The real hero

He used to make these catches ALL THE TIME. Most spectacular player I've ever seen.

I'm really upset by the non-perfect game last night. It's terrible that the game had to go down the way it did. But the biggest reason I'm upset is the fact that because of that horrible call, the greatest player of our time is being overshadowed on a day where he should be celebrated.

The third headline on ESPN.com today is the retirement of Ken Griffey, Jr. It's the second headline on MLB.com. Hell, even Fangraphs has more stuff on the imperfect game than on Griffey. And now I've talked about it for two paragraphs. And that is unfair to the career of one of the greatest baseball players ever.

Ken Griffey, Jr. was a large part of the reason why I'm a baseball fan. When I was a kid, the Mets weren't very good, and I wasn't a Red Sox fan yet. My connection with baseball was based primarily around my father, and the video game Ken Griffey, Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. I played the game and I watched Junior play, and I was obsessed. I had a Junior signature glove. I had a Mariners hat. If you know me, you know I wear my hats backward most of the time. Well, I started that because of Junior. He was my idol like probably no other player has been. And for almost everyone around my age, I think it was about the same way.
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It wasn't just the fact that he was better than everyone else, though that helped a lot. For a kid, there's nothing cooler than a player who can do everything - he hit for average, he hit home runs, he hit in the clutch. He was a spectacular outfielder (I can't find numbers on this, but I'll hit anyone who tries to tell me he wasn't the best centerfielder ever). He could run. He did everything.

But beyond that there was the persona. He was just so damn cool. Before the injuries, when he was still The Kid, Junior had this ebullient air of awesomeness no matter what was going on. He seemed like he was happy to play baseball, and it never seemed like he even had to try that hard to be great and to look cool doing it. That's where the hat comes into play, I guess. He was totally effortless in all phases on the game, and seemingly outside the game as well. He was like an angel or an alien who had been sent here to show the children of the world what baseball was supposed to look like. He was the commercial king before Jeter, too. I found a couple of old ones:





Events conspired against Junior, though. Parts of his career kept getting taken from him by factors largely outside of his control. His early prime was largely robbed because of the players' strike in 1994, at least in terms of public recognition. After the strike people pretty much stopped watching baseball; it wasn't until the home run race in 1998 that baseball really came "back." But some of Junior's best seasons came during that period. Hell, he hit 40 home runs in 1994 and the season ended 50 games early. That's on pace for 58 home runs (which would have been a career high for him).

That wasn't the worst of it, though. You're probably already aware of Junior's injury history. After he asked to be traded to the Reds, he was riddled by major injuries (mostly to his legs) that robbed him of the meat of his prime years. He finished his career yesterday with 630 career home runs. Since I'm evidently a numbers junkie now, I decided to run a number-crunch on how many home runs Junior would have today in a just universe. This won't be exact, as I'm making a lot of stuff up, but I have to for this exercise, so we'll just have to deal with that. The relevant variables are as follows:

Games: 2671
HR: 630
Seasons: 22

To correct for days off and minor injuries over the course of a season, I'm going to assume 140 games a season (his average during his first stint in Seattle). His HR/G rate for his career was 0.236 (to three significant digits). So assuming 140 games a season for 22 years, Junior should have 727 home runs. And that's a conservative estimate, since I included the strike season and a 72 game season (he missed almost three months in 1995 after breaking his wrist while making a catch) in the games per season calculations, and I didn't correct for the terrible seasons Junior had recently. Even with those caveats, he could have outhomered Babe Ruth.

There was another way in which Junior's career is a bit tragic. He very clearly was one of the greatest players in the history of the game. He did this during the steroid era, when it's been basically assumed that every good hitter in baseball was cheating (mainly because we've discovered that most of them were). And yet there's never been even a hint of a suspicion that Ken Griffey, Jr. was a steroid user. All the evidence indicates otherwise, even. Junior has never even been rumored to have failed a steroid test. His career arc roughly followed that of a non-user: spectacular as a young man, improvement into the prime, a plateau, then a steady decline into middle age. His body did the same thing: thin as a kid, strengthened into his prime (but not enormous), and then as he aged he got kind of fat and got hurt a lot.

He wasn't a user, and to most that just means that his numbers will be obscured by those of the sluggers who did cheat. That's a fair assessment; the 56 home runs that Junior hit in 1998 would have been amazing most years, but that year it was good for third behind Mark McGwire's 70 and Sammy Sosa's 66. McGwire's admitted to using steroids that year, and while Sosa hasn't, it's pretty much assumed by most people that he was, whether that's fair or not. He had huge numbers, but they weren't as huge as those of Bonds and the others.

But what gets overlooked is the fact that most of the pitchers were probably using too. Not only was Junior competing against hitters who were juicing, but he was batting against pitchers who were unnaturally good as well. If we take steroids out of the game, the numbers would drop almost across the board, most likely. But it's quite likely that Griffey's would actually have risen.

This is all very depressing. To think that Ken Griffey, Jr. should probably be atop the all-time home run list rather than Barry Bonds, to think that as good as he was he should have been even better...that all isn't much fun. So today, let's not think about that.

I got to see Ken Griffey, Jr. play several times as a member of the Reds, but I also got to see him once as a Mariner. It was 1999, and I was in Seattle with my family for my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary. All I cared about, though, was the fact that we were going to get to see Junior play. It was Ken Griffey, Jr. Hat Day, and when we walked in we all got these great hats, which my brothers and I immediately put on. What we didn't know at the time was that Junior was sick, and questionable for the game. He probably shouldn't have played, but it was his hat day, and he knew that there were going to be thousands of kids like my brothers and me who were there just to see him. So he played sick, and he made my childhood. Things like that are the things I'm going to remember about Junior.

So for today at least, let's not remember the injuries, or the years where Junior had to take a backseat to cheaters. Let's remember the diving catches. Let's remember the long flies. Let's remember the Home Run Derbies where he stood in the batter's box, hat turned back, and blasted baseballs deep into the night using nothing but a wood stick and his raw skill. Let's remember the video games we played as kids, and the heroes we had. Let's remember him as Junior. Let's remember him as the Kid. Today, let's remember Ken Griffey, Jr.'s career not as what it could or should have been, but as what it was: one of the greatest in the history of Major League Baseball.