Curtain Call: Pilot Season

Recently while scrolling through bluesky, I came across a post from the account Old Baseball News that caught my attention.

Now I had a passing knowledge of the Seattle Pilots, in no small part thanks to the seminal book Ball Four written by pitcher Jim Bouton as a sort of travelogue during the team’s only year of operation in Seattle. But I certainly had never heard of Miguel Fuentes, nor was I aware of his distinction of having thrown the final pitch in Seattle Pilots history. And that distinction in particular started me down a rabbit hole.

I grew up watching a lot of sport; but I also spent a lot of time watching live theater thanks to my mother managing a little black box space for most of my childhood. It makes sense that the two passions fed off of one another, one kind of drama impacting the way I took in the other and vice versa. With that being said, there is still the one major difference between the two: the scripted versus non-scripted nature of how that drama unfolds. I’ve seen plenty of plays or performances more than once and there are absolutely shows that are worth the repeat viewing, but there’s just never going to be the same tension about something where you know the ending.

Part of the reason that the notion of star players like Ray Lewis or Bill Russell riding off into the sunset by retiring after winning a title is that it is so rare for an athlete to get to choose their own ending, especially one with so much catharsis. Despite what the more conspiracy-minded of us may believe at times, there is no script in sports: even if history isn’t necessarily cruel, it is fundamentally uncaring. History didn’t know that the Seattle Pilots were more or less bankrupt at the end of the season, that they would soon be taken over by the league and moved nearly 2,000 miles away. Someone like Miguel Fuentes didn’t get to choose to be on the mound for what would end up being the final inning for the Pilots, and the only reason this distinction was calcified into the fossil record of the extinct team was because of subsequent events completely out of any member of the team’s control.

Fuentes is far from the only one to be put in this position: the past century of North American pro-sports have had no shortage of franchises pick up and skip town, ceremoniously or otherwise. And so with all that in mind dear reader I would like to introduce you to Curtain Call, a new series featured on the RTG? Dispatch that will find the incidental final statistics collected by members of teams in their final games before departing their homes for greener grasses. And given how it inspired this idea, we’ll first take our time machine back to the October 2, 1969 (nice) as the Seattle Pilots host the Oakland Athletics.

The player that started all of this was Puerto Rican Miguel Fuentes; and something you might notice looking at the Topps card above this passage, featuring Fuentes and fellow pitcher Dick Baney, is that it is from 1970, a season in which the Seattle Pilots no longer existed. It turns out that the Pilots exit from Seattle was so haphazard that by the time they actually moved, the following season’s cards had already been printed with the now defunct team name. Baseball is very dumb.

Fuentes was signed by the newly formed Seattle Pilots at the age of 23 after leading the Rio Grande Guerrilleros to a Puerto Rican league championship in 1968. While Seattle opened play as the Pilots for the first time the season following this signing in 1969 (nice), Fuentes was relocated to their brand new A-ball affiliate along with four other Puerto Ricans. All of these islanders would still play for the Pilots - it was just the Clinton Pilots of Clinton, Iowa.

Fuentes was phenomenal that season in the minors, sporting a 1.46 ERA in 74 innings while moving between the rotation and bullpen. He was indeed so good, and the Pilots so hapless, that he was called up to the big league club at the start of September despite having never thrown a single pitch at any minor league level higher than A. Once again, his role was fluid - his first two appearances came in mop-up relief situations, finishing out a 1-6 loss to the Yankees and a 2-6 loss to the Royals on 9/1 and 9/6 with a pair of scoreless outings.

He finally gave up a run in his next appearance, but still managed to get his first win that day as that was the only run he gave up in a complete game against the White Sox in his first ever major league start. That would be his lone win of the season: in his next four outings he continued to split time between the pen and the rotation but with poorer results, giving up 14 earned runs in exactly 14 innings as his ERA ballooned to 5.40 heading into the final stretch of the season.

Fuentes would indeed throw the final pitch for the Seattle Pilots: on October 2nd against the Oakland Athletics, who themselves had arrived on the west coast just two years prior, Fuentes came in to finish up what would be the 98th loss of Seattle’s season. In the final inning his line included a hit, a walks, and a strikeout; but for the first time since September 6 it did not include a single run. The promising Puerto Rican got the final out in the top of the 9th on this October 2nd against none other than Mr. October Reggie Jackson, who lined out to center field.

BUT. Because this was a home game, this lineout induced by Fuentes was not the last play in Seattle Pilots history. Down 3-0, the Pilots threatened in the bottom of the 9th to maybe send the paltry crowd of just 5,473 supporters home with at least one last sweet memory of an otherwise disappointing season. With the top of the order due up, the leadoff hitter Tommy Carpenter got on base with a single. The very next batter, Steve Whitaker, finally scored the first Seattle run of the game with a homerun to deep right field, but it only counted for one due to Tommy Harper getting thrown out trying to steal second. Two batters later, the score was still 3-1 as the everyday catcher stepped up to the plate: Jerry McNertney.

McNertney had been in the league at this point since 1964, when he debuted with the White Sox. They’d signed him out of Iowa State University as a first baseman/outfielder combo, only converting him to catcher midway through his minors career, but he acquitted himself well enough after the late position change to be taken by Seattle in their expansion draft. 1969 (nice) was by far his most productive season, given that there was little to no competition for play time behind the dish. He appeared in a career-high 128 games, threw out 35 baserunners (more than anyone else in baseball, though this was partially because of how many baserunners Seattle allowed) and recorded 1.5 WAR, his only time even topping 1.

But that was all during his time behind the plate - now, he was at the plate as the potential tying run with 2 down and a man on first. But after all, the whole throughline of this look into finales is we rarely get to script the endings that we want. Unfortunately, game play by plays from this period on sports-reference don’t yet indicate whether strikeouts were swinging or looking, and I was unable to find any newspaper accounts beyond just the boxscores from that day. Regardless of the kind of strikeout, the last sound a Seattle fan would have heard watching the Pilots would have been umpire Frank Umont calling strike three.

The Pilots decamped to Milwaukee the following season to become the Brewers, a team that would be owned by the future commissioner of the sport Bud Selig. McNertney would spend another year with the club before bouncing between future the Brewers’ future NL Central rivals, the Cardinals and Pirates, prior to his retirement following the 1973 season. Despite only spending 128 of his 590 career games in Seattle, if you go to his baseball-reference page today, the face that will greet you is shaded by the blue and yellow hat of the Pilots from their lone season of existence.

That’s rarer than you might think: of the top 12 players by WAR for the ‘69 (nice) Pilots listed on their baseball reference page, only 3 of them are shown sporting a Pilots cap in their pictures. McNertney is joined by reliever John Gelnar, who had let three inherited runners score on that October day after starter Steve Barber fell apart in the 3rd; and by outfielder Wayne Comer, who had recorded the penultimate out of the same game just two batters before McNertney’s accidentally-historic strikeout. Its not like this was the lone season for any of them: all three played for at least a couple seasons before and after this year, and all spent at least some time with the franchise in Milwaukee following the move. But, for whatever reason, this trio that helped play out the string in Seattle live on (at least digitally) sporting the colors of those woeful Pilots.

As for Miguel Fuentes: not only was that the final pitch of his first major league season, it was the final pitch of his major league career. In the off-season he returned to Puerto Rico to play in the winter league, this time with the Caguas Criollos. He and the team reached the semi-finals during that year’s playoffs before eventually falling to the Ponce Lions; and shortly thereafter, Fuentes found himself in a situation familiar to Seattle Pilots fans.

Since Seattle’s Sicks’ Stadium had been a minor league ballpark until 1969 (nice), there were often insufficient toilet facilities for the hastily doubled stadium capacity during that lone MLB year. Fuentes, on this January evening in Puerto Rico, found himself at a bar that similarly could not serve his bathroom needs due to their own plumbing issues. While the ultimate outcome of what happened that evening is indisputable, it’s an account relayed by teammate Dick Baney, his neighbor on that lone baseball card appearance, that provides the most detailed timeline. The sequence of events, at least partially corroborated by newspaper reports at the time, was as follows:

Without a functioning bathroom, Fuentes went to relieve himself outdoors near a car. The owner of the car saw him and thought that Fuentes was urinating directly onto the vehicle, so shot him on the spot, causing injuries that Fuentes would later succumb to. He died at just 23 years old, and would never even live to see the Topps card that featured his and Baney’s likenesses.

This is not the end of the story of baseball in Seattle - the city didn’t even need to wait all that long before the major leagues returned in the form of the Seattle Mariners when the 1977 MLB season kicked off. It had been less than a decade since a small crowd in the far flung Pacific Northwest watched a pitcher from Puerto Rico who wouldn’t live to see another game and a converted catcher from Iowa play out the string of one of the most inconsequential seasons in major league history. And it had taken less than a decade for both of those individuals, along with the team, to fade into obscurity even here in their temporary adopted home.

For anyone familiar with the 1969 (nice) season from having actually watched their games or perhaps from reading the aforementioned Ball Four, this may not necessarily be the lasting image of the Seattle Pilots. But that game did provide, at the very least, the last images of the Seattle Pilots. Maybe it’s splitting hairs to differentiate between lasting and last like that, and maybe it’s unfair to highlight this unflattering moment in a season that did not lack for them. But you rarely get to choose your endings in sports - once you’re a part of the story, it will do with you what it please.