In the end, Ken Griffey, Jr. was wise enough to take the hints that not even a boundless love for the game was enough to make him the Kid once again. Posted on 06/03/2010 10:11:26 AM PDT by BluesDuke
In the end, Ken Griffey, Jr. was wise enough to take the hints that not even a boundless love for the game was enough to make him the Kid once again.
The toothy, hat-backward imp with the lyrical swing, the hunger for roaming center field like it was his personal playground, and the ownership of baseball's 1990s had become the memory nobody wanted to lose even as the man looked time in the face and attempted the closest Griffey could ever get to defiance.
The team that raised him, the team he is still believed to have rescued, brought him home in 2009, saw just enough of what he once was to sign him up for one more tour, probably didn't experience as great a slap in the face from reality as he did to discover that 2010 would be the year his needle finally reached empty.
Griffey didn't wait until season's end to do what his buffeted heart knew had to be done, nor could he bring himself to admit that what had to be done probably should have been done a season or three sooner. He quit because he wasn't Ken Griffey, Jr. anymore.
Age finished what round after round of injuries that would have shattered lesser spirits began a decade earlier.
"While I feel I am still able to make a contribution on the field and nobody in the Mariners front office has asked me to retire, I told the Mariners when I met with them prior to the 2009 season and was invited back that I will never allow myself to become a distraction," Griffey said Wednesday, before the Mariners went out and beat the Minnesota Twins, 2-1, in ten innings. "I feel that without enough occasional starts to be sharper coming off the bench, my continued presence as a player would be an unfair distraction to my teammates and their success as a team is what the ultimate goal should be."
It's all right to indulge Griffey one little white lie. He's earned the right to think he could still make a contribution on the field if he got more than a start or three here and there. You will note his phrasing: nobody in the front office asked him to call it a career. Perhaps manager Don Wakamatsu, who is rumoured to have asked Griffey about retirement once or twice in recent weeks, shepherded the inevitable by keeping his future Hall of Famer on the pine.
Like Willie Mays, who loved the game too much to let it go when his body and his age began telling him he just couldn't be Willie Mays anymore, Griffey---who didn't have half of Mays's then-underreported burdens in heart and mind---tried to tell his body and his age where to shove it just a little too much longer than he should have. The body and the years have cruel ways of obeying that command, usually by shoving it right back down your own throat.
For over a decade he patrolled center field for Seattle as though the host city had been built with his name engraved in the foundations. And when he wasn't scaling tall center field fences in less than a single bound, he was hitting balls for distance with a swing that seemed struck right from the debris of the phenoms who preceded but never quite got themselves into his world.
Think of every power plant you saw before this son of a valued outfielder and batsman (Junior has made bloody well sure that it's going to take better men than he to match the record he shares with his father for most bombs by a father-and-son combination) first turned up in the Mariners' teal-and-white with a grin straight from Romper Room and thunder in his wrists.
None of them matched Griffey's consistency, few of them had as many tools as he did and used every last one of them, and maybe a couple of them equaled his passion for the game itself. If the old saying is that a fellow learned to say hello when it was time to say goodbye, Griffey had the opposite problem. He learned to say goodbye when he wasn't really finished saying hello again.
His seasons in Cincinnati, the city where his father had performed well enough for a series of classic and champion if not necessarily beloved teams, should have been kinder to him. That rash of astonishing enough injuries, inflicted upon a young man (do we really still think of Griffey as a young man?) who incurred every last one of them merely by playing the game the only way he knew how to play it, provoked unconscionable criticism from people who should have known better.
By the time he went to the White Sox, people were talking about him they way people once talked about Mickey Mantle and probably still do, when all is said and done: what might have been. Oh, the home runs he didn't get to hit; oh, the records he didn't get to break; oh, the obliteration of everything before him that he didn't get to commit.
"Maybe he wasn't as good as he could have been," Rob Neyer wrote before Junior's retirement announcement had settled in. "But he was better than almost everyone else." One slab of evidence: Griffey's Wins Above Replacement is surpassed by only three players: Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Jeff Bagwell. Two bear the taint of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances; somewhat idle rumours have surrounded the third with nothing substantial taking hold.
Lest you think that's a piece of spitting in the wind, be reminded that no less than Jeff Pearlman's incisive enough, meticulously enough researched Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero, cites an exchange between Junior and Himself in 1998, just after Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa---two more who have had the taint attached to their legacies---finished the home run chase that many thought Junior himself would join up in one or another season.
Himself: As much as I've complained about McGwire and [Jose] Canseco and all of the bull with steroids, I'm tired of fighting it. I turn 35 this year. I've got three or four seasons left, and I wanna get paid. I'm just gonna start using some hard-core stuff and hopefully it won't hurt my body. Then I'll get out of the game and be done with it.
Junior (who said subsequently that he didn't remember the conversation): If I can't do it myself, then I'm not going to do it. When I'm retired, I want them to at least be able to say, "There's no question in our minds that he did it the right way." I have kids. I don't want them to think their dad's a cheater.
Griffey wasn't always the go-to guy for the press, especially when his body began betraying him at shockingly regular intervals in Cincinnati. But not always being the go-to guy doesn't equal not always being the stand-up man. What some interpreted as aloofness was probably nothing more than a mature enough acceptance that he didn't have to be the center of attention every day, all day.
He had his best crack at passing Roger Maris in 1994, when he had 32 home runs as of 24 June. Yet he hit only eight from that point until the strike launched. We'll never know whether he eased up a bit because the heat of the spotlight got a little too hot for him. Baseball was his passion, not his controller.
Even his retirement timing seemed a textbook exercise in declining to be the center of attention. (You may note that there'll be no garish Ken Griffey, Jr. retirement tour around the league.) He dropped his not-so-little bombshell on the same day baseball got slapped upside the head with the Armando Galarraga/Jim Joyce controversy.
Classily enough, Joyce admitted he blew a call at first base that should have secured Galarraga's perfect game, with the Detroit Tiger pitcher covering at first, yet, in a play even Stevie Wonder could have seen was a no-questions-asked out. Not only did the uproar demanding replay for more than just the postseason return with vengeance enough that Bud Selig at this writing is said to be pondering whether to overturn the call and award the perfecto, but Don Denkinger himself---who first spoke out about it last year---has renewed his own call for replay.
Griffey retired seventy-five years to the day after Babe Ruth called it a career, and Ruth may have gotten a more brutal push out: the Boston Braves, in fact, asked for Ruth to acquiesce in his release before he finally decided enough was enough. But Griffey has more in common with Mantle, Mays, DiMaggio, and Hank Aaron: line up all the greats and then try to tell yourself any of them were as complete a package of position player as those five.
Now, ask yourself how many of them could be said to have saved a franchise. There go Mantle, Mays, DiMaggio, and Aaron off the list. (Don't go there, Ruthophiles: the Yankees were stepping slowly but surely out of their also-ran status and were in fact predicted to have a clean shot at winning the 1920 American League pennant before they landed Ruth.)
Griffey isn't going anywhere. And he isn't taking that mad dash home with the division series-winning run in 1995 (against the Yankees, incidentally) with him, either. It is to mourn that among his accomplishments will be his dethroning of Ernie Banks as the greatest position player never to have gotten to play in a World Series. Perhaps Griffey will allow the same thought to cross his mind, even for a moment, as he drives toward his Florida home.
So Griffey didn't speak publicly the way he spoke privately to Barry Bonds. He didn't have to. The way he played the game before his body betrayed him, and in enough moments the way he played the game while trying to tell his body where to shove it, said more. So did the way he made his peace with the team that raised him and will surely have a relationship with him the rest of his life. About the player and---was it really that easy to forget he was the Kid in nickname and on-field exuberance alone?---about the man.
That still-boyish looking fellow crossing these United States for home can think about that behind the wheel, too. And if he allows that famous toothy smile to split his face in half the rest of the way home thanks to thoughts such as that, he earned that right years before he got behind the wheel for the journey.
Wish him all good things in retirement. To my knowledge, he didn’t do drugs, booze or broads...or for some other reason get his name in the media for anything other than baseball.
His home runs were legit, he didn't shoot steroids like the other bums.
First ballot Hall of Famer!
Maybe some MLB Team will make him a coach or Manager.
My other favorite Junior memory was once when Lou Pinella was throwing a huge tantrum, Junior and Buhner were watching from right field, gloves up to their faces, convulsed. They were like two mischievous kids, eyes twinkling.
To sports, and Seattle baseball, his is iconic like say Kirby Puckett was to Minnesota or Tony Gwynn in San Diego.
Prettiest swing in baseball. I’ll miss his enthusiasm for the game.
Looks Like KC or His old team Seattle need a good Manager.
Loved the way he whipped that bat through the strike zone. A signature swing if there ever was one.
Maybe some MLB Team will make him a coach or Manager.He'd make an excellent coach. His knowledge of the outfield and of hitting is invaluable. I'd imagine he'd need about a year or two to get playing the game out of his system before he might consider it. The word is, as I mentioned in the essay, that he'll have a formal relationship with the Mariners for pretty much the rest of his life. So he has nothing but time to clear his mind and heart and then make whatever move he might make.
I hate when great players become managers. It almost never works out. Think of Ted Williams and the Washington Senators...It worked out so horribly that the Splinter was named Manager of the Year in the American League for 1969.
Williams only had problems in the last couple of years the Senators were in Washington, when owner Bob Short was pretty much turning the club topsy-turvy with insane deals and moves the better, perhaps, to hype his hankering to get the hell out no matter what he was saying publicly.
I can name you a few other great players who became serviceable managers, at least. Gil Hodges, for one. Bill Terry, for another. Yogi Berra was a good manager whose organisations (the 1964 Yankees especially, and shamefully) undermined him when all was said and done. Lou Piniella was an excellent player and became a World Series-winning manager.
The word out of the Cubs organisation (ok, ok, I know) is that Ryne Sandberg, a Hall of Fame player, is proving an excellent manager in their system who just might get to manage the Cubs or elsewhere in the Show in the future. And it's easy to forget that Joe Torre as a player alone is a borderline Hall of Famer; as a player and manager he just might make it after all on a combine entry. Red Schoendienst proved a Hall of Fame player and went on to become a World Series-winning manager. Hall of Famer Frank Robinson was a fine manager who probably deserved better when he did manage. Bob Lemon was a Hall of Fame pitcher and a good manager (he won a World Series managing the Yankees) who likewise deserved better as a manager. (Come to think of it, how many pitchers, period, never mind Hall of Fame pitchers, make useful, never mind winning or great managers?)
What about this one: http://losangeles.angels.mlb.com/team/coach_staff_bio.jsp?c_id=ana&coachorstaffid=121919
Loved the way he whipped that bat through the strike zone. A signature swing if there ever was one.If you think about it, Ken Griffey, Jr. became the player everyone once thought Darryl Strawberry might become, before the crush of overheated expectations and the furies of his childhood turned into substance abuse, injuries, and a truckload of might-have-beens for Strawberry. These two had the most picturesque swings I've seen in a lifetime of watching baseball, and I'm old enough to have seen Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Willie McCovey (who had a pretty swing himself), Ernie Banks, Mike Schmidt (who may have been the most underappreciated Hall of Famer of them all and probably should be in the conversation about the greatest all-around player of the post-World War II generations), Willie Stargell (who had one of the ugliest swings I ever saw, but damn if it didn't work wonders), Frank Howard (they didn't call him Capital Punishment for nothing), Eddie Mathews, Dick Allen (who admits today that had he not mishandled the very real racism he faced in his early seasons he just might have been a Hall of Famer), Ron Santo (who does deserve to be in the Hall of Fame), Reggie Jackson, and Billy Williams in their primes.
If you were going to engineer a textbook swing, Ken Griffey, Jr. might be your model.
Of course, people perform rather splendidly even if their swings are the kind that would send a coach to the rye bottle. God only knows how often the story was told how John McGraw was so petrified about some nimrod in the minors possibly ruining Mel Ott's unorthodox swing that he kept Ott next to him on the bench to learn the game for a couple of seasons before turning him loose to become the National League's home run king. I imagine people in the Cardinal organisation had the same fears about someone potentially ruining Stan Musial.
Or, on the other side of the plate, just imagine if someone in the Giants organisation had been fool enough to think that someone needed to teach "legitimate" pitching technique to Juan Marichal . . .
He was a great one and should have the HR record now if it wasn’t for those constantly occurring injuries.
Okay, you can cherry pick items and make excuses. Lets look at bottom line, manager wins and losses:
Ted Williams: 273 W 364 L .429 winning percentage
Frank Robinson: 1065 W 1176 L .475 winning percentage
I agree with you about Lou Pinella and Yogi Berra. Notice I did say it almost never works out. You mention Joe Torre. While I agree that he was a good and above average major leaguer, he was in no way a boderline HOF’er. I think you’re stretching it a little there. However he is an interesting case in managing. Before he became manager of the Yankees he had a below .500 managerial record. Did he all of the sudden become a genious when he managed the Yankees or did being able to spend on anyone he want help out?
Anyways, back to the point. I am not one that believes that a manager has that much of an impact overall. Not as much as a football head coach. I think a lot of guys could manage in the major leagues and be just as successful as the current crop of guys. The reason most of them get their gigs is because of who they know and their reputations, not necessarily because they are so much better than some guy toiling in the minors. The reason I made my statement is not necessarily a reflection on those guys manager skills. It’s that I hate seeing great players being diminished like that. Like watching Willie Mays play centerfield for the Mets.
See my post 15
Remember hearing him being interviewed about five years ago. He said he had never been on the DL.
It seems like baseball swings are taught these days and there is very little personal variation with the swing itself. It’s all pretty formulaic. I would point to Charlie Lau when he was hitting guru for the KC Royals during the George Brett era as the man that standardized hitting.
How many players do we see now with a slightly opened stance; short, or non-existent stride; compact swing; and a top-hand release? Just about everybody does it that way now.
Junior just generated so much bat speed that if he got square on the ball it was going to go a long way. Different kind of power since he was a long skinny kid. And yet you couldn’t really tie him up by pitching inside.
I saw the entire division series with the Yankees...when Seattle won. Wow, that was RAUCUS.
It's a shame this CLASS ACT can no longer play.
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