PEORIA, Ariz. -- The final curtain in Ken Griffey Jr.'s career hasn't fallen yet, but its downward trajectory certainly may have been set in motion.

At 39 years old, the left-handed slugger with 611 career homers returned Saturday to where it all began as a 19-year-old top pick in the 1987 First-Year Player Draft -- the Seattle Mariners.

And though Griffey didn't want to come right out and say it, the underlying sentiment is that Seattle is where it also should all end.

"I think this is a step in the right direction," he told a packed media conference staged in the visitor's clubhouse at Peoria Stadium, where the Mariners play their spring games.

Chuck Armstrong, the team's longtime president, agreed. Armstrong was a happy man Saturday as the prodigal son returned. He recalled the meeting after the 1999 season when Griffey told Armstrong to explore trading him to the Reds for family reasons as one of the most emotional moments of his career.

Safeco Field had just opened midway through that season and a long period of time in which the Mariners' future in Seattle was questionable had come to an end.

A month after the Feb. 10, 2000, deal that sent Griffey to Cincinnati, Armstrong called Griffey and said he wanted him to finish his career with the Mariners. Now Griffey has that chance and Armstrong said the new one-year contract with the $2 million base salary and $2.5 million of incentives tied to games played and attendance is open-ended.

"I want him to finish it off with the Mariners, but I don't know whether it's going to be this year or not," Armstrong told MLB.com. "Suppose he comes out and has a good year and he says he's not ready [to quit]? I asked him about it and he said, 'Chuck, you won't have to come to me. I'll know when it's time to leave.'

"As he said up there, this is a first step. And if he'd like to play after this year, I'd love to have him."

Griffey brings his own brand of teasing and humor back to a Mariners clubhouse that was fractured during last year's 101-loss season, their worst since suffering 102 defeats in 1983. Management spent a club-record $118 million on that product and all it got was a lot of bickering, ultimately dismissing a general manager and two managers in the process.

Top executives Armstrong and Howard Lincoln are still in place, but the new general manager via Milwaukee is Jack Zduriencik and the first-time manager is Don Wakamatsu.

Both flanked Griffey at the head table during Saturday's press conference.

Earlier, Griffey was back in the clubhouse and before he'd even donned his uniform, he was chirping about the post-workout spread and entertaining some of the rookies in camp who hadn't met him until that moment. Later he hit for 12 minutes off Wakamatsu and called it a day.

Aside from a bevy of front-office staff, there's little to resemble the team and baseball operations Griffey left a decade ago when Lou Piniella was the manager and the Mariners were about to embark on successful playoff runs in consecutive seasons.

The often-injured Griffey looked around and stated the obvious: that there's a finite sense of his career this time around.

"Every play could be your last," he said. "That's the only thing that I've learned: that you're not promised tomorrow so go out and play as hard as you can. At the end of this contract it will have been 20 years. So there's just a few years left. You have to figure out what you're going to do in the future."

Griffey's 2008 season ended on a sour note. While still with the Reds, he banged the outside of his left knee on a trunk during a chat with reporters in the Cincinnati home clubhouse, and from that point on, he tried to play through it. He was traded to the White Sox at the July 31 non-waiver Trade Deadline and because of the injury had only three homers and 18 RBIs for Chicago in 41 games.

Griffey had lost that first couple of steps of burst in the outfield and was having trouble planting his left leg at the plate.

To the outside observer it appeared he was finished. But he had surgery to repair torn cartilage and meniscus in the knee this offseason and believes his leg is back in shape. In fact, he passed physicals with both the Mariners and Braves before he decided on returning to Seattle just the other day.

"Kenny was injured about a month into the season and he tried to play through it," Brian Goldberg, Griffey's agent, said Saturday. "Other teams didn't really know. He had his knee drained twice with the Reds -- once in early May, once in early July -- and once in September when he was with the White Sox. [Chicago GM] Kenny Williams knew Kenny was not 100 percent. But they didn't know the extent of it.

"Now the doctor said he should be as good as he was five years ago. I'll be happy with a year ago. He had a good year in '07 [when he batted .277 with 30 homers and 93 RBIs]."

Wakamatsu, though, isn't making any decisions yet about how much he'll integrate Griffey, who still played in 143 games despite the injury. He said he's targeting Griffey for left field and some days as designated hitter.

"It's twofold," Wakamatsu said. "The first is to find out what kind of shape he's in and the second is to try and sustain him for the whole season. We're going to be reacting to how his body feels on a day-to-day basis. We're not looking ahead. We're only going to look at today."

For his part, Griffey tried to tamper down expectations. He left Seattle in 2000 to be closer to his family, which lives in Orlando, Fla. His two oldest of the three kids, 15 and 13 now, both gave their blessings to Dad this week to head back to the Pacific Northwest.

But Griffey, the son of a Major League ball-playing father, said he's dreading being away from his family for a better part of seven months.

"I was one of those kids whose dad wasn't there all the time," Griffey said. "We talk about it all the time. It didn't mean he didn't love me any less. It's different from now and then. I have more of an option of what I can do than he had."

Still, when asked what he would've done had the kids told him to stay home and retire, he added: "I don't think they would ever ask that. You only have one shot at a career, of doing something you love. You play as long as you can and enjoy it as long as you can. If they had said stay home, I might have had to not listen to them."

Clearly, then, Griffey is not done with baseball.

"I'm going to go out there and be the best that I can be right now," Griffey said. "Try and be as consistent as possible. That's the best thing anybody can ask of me."

And obviously the Mariners are not done with Griffey.

"There might not be baseball in Seattle but for him," Armstrong said. "It might have gone the way of the Sonics. Thank goodness it didn't."