankees 3
Yankee Stadium, New York

The Mariners landed in New York at 6 A.M. the day after Game Two, catching their first glimpse of the transformed New York skyline without the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

Edgar Martínez arrived at his hotel room an hour later and found himself – possibly – in the middle of one of the post-9/11 subplots, the anthrax attacks through letters sent to news organizations and politicians. When he opened his hotel door, he found a letter. “It looked to me like the handwriting was similar to what they showed on TV on the anthrax letters,” Martínez wrote in his autobiography. “It had my name on it, which was odd, because I always use an alias when I check into a hotel on the road.”6

He called an MLB security agent, and the agent retrieved the letter, but Martínez never heard anything else about it. It was likely an ill-thought-out joke, but the incident underscored the fear and uncertainty everyone was feeling.

The first day in New York was an offday, and a handful of Mariners players went to look at the site of the World Trade Center attacks, Ground Zero. Dan Wilson and backup catcher Tom Lampkin went together. “To see the devastation, the barrenness of it, where the towers used to stand, is just … incredible,” Lampkin wrote of the visit in his postseason column for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. “Looking at the devastation, we felt a little bit of everything.”7

Meanwhile, the New York press was making hay out of Piniella’s promise that the series would return to Seattle. Headlines in newspapers across the country carried his guarantee, and many inches of newsprint contained mockery and analysis of the likelihood that the Mariners could rally from their deficit. Piniella would say later that his comments “got blown up here in I don’t know what type of proportion. If you say it in New York, it’s OK, but if you say it in other parts of the country they take it a little differently.”8

Piniella’s guarantee seemed prescient in Game Three. Under the spotlight of Yankee Stadium, it looked as though new baseball ghosts were soon to join the old stalwarts as the Mariners bats found their spark.

It began innocently enough. With the Yankees leading 2-0 on Bernie Williams’s first-inning home run, Lampkin hit a one-out single in the top of the fifth inning. Then, with two outs, Orlando Hernández loaded the bases with two walks and Bret Boone came to the plate. He’d had minor success in the series. After going 2-for-21 in the Division Series, he’d been 2-for-7 in the ALCS. That night, he broke out and made it count, driving in two runs with a single to left field.

Leading off the sixth inning with a home run, Olerud kept the offense going. Javier singled and stole second base while Cameron worked a walk. The night was over for Hernández. It was the worst postseason start of his career. The Yankees bullpen tried to shut down the suddenly potent Mariners offense. But Wilson reached on an error and Ichiro was intentionally walked for Mark McLemore, who promptly tripled. Boone capped the inning with a two-run home run, and the score stood 9-2, Mariners.

The Yankees scored one additional run off Mariners pitching. In the first two games of the series it would have been enough; that night it was not.

When the dust settled, the Mariners had demolished the Yankees, 14-3.

Game Four: Sunday, October 21
Yankees 3, Mariners 1
Yankee Stadium, New York

Before coming to New York, Piniella said the team would not make an official visit to Ground Zero.9 Confronting baseball ghosts was one thing, but seeing the devastation that had upended everything was another matter. However, on a visit to a Manhattan fire station before Game Three, he was asked to bring the team behind the scenes and agreed. Piniella was still popular in New York and felt he owed it to first responders to boost their spirits.

A group of about 30 players, families, coaches, and front-office personnel rode in police vans inside the secured perimeter and saw the part of Ground Zero that was unavailable to the public. It was a somber experience, but Piniella said later that he was glad they went. “We just went there basically to pay our respects and say thanks,” he said.10

The Mariners left Ground Zero for Yankee Stadium, and as the game unfolded, it seemed the team had a hard time shaking off the intensely emotional experience and focusing on the game.

Paul Abbott took the mound for the Mariners. His last start was nearly three weeks earlier, on October 2. In what can only be described as a weird game, he walked eight batters, and half the pitches he threw were balls. He also allowed no runs and left the game after the fifth inning with a no-hitter. He was wild, but he was effective.

In fact, pitchers on both sides were wild; the Mariners and Yankees combined for 15 walks, tying a League Championship Series record for walks in a single game.11

Yankees starter Roger Clemens also left after the fifth inning; his excuse was a sore hamstring. The easy offense the Mariners had the day before was missing in action. Clemens allowed one hit through his five innings. The sole Mariners run that day came on Bret Boone’s solo home run in the eighth inning. In the top of the ninth, the lifeless Mariners offense made nary an attempt against Mariano Rivera; he needed only three pitches to get through the middle of the order.

The Yankees tied the game in the bottom of the eighth, when Bernie Williams answered with a solo home run off Arthur Rhodes. After the game Rhodes shook his head. “It’s a popup in most ballparks.”12 Whether it was carried out by the wind or the gossamer mystique in the late October air, it struck again in the bottom of the ninth inning. With one out and one on, Alfonso Soriano sent a pitch from Mariners closer Kazuhiro Sasaki – making his first appearance of the series – out of Yankee Stadium for a walk-off win.

The Mariners were one game away from elimination for the second time in the 2001 postseason.

Game Five: Monday October 22
Yankees 12, Mariners 3
Yankee Stadium, New York

The final game of the series was a Game One rematch – Sele versus Pettitte. It began quietly enough, initially looking as though it might be a pitchers’ duel. But the Yankees cracked Sele in the bottom of the third inning. With two on, Derek Jeter hit a sacrifice fly. Justice followed with a double to right field to score another run, and Williams capped it with a two-run home run. And just like that, the Yankees had all the runs they needed.

That didn’t stop them from continuing to score, though. All night the Westminster chimes echoed in the Yankee Stadium air as Yankee spikes trod unremittingly across home plate. O’Neill launched a solo home run in the fourth inning. In the sixth, against Joel Piñeiro, the Yankees put four more runs on the board via five singles, two walks, and a wild pitch.

The Mariners finally crossed home plate and chased Pettitte – the series MVP – in the seventh inning when Bell and Ichiro drove in three runs with singles of their own. But they never threatened the Yankees’ lead. In a series that often felt as if a bounce here and a step there could have turned the series around for the Mariners, the Yankees broke Piniella’s promise to return to Seattle with a barrage of offense.

The capstone was a three-run home run in the bottom of the eighth inning. It was hit by former Mariner Tino Martinez, a piece of the Mariners’ past come back to haunt them.

And that was how Seattle’s magical 2001 season ended. Not with a whimper, but with a blitz of Westminster chimes.

The Mariners joined the 1906 Cubs and the 1954 Indians in the club of nearly unbeatable regular-season teams that were beaten in the postseason. They became another ghost in baseball history that served as a warning, rather than inspiration.

Though all the ghosts, the good and the bad, loomed large in October, October baseball was only a small part of the baseball season.

In the halcyon summer of 2001, the Mariners made history. They gave us all a magical summer.

Maybe the September 11 terrorist attacks ruined their momentum. Maybe the chill of autumn cooled their bats. Maybe the pressure and the sudden, intense national spotlight was simply too much for a team no one expected to win when the season began. Maybe it’s simply that the sprint of a postseason series is no match for the long and winding pace of the regular season.

The Mariners still made history. They still had a magical summer.

That dark night at Yankee Stadium in 2001 was the last postseason game the Mariners played for 21 years. In 2025 they earned another round in the ALCS, taking the Toronto Blue Jays to seven games. Through those seven games the ghosts of the 2001 Mariners flitted and floated. They echoed as a cautionary tale that even the best of seasons can meet a heartbreaking end, and they reverberated as a promise—a poignant reminder—that even in October gloom, the warm ghosts of a magical season cannot be extinguished.

AMANDA LANE CUMMING’s first act of rebellion was choosing to be a Mariners fan, despite her Boston-native father advocating for the Red Sox. Rather than dwell on whether this was a good choice, she began writing about the Mariners and local baseball history. A former staff writer for “Lookout Landing” and a 2021 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award finalist, she currently writes “NW Baseball History” (www.nwbaseballhistory.com), a newsletter devoted to baseball history in the Pacific Northwest.

 

SOURCES

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com, the New York Times and the New York Daily News, and watched all five of the games on YouTube.com.

 

NOTES

1 Les Carpenter, “The Play That Saved the Game for Yankees,” Seattle Times, October 19, 2001: D7.

2 The Mariners also led the major leagues in ERA but posted a 4.70 ERA in the ALDS. They were outscored 26-16 in the Division Series.

3 Bob Finnigan, “Yanked Back to Reality – Pettitte, N.Y. Serve Notice to M’s with Game 1 Win,” Seattle Times, October 18, 2001: D1.

4 Mike Vaccaro, “Mariners Comeback? Only in Lou’s Dreams,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 19, 2001: D5.

5 Larry Stone, “Smoldering Piniella Hopes His Words Fire Up M’s,” Seattle Times, October 19, 2001: D8.

6 Edgar Martinez and Larry Stone, Edgar: An Autobiography (Chicago: Triumph Books LLC, 2019), 273.

7 Tom Lampkin, “Sobering Visit to Ground Zero,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 20, 2001: C4.

8 Michael Morrissey, “In End, M’s a Bunch of Lou-Sers,” New York Post, October 23, 2001: 87.

9 Craig Hill, “Ground Zero Holds No Allure for Piniella – After Spending 14 Years in Pinstripes, M’s Manager Says He Has No Desire to See Site of Terrorist’s Destruction,” News Tribune, October 19, 2001: C3.

10 Art Thiel, “Piniella, Mariners Visit Ground Zero – Fire-Station Tour Leads to Moving Experience at Site of Devastation,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 22, 2001: D2.

11 David Andriesen, “Wild, but Good – Abbott Pitched Five Hitless Innings, but Walked Eight,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 22, 2001: D3.

12 John Hickey, “Devastation – Yankees Stun Mariners with Late Home Runs.” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, October 22, 2001: D1.