When the Orioles were in Seattle last weekend, several of their players and coaches watched intently the pregame ceremony on Saturday night when former team great Félix Hernández was inducted into the Mariners Hall of Fame.
A career winner of 169 games with 2,524 strikeouts – all with Seattle over a 15-year career – it was a special night at T-Mobile Park.
He’s known simply as the “King” in Seattle. He was a six-time All-Star who won the 2010 AL Cy Young Award and was a runner-up twice. He pitched a perfect game against Tampa Bay on Aug. 15, 2012.
When he took the mound at home, the “Kings Court” would fill the leftfield stands with gold shirts and K cards.
Like Hernández, the Orioles’ Anthony Santander is a native of Venezuela. When Santander was tearing it up this spring in the WBC, Hernández was a visitor to the Team Venezuela clubhouse. When he was 13, scouts compared a young teenager pitcher Santander to Hernández. In the spring of 2021, Hernández signed a minor league deal with the Orioles and the two countrymen were briefly teammates.
