Monday, March 27, 2000

By ALIYA SAPERSTEIN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

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Edgar Martinez had just drilled a two-run homer over the left-field wall.

Two batters later, Paul Sorrento hit a single, and the Cleveland Indians had to pull their star pitcher, Orel Hersheiser, from the game.

Suddenly, the Kingdome was rocking.

"I was wondering what was going on, if the (Mariner) Moose was on top of the dugout, jumping, or if someone was kicking the dugout," Martinez remembered. "It didn't last long, maybe a minute."

By then, the earthquake, which registered 5.4 on the Richter scale, was over.

And on that day, May 2, 1996, at 9:05 p.m., the Mariners became only the second baseball team in the history of the league to suspend a game because of an earthquake.

Dennis Higgins and his 7-year-old daughter were sitting in the back of the Kingdome's 100 level that night.

People sitting near aisles ran outside.

But for many others, there wasn't really any place to go.

"Everybody looked concerned and curious but not scared," Higgins said. "After a few minutes, the crowd started cheering for them to 'play ball.'

"Finally, the Kingdome announcer said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, we've just had an earthquake.' And everybody cheered again. Then he said, 'The game will be postponed. Please exit the building.'"

Dave Niehaus was up in the broadcast booth that night. Today, he laughs at how quickly he ran out of the Dome.

"I left the booth and was one of the first out of the building," Niehaus said. "I'd been in an earthquake before down in Southern California, and I said, 'I'm outta here!'"

Ten minutes later, 21,711 fans milled around outside and traded stories about what had happened.

"In my mind, I was thinking we were standing on those wooden high school bleachers, and they were rocking because we were all standing up and cheering. But we were on concrete," said Framir Shilston, who was sitting 20 rows up from first base with his son.

The next day, 12 engineers inspected the Kingdome for damage.

They found none.

That night, the Mariners and Indians finished the rest of the game, which had been called in the seventh inning, and played another full game, too.

"It was pretty uneventful," remembered Jon Magnusson, who inspected the Dome that day. "It really wasn't that big of an earthquake. We didn't expect to find anything."

The Kingdome was built to withstand a magnitude 7.5 quake centered beneath the Dome, or an 8.5 quake off the Washington coast.

"We went through the whole building, and the areas where there would have been the most cracking -- on the concrete supports -- had just received a fresh coat of paint.

"So (cracks) would've shown up pretty dramatically," said Magnusson, chief executive officer of Skilling Ward Berkshire Inc. "But there weren't any."

The only other baseball game to be called because of an earthquake took place in 1989, during Game 3 of the World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A's.

The Mariners, by the way, lost both games to the Indians.