Day Twenty Eight: Jeff Cirillo
In January of 2020 I was driving Uber as often as I could while staying at home with my then four month old daughter. Towards the end of the month, we all found out that somebody had returned to Snohomish County from Wuhan with Covid-19 symptoms. And sure enough, he had the virus. I couldn't stop driving Uber at that point but I began to get really worried. But, like most of us, I kept going with whatever I was doing, just being a little more cautious about my proximity to folks and washing my hands (about the same amount as a neurotic hypochondriac parent of a newborn usually does). But as time went by, new and unusual things began to develop and finally we couldn't ignore the situation any longer. I stopped driving Uber and the people who I was nannying for stopped being able to go to work as well. Soon thereafter the whole world came apart. And here we sit, trying to keep our heads up through some beautiful weather and some strange times. And the reason I draw attention to this course of creeping doom, is that the years of 2002 and 2003 were filled with "should we continue down this road?" moments that only take on brutal significance after the fact. No single player is more significant in this spreading illness than Jeff Cirillo. Yes, I have just called Jeff Cirillo the Covid-19 of Mariners.
In the dismal offseason following the 2001 season, a trade was made between the Seattle Mariners and the Colorado Rockies. The Mariners gave up habitual ball-greaser (and useful pitcher) Jose Paniagua, Denny Stark, and future elite closer, Brian Fuentes for optical illusion artist and funhouse mirror third baseman Jeff Cirillo. During this era of my life I was often times drunkenly telling whoever happened to be in my line of fire that all statistics from Colorado were trash and should be trusted even less than a good statline from the NL coming over to the AL (I'm not drunk anymore but I will still gladly yell about the superiority of the AL over the NL any chance I can get). So when this trade was made I was pretty much double pissed off. Not only do you have a guy with clown balloon numbers, he is leaving the NL as well. Jeff Cirillo was pretty much set up to fail from the very second he was given a Mariners uniform. And unfortunately this was an occasion where I was proven very right.
From day one Jeff Cirillo was a pile of garbage as a baseball player. He was an inferior defensive third bagger to David Bell (who we would all get to watch play in the World Series that year! LOLOLOL) whom he had replaced and the bat which was supposed to be such a great hallmark of his game was utterly dead. Historically, if you are tracing the mention of "marine layer" in relationship to the Mariners suffering, I think that you might very well find that Jeff Cirillo is your patient zero here. He continually complained about the heavy air (no shit bro! You were playing on top of a mountain before!) and the effect it had on fly balls. So remember, not only was Jeff Cirillo playing bad baseball, he was acting like a dick while doing it. He had a perpetual gasface that year. There was no denying how much he was suffering as a player, but rather than either turning that discontent inward or giving up entirely, he just walked around with a stink cloud above his head all season long. And they played his sorry ass every single day. He started 146 games that year. Even on a 90 win team this was a constant bummer. He was a great harbinger of the losing that would soon come to the club.
At one point during the 2002 campaign Lou himself tried to give Cirillo hitting instruction. Can you even imagine what that might have looked like? Cirillo's sour face looking off into the void while Lou smoked a cigarette and berated him? I would have loved to see that honestly. But even the great motivator and madman Sweet Lou couldn't get Cirillo out of the "slump" that he rode through the hole summer of 2002. He never got out. So really you can't call 2002 a slump because it was a full year. I don't like it when guys have a bad year and everyone says "it was a slump year." No, it was just a bad year. A slump is a series of AB's over a handful of games. Not an entire year of being utterly useless at the plate. But the Mariners won a lot of games that season. However the cost was significant. Through the ugliness of that year they lost Lou. So for many of us the last memories of Sweet Lou are of him painstakingly trying to get Jeff Cirillo to relearn how to hit a fucking baseball. Thanks for that, Jeff. And the bulwarks of the mighty Mariners faux-dynasty crumbled. Pat Gillick, who had brought two World Series banners to Toronto, left the Mariners after the 03 season and that was that. Of course, Gillick would go on to build another championship team in Philadelphia (of course!) when ownership gave him the opportunity to spend the way he wanted to. And Raul Ibanez got to play in a World Series (a story for another day). But the Mariners, who just two years prior had won 116 games and seemed destined for the innermost sanctums of lasting greatness, were relegated to perpetual retooling. The bulk of Ichiro's career placed "Reopening! Under New Management." But it all started with the dreadful presence of Michael Biehn look-alike (and Michael Biehn from "The Abyss" not Kyle Reese or Corporal Hicks) Jeff Cirillo and the slow creep of infection that you could just feel those two years of 02 and 03. Desi Relaford, Ruben Sierra, Ben Davis, James Baldwin. The list is as ugly as it sounds. And it's a testament to how good that core of 01 was that they were able to essentially win 90 games in back to back seasons running on fumes. But Cirillo was the talisman of doom throughout. And perhaps, in some different reading of events, it is the loss of Jeff Cirillo after the 03 campaign that was the straw the brought the house down. Something like that.
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