Bill Schonely’s career might have been very different if the Pilots had stayed in Seattle or if he had followed the team to Milwaukee. But now he roots for the Mariners.
Bill Schonely always wanted to be a big league baseball broadcaster. He grew up outside of Philadelphia, listening to Mel Allen, Red Barber, Vin Scully and Bill Stern calling games on the radio.
The late Dudley was a legend and a future Hall of Famer who had been with the Cleveland Indians for two decades before being hired by the Seattle Pilots. Schonely’s bosses at KVI Radio recommended him for the job of “sidekick,” Schonely said. It was a dream come-true for Schonely, and for the Pacific Northwest.
“The field itself, the playing surface, was manicured to the nth degree. Everything was fine, but it had no seats to speak of. You know, there were no suites, no anything. A hundred hot dog stands, I guess, you know, and soda stands,” Schonely said. “It was old-school.”“Joe Shultz was one of the greatest guys, one of the great characters I met of all the people that I have known in sports,” Schonely said.
Behind the scenes during that inaugural year and then in the off-season that followed, the dream that was the Seattle Pilots began to fall apart. Ownership blamed the size and condition of the ballpark for revenue problems, and the promise of revenue from bigger crowds at Kingdome was still years in the future. The team declared bankruptcy and was taken over by the league.
“I thought at that time, ‘my goodness, I always enjoyed baseball and doing the broadcasts, I might be in baseball for the rest of my life,’ but it only lasted a little over one year,” Schonely said.
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