The Seattle Mariners have officially picked May 2, 2026 as the day they will retire Randy Johnson's No. 51. And when it happens, it will put a nice bow on a partnership that probably never should have worked.
It indeed never would have happened at all if the Montreal Expos hadn't been in the market for pitching help early in the 1989 season. The Mariners obliged, sending Mark Langston and a player to be named later to the Expos in a trade that brought back three pitchers: Gene Harris, Brian Holman and Johnson.
"We looked at a lot of packages, but we had to get pitching,” was how Woody Woodward, the Mariners' director of baseball operations, justified the trade at the time.