With a winning record in the bag but the franchise’s first playoff berth out of reach, Seattle Mariners manager Lou Piniella obliged Randy Johnson and gave him the go ahead to gallop out to left field for the last inning of the last game of 1993. The Big Unit wanted to play first base, but Lou's use of him in left hung a lantern on the position's putrid campaign.

It didn't matter who was out there.

In his first season with the Mariners, Piniella sent a franchise record-setting 12 players out to left field. The group hit a league-worst .224/.280/.312.

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"It's always better looking to my left because I never know who's on my right." -- Ken Griffey Jr. to teammate Jay Buhner

Between 1989 and 1999 the Mariner outfield was set in stone: Jay Buhner in right, Ken Griffey Jr. in center, and whoeverthehell in left. Junior and Bone patrolled the Kingdome turf flanked by prospects and hired guns and journeymen and utility players, from Greg Briley to Kevin Mitchell to Rob Ducey to Rich Amaral (and on and on and on), none living up to expectations or stepping up enough to carve out a regular role.

During Griffey and Buhner's decade-plus tenures with the Mariners they never saw the same player top the left field games started leaderboard in consecutive seasons. With two all-timers providing remarkable continuity and consistently elite performance, the turnover in left field became more and more conspicuous as the years rolled on, and one of a few scapegoats for a Hall of Famer-laden team that couldn't make the World Series.

But while Junior and Bone became accustomed to new faces and weak links in left, it was just prior to their respective arrivals in Seattle that left field was the Mariners' position of strength.

Coming up as a singles-hitting, base-stealing, archetypal center fielder who hit just 4 home runs over his first 1,729 professional plate appearances, Phil Bradley improbably emerged in 1985 as one of the most well-rounded offensive forces in the American League thanks to "‘a little different’ stance and swing … plus a new power philosophy." Bradley started in left field, represented the Mariners in the All-Star Game and hit 26 home runs on the way to a final .300/.365/.489 batting line.

While some of that power fell away over the next couple seasons, Bradley nevertheless positioned himself as the Mariners best offensive player. For three seasons the Mariners could count on left field, but Bradley couldn't count on the Mariners; the team stank and management alienated him with a low-ball contract offer. Bradley wanted out and got his way before the 1988 season.

Young, in-house replacements Mickey Brantley and Greg Briley were given opportunities to fill Bradley's shoes but neither proved to be long-term answers for the Mariners. Extended opportunities for youngsters dried up once Piniella and his preference for veteran ballplayers came in following the 1992 season; he played rookies but had no time for growing pains with his team on the brink.

"How many kids have we given chances?" Lou asked in July 1995. "And how many have stuck? God Almighty, they’re killing me."

Rookie Darren Bragg was given the everyday job in left to start the 1995 season but Lou and GM Woody Woodward pulled the plug by late May. Marc Newfield, one of the highest-rated prospects in all of baseball, was given the next crack but couldn't survive June. Set-it-and-forget-it veteran rentals Warren Newsom and, ultimately, Vince Coleman were brought in mid-season as the Mariners pushed toward their first postseason berth.

Meanwhile, Newfield was part of the package that netted Andy Benes and, the following season, Bragg was sent off to the Boston Red Sox in exchange for Jamie Moyer.

Soon after, another young outfielder came along and actually made an impression but suffered the same fate.

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"Junior, Junior and the Bone, and you can’t go wrong." -- Roger Jongewaard, Mariners’ vice-president of scouting in 1995

As a 9-year-old in 1997, I didn’t know that Rice University product Jose Cruz Jr. was viewed by talent evaluators as a bit of a reach at third overall in the 1995 draft, a safety pick taken for his high floor and big league pedigree over a riskier potential star in Kerry Wood. All I knew was that he showed up one day and was instantly one of the coolest players on a team full of cool players.

I identified with his youth. He and my favorite player Alex Rodriguez were "Generation X cool," as the Seattle Times' Larry Stone once put it-- young guns bringing the ruckus to a very veteran team. Even Griffey --The Kid -- seemed too grown up for me by that point. I couldn't imagine being him. I could imagine being A-Rod and Cruz.

He was a power-hitting switch-hitter, one of my favorite baseball skill sets growing up (possibly due to a particular Eddie Murray baseball card and the Chipper Jones phenomenon) and something that endeared me to Mark Whiten a year prior and David Segui a year later.

He went for the high socks, the eye black, the flip-up shades. As the News Tribune's John McGrath put it (and with apologies to Taijuan Walker), "Cruz ... clearly is the Fresh Prince of Seattle. With his high blue socks and unmistakably regal manner, Jose the Second sure looks terrific in a Mariners uniform."

That was it. He wasn't just talking the talk -- hitting the crap out of the ball, sparing us from Lee Tinsley and bringing an unfair boost to what was already the most bruising lineup in baseball -- he walked the walked. From day one he could run out on the field with Griffey and Buhner and completely fit in.

Something about that was meaningful.

With Cruz in and Tinsley/Amaral/Ducey out, the lineup was nearly bullet-proof. Russ Davis and Dan Wilson’s mere competency seemed unbearable compared to bonesaw that was the middle of the order. In the rotation, the Big Unit was back healthy and joined by two other talented southpaws, a late-blooming Moyer and a prime Jeff Fassero. The Mariners were poised to return to the playoffs and push deep into October. Midway through the 1997 season they were well on their way. Facing the second-place Anaheim Angels on July 4th, Cruz hit the deciding two-run home run in the fourth inning, letting Randy take it from there to push Seattle’s division lead to 6 games.

The next day Moyer handed the bullpen a 4-1 lead in the 8th inning only to see Greg McCarthy, Scott Sanders and Norm Charlton let the Angels walk off with a 5-4 victory in the 9th. This kicked off a torturous stretch for Mariners fans, Piniella and GM Woodward.

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"I thought he was gonna be a fixture for years to come." -- Jay Buhner to reporters following the trade of Jose Cruz Jr.

The Mariners' two most crucial relievers were melting down-- a closer in the midst of the worst season of his career in Charlton and a man referred to by Mariners fans exclusively as Bobby Fucking Ayala. Each threw away multiple games in July and the rest of the bullpen offered no (ahem) relief. The Mariners lead over the Angels shrank to just half a game once play concluded on July 31st, the trade deadline.

Lou was begging for help and Woodward had had enough. He wouldn't let the bullpen keep an otherwise good team out of the playoffs. As the trade deadline approached, Woodward started putting all his chips on the table including his new, previously "untouchable" left fielder.

Over the course of 49 games with the Mariners the 23-year-old Cruz smacked 12 homers and 12 doubles on the way to a .268/.315/.541 batting line. "I thought I was going to be a Mariner forever," he said years later.

He played game number 50 for the Toronto Blue Jays.

Woodward had been protecting Cruz, balking at the idea of trading him for relief help, but as the clock ticked and August came knocking he couldn’t bear the idea of telling Sweet Lou to keep running Ayala and Charlton out at the ends of games, or calling upon guys like Josias Manzanillo and Mike Maddux at all. With multiple Cruz-for-established closer trades reportedly on the table, Woodward tried to cushion the blow by taking one that brought some youth back to the team: the Blue Jays' Mike Timlin packaged with a 26-year-old lefty with a high strikeout rate in Paul Spoljaric.

While the fans were also done enduring any more Ayala than absolutely necessary, the trade was widely panned. Pre-Moneyball and pre-blogosphere, it didn't take an "enlightened" baseball fan to sense the overpay.

"We didn't want to trade Cruz," said Piniella. "We waited until the last possible second. We couldn't do anything else."

"In order to give us the best shot at an American League pennant," added Woodward, "we had to trade quality to get quality."

He also dealt two quality MLB-ready prospects in Derek Lowe and Jason Varitek to the Boston Red Sox for closer Heathcliff Slocumb.

Woodward was chasing a pennant and his trade deadline maneuvers bettered the team's chances regardless of whether he received a good return on his assets (he obviously didn't). The Mariners that rolled into the playoffs were better than the Mariners before the trade deadline. Roberto Kelly was rented from the Minnesota Twins for the stretch run and effectively replaced Cruz's production in left. The pitching reinforcements improved the bullpen's overall performance.

If the Mariners won the World Series in 1997 I can't imagine many of us worrying too much about the outlook of the next couple seasons as we bathed in the sweet jubilance flowing from Dave Niehaus' smiling mouth. But they didn't win it or get particularly close, and come 1998 Woodward and Piniella watched their aging team deteriorate with no cheap, talented support readily available.

Once Kelly's replacement Glenallen Hill was dismissed midway through the 1998 season the Mariners turned their attention to 23-year-old Shane Monahan, giving him an opportunity to get acclimated to the big leagues, establish himself as the left fielder of the future, and carry some momentum into 1999. He went 0-for-3, as he was wont to do, and the next season it was back to journeyman veterans.

It's hard to know for sure whether Cruz would have received much more of an opportunity than Bragg or Monahan or anyone else. While many Mariners fans and media members immediately saw him as a "bankable star," his superstar aura was never quite in sync with the reality of his prospect profile.

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"Difficult-to-please media types are already bleating that he's a disappointment, but the expectations of what he could do were overstated." -- Baseball Prospectus 1999 player comment for Jose Cruz Jr.

Cruz was good, not great. Many fans surely heard "five-tool prospect" and couldn't help but lump him in with Griffey and Rodriguez, the ultimate five-tool players, even if they knew better on some intellectual level. On top of that, from the beginning his game was naturally (lazily?) compared to that of his father, an outstanding all-around left fielder in the '70s and '80s. Once Jose Jr. developed a power game, it was easy for anyone invested in the bloodlines narrative to graft Jose Jr.'s home runs onto two-time All-Star Jose Sr.'s 50 WAR career.

They were different players; the power came with drawbacks. A 1996 article mentions Cruz Jr., as a prospect, acknowledging the need to "become more consistent at the plate and cut down on his strikeouts," two shortcomings that stuck with him, lowered his ceiling, and made him an enigma among Blue Jays observers expecting a star.

Those expectations were out of hand in Seattle but at the end of the day he was merely the cherry on top bottom of the best lineup in the sport and only taking a sliver of spotlight away from four should-be Hall of Famers and other big personalities; fans wanted greatness but weren't going to demand it, whereas in Toronto he was brought in as a cornerstone member of a talented youth movement tasked with bringing the team back to prominence following the early '90s championship hangover. There was more pressure to break out, but while Carlos Delgado and Shawn Green were beginning to put up gaudy numbers, Cruz began being known for frigid cold snaps.

"Cruz hasn’t been a superstar so far and has been prone to long slumps that have made him an easy target for management dissatisfaction," read Baseball Prospectus 2000's player comment.

"I had a moment in 1999 that I wasn’t sure how I was ever going to hit again," Cruz said in 2012.

Cruz finally put it all together in 2001, hitting an outstanding .274/.326/.530 with 34 homers, but a return to shaky mediocrity in 2002, bloated arbitration figures, and the rise of Vernon Wells led to the Blue Jays forfeiting their last season of club control.

Would he have made it that long with the Mariners? Could Piniella have possibly tolerated Cruz's lows?

How many kids have we given chances? They're killing me.

In a world where Woodward passed on Timlin and Spoljaric, or even in a world where Cruz was brought back in a second trade (a persistent rumor beginning as early as the next offseason), Cruz still might not have had the opportunity to play his best baseball as a Mariner.

Few left fielders did.

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"Hunter accounted for nearly 70% of the playing time of what is currently the worst single season positional performance in Mariner history." -- Matthew Carruth on Brian L. Hunter's 1999 season with the Mariners

Once Monahan proved that he didn't have a future in Major League Baseball, Woodward struck a deal with the New York Mets for Butch Huskey, a very solid hitter and, well... a very solid hitter.

Huskey would have gotten the job done as the full-time left fielder -- he hit .290/.353/.496 in his half-season with the Mariners -- but Woodward and Piniella had something else in mind for the position. They were after a speedy leadoff hitter to fill the void left by Joey Cora and the Detroit Tigers were shopping stolen base king Brian L. Hunter.

Hunter started 108 games in left field for the Mariners following a rare April trade, the most by a single player since Phil Bradley in 1987 despite hitting an embarrassing .231/.277/.300 over 527 plate appearances, the worst offensive performance at a position defined by a disappointing lack of production. He was somehow allowed to lead off 100 of those games.

Pat Gillick took the reins from Woodward going into the 2000 season, but while he immediately brought the Mariners back into pennant contention, shoring up left field took a little longer. Gillick released Hunter and, for the next three seasons, cycled through crusty veterans like Rickey Henderson, Stan Javier, Mark McLemore, Al Martin and Ruben Sierra. In the magical 116-win 2001 season in which seemingly everything went right, Mariner left fielders played quality defense but hit just .256/.350/.364 to place among baseball's worst.

Gillick eventually found someone in 2003 by trading Piniella to the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in exchange for Randy Winn, but what really did it was his leaving the team in shambles following offseason.

2004 brought Bill Bavasi and a return to the bottom of the American League, redesignating the left field problem as just another problem. For Winn and Raul Ibañez, arguably two of the top three left fielders in franchise history, solving a decades-old riddle meant little as a once-great Mariners team crumbled due to the decay of aging stars and disastrous acquisitions.

The "Left Field Problem" doesn't exist in a meaningful way without an otherwise good team. The juxtaposition of the parade of misfits through left field against the starlit continuity of Griffey and Buhner, Mike Cameron and Ichiro Suzuki, and all of the best teams in franchise history was striking. Michael Saunders' struggles don't seem worth noting in this context when he shared a lineup with Adam Moore, Casey Kotchman, Chone Figgins, Josh Wilson, Jose Lopez and an ailing Franklin Gutierrez.

While the Left Field Problem with a Capital L only existed during the Woodward and Gillick eras -- the late-'80s to early-2000s, the rise and fall of a great Major League Baseball franchise -- the position has been a weak link for nearly four decades of Mariners baseball.

As the Vice President of Player Personnel for the expansion Blue Jays way back in 1976, Gillick watched his future team plant the seed for the first in a long line of left field disappointments.

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"We expected [Steve] Braun to be our leading hitter. His track record pointed to that." -- 1977 expansion Mariners Manager Darrell Johnson reflecting on the disappointing play of his left fielder

With the 38th pick in the Expansion Draft, the Mariners selected Minnesota Twins outfielder Steve Braun, a 29-year-old who averaged a solid 2.7 WAR over 6 seasons in the Twin Cities.

Unfortunately, something didn't carry over to Seattle. Braun slumped underneath a career-low BABIP and was outshone by fellow outfielders Leroy Stanton and rookie Ruppert Jones, the 40th and 1st picks of the Expansion Draft, respectively.

That was it for Braun. On to the next. The Mariners' first seven seasons saw seven different players atop the leaderboard for left field games started. The same goes for the seven most recent seasons. Looking backwards from today, most of the franchise's history has unfolded with a left fielder not worth keeping (apparently).

Granted, while there are plenty of franchise left fielders in the game, the position can naturally become one of impermanence, an afterthought, a catch all. It's one of the easiest places to play on the defensive spectrum and a position that tends to harbor a variety of players who shouldn't be there long-term: an aging center or right fielder who has lost some range or arm strength, a player from a more skilled position displaced by a logjam, a useless defender who lacks the reflexes to field ground balls and errant throws at first base. Those types of players will hopefully be off the team or in a more suitable position before too long. But that shouldn't absolve the Mariners.

The Mariners always have been staggeringly inept in left field. Using FanGraphs' leaderboards for 1977-2015, the Mariners rank 28th out of 30 in left fielder total WAR, only beating out two 1990s expansion teams. They are also behind two 1990s expansion teams.

(sOPS+ explanation)

Strictly from an offensive standpoint and measured against other Major League left fielders (sOPS+), the Mariners have had unbelievably few notable performances over the years. Most of the top seasons came from Bradley and Ibañez, bookends to most of the Mariners' success.

The 1997 crew deserves credit for arguably the best left field performance during the Mariners' winningest period by simply pairing good defense with mediocre hitting; either Cruz or Kelly alone might have put together one of the better left fielder seasons in Mariners history but their contributions were leveled out by Tinsley and Amaral.

The best single left fielder season in franchise history might belong to the 1981 group led by Tom Paciorek, who improbably put together the best season of his career at 34 years old. He hit .331/.385/.510 over 351 plate appearances as the left fielder (.326/.379/.509 across 452 plate appearances overall) and led the fledgling Mariners in WAR by a fair margin. The Mariners (probably foolishly) wanted to sign Paciorek to a multi-year contract following his big year, but he was unhappy with their offers and (probably fortunately) forced a trade.

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"You gotta love these guys." -- Seattle Mariners 1996 slogan

I came to the Mariners at a time when they were flush with genuine superstars and universally adored fan favorites, but I found myself developing a fascination for the players passing through who weren't part of the core and weren't in the spotlight. On those mid-late '90s teams, so many of the more obscure players were part of the left field tapestry.

I really did love them, each and every one. Whiten, Ducey, Cruz, Huskey... these are players I remember of as some of my favorites, players I find myself thinking about nearly 20 years later, players that cause me to write a 3,500 word FanPost two years after I stopped writing about baseball. I made a drawing of Glenallen Hill and hung it on my bedroom wall. I modeled my Little League swing after Roberto Kelly.

So many did enough to stick with me, but literally none of them did enough to stick with the team.

The search continues. So long, Dustin Ackley. Welcome back, Franklin Gutierrez?

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75

57

Year Left Fielder GS 1977 Steve Braun 95 1978 Bruce Bochte 68 1979 Leon Roberts 56 1980 Dan Meyer 116 1981 Tom Paciorek 78 1982 Bruce Bochte 99 1983 Steve Henderson 109 1984 Steve Henderson 49 1985 Phil Bradley 124 1986 Phil Bradley 134 1987 Phil Bradley 158 1988 Mickey Brantley 94 1989 Greg Briley 79 1990 Jeffrey Leonard 68 1991 Greg Briley 49 1992 Kevin Mitchell 67 1993 Mike Felder 69 1994 Eric Anthony 57 1995 Vince Coleman 38 1996 Rich Amaral 48 1997 Jose Cruz Jr. 47 1998 Glenallen Hill 70 1999 Brian L. Hunter 108 2000 Rickey Henderson 87 2001 Al Martin 71 2002 Mark McLemore 69 2003 Randy Winn 134 2004 Raul Ibanez 106 2005 Randy Winn 90 2006 Raul Ibanez 157 2007 Raul Ibanez 131 2008 Raul Ibanez 153 2009 Wladimir Balentien 34 2010 Michael Saunders 74 2011 Carlos Peguero 40 2012 Casper Wells 42 2013 Raul Ibanez 97 2014 Dustin Ackley 127 2015 Seth Smith 51 2016 Nori Aoki 88 2017 Ben Gamel 82 2018 Denard Span 75 2019 Domingo Santana 57

Obligatory: Raul Ibañez takes pride in his defense