Just a few days ago, Ichiro Suzuki, hailed by the Seattle Mariners' media guide as "the best Japanese import to come along since the VCR," meekly grounded out to give the Oakland Athletics a division title. Soon after that, the Mariners traveled to Anaheim where they ended the season with two losses to the Angels, a playoff-bound team for the first time since 1986.

The Mariners were supposed to be the best team in baseball. They won 116 games last year, but failed to make the World Series. This year they didn't make the playoffs. Suzuki, mired in a late season slump, ended up with batting statistics comparable with those of Adam Kennedy, a solid, but unspectacular Angel infielder no one is comparing with a best-selling appliance. In the end, it was the unheralded, gritty Angels that showed a winner's heart as the Mariners' season whimpered to a close.

Much the same hype and reality check describes the fortunes of Seattle itself, a town hailed as the very model of urban success in the 1990s' "new economy." Spurred by a seemingly endless recession, riots, and even earthquakes, thousands of Southern Californians relocated to the quiet, less socially complex Northwest. Many touted the area's smog-free, often breathtaking greenery. Others hailed its tranquil, self-contained religious communities. And all believed that the once-hardscrabble, working-class Seattle economy built by Boeing and shipping was being transformed by the likes of Microsoft into an unstoppable information-age powerhouse.

Yet, like the Mariners' dynasty that never was, Seattle badly stumbled on the road to greatness. Since 1997, its job growth rate is lower than that of Los Angeles County and has been utterly surpassed by Orange County's performance. Worse still, Seattle lost a whopping 4.5% of its employment over the past two years. That's about the same setback suffered by chronically crippled Youngstown, Ohio, or Flint, Mich.

In part, Seattle's hardships reflect its gamble on the stock market bubble. During the last decade, the city emerged as one of America's post-industrial boutiques, a gathering spot for the environmentally sensitive, post-material rich who didn't want to be annoyed with making what they consumed. Much of the city's boom was related to such ephemeral, ultimately illusory economic growth. When America's dot-com, Internet fantasy finally collapsed, so too did much of Seattle.

But there is more to the story. Ironically enough, the region's decline is also traceable to the same civic conceit and social conflict, if not natural disasters that once drove the disaffected from Southern California.

Indeed, the low-water mark in Seattle's recent history was its utterly incompetent reaction to the World Trade Organization riots of 1999. To be sure, much of the violence was caused by outside elements who assembled in the city specifically to provoke global economic leaders. But the looting, beatings and millions in damage also exposed the fact that the capital of grunge culture had fostered a remarkably lethal underclass, one increasingly willing to back up its rhetoric with a two-by-four across the head.

Throughout the riots, Seattle's new-age mayor, Paul Schell, and police chief Norm Stamper agonized over whether they should contain the unruly. They wavered between strong action and tearful regret. Unfortunately, despite their progressive rhetoric, America's privileged classes in Seattle as in everywhere else care a great deal about protecting their cars, homes and favorite coffee houses. Stamper was forced to resign, and two years later Schell became the first incumbent in the city's recent history to lose a primary election.

Then came the 2001 Fat Tuesday riots, a Mardis Gras celebration in famed Pioneer Square that ended with beatings and a tragic death. Once again the city appeared paralyzed. Ugly racial overtones began to surface. "Many television and newspaper images of the mayhem in Pioneer Square showed young blacks assaulting whites," reported the Associated Press. But, to the dismay of many critics, Seattle's leadership refused to consider the incident as a possible hate crime.

The very next day, Seattle was hit by a 6.8 magnitude earthquake, its biggest in over 50 years. Tagged by some as "Crash Wednesday," the temblor caused at least $1 billion worth of damage, injured 200 people, and was blamed for one death. Suddenly, it appeared that the epochal wave of plagues afflicting Southern California in the early 1990s had decisively moved to the north.

The bad news continued. In September 2001, Boeing, the bedrock of the region's economy since 1916, moved its headquarters to Chicago. Although much of the firm's production workers remain in the area, the implication was clear. Strangled by anti-industrial regulations and rising costs -- in part attributable to bubble economy home price speculation -- aerospace employment would become increasingly endangered in Seattle.

Then, in June of this year, the FBI made headlines with the revelation that Islamic terrorists view Seattle an "easy target" because of the city's inept law enforcement. The city, millions of Americans learned, has the nation's fifth highest crime rate, about 30% worse than the national average. It also deploys far fewer police officers per population than most everywhere else.

Now cities, like baseball teams, can often mount surprising comebacks. Against all odds, it was the Angels, and Southern California, not the Mariners and Seattle that have prospered of late. There's nothing to prevent a similar reversal of fortune in the future. But there were many who, not long ago, viewed the northwest as a sure thing. Hopefully, with the lessons of the 1990s behind us, we've learned to better hedge our bets.