Junior Slips Quietly Away

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.

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.

It's probably easy to forget just how good a player Joe Torre was. However, by the Bill James measurements for the Hall regarding position players---the Batting Standards and the Batting Monitor---Joe Torre meets 40 percent of the batting standards by which you would spot a Hall of Famer with the average Hall of Famer meeting 50 percent of them, while scoring a 90 on the Monitor where an average Hall of Famer would score 100.

Torre was also a nine-time All-Star---in an era in which fans did not vote for the All-Star teams, having lost the vote after ballot-box stuffing out of Cincinnati in the 1950s, and in which there was no way to get away with accusations of favouritism sentimental or otherwise considering that he was never selected to an All-Star team likely to be managed by his own manager.

Defence? Torre was an above-average defencive player at three positions at which he played more than five hundred games apiece during his career, even though he wasn't necessarily a great defencive player at any of them. But if you can play defence anywhere above your league average at three defencive positions two of which may be the two most demanding in baseball (though I'm never entirely sure whether center field shouldn't be tied with third base at least) . . .

That sure looks like a borderline Hall of Famer to a lot of people. Including me. I don't know if I'd advocate making him a Hall of Famer on his playing record alone, but Joe Torre was awful close to having been a Hall of Fame-caliber player.

[Torre] 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 genius [sic] when he managed the Yankees or did being able to spend on anyone he want help out?

Torre has a precedent as a Yankee manager who didn't win a thing in the major leagues until he became a Yankee manager: Casey Stengel. Stengel got one opportunity pre-Yankee that Torre didn't get: in the years when the Pacific Coast League really was as good as a third major league in all but name, Stengel got to manage the Oakland Oaks to a league title. It's how he got on the Yankee radar in the first place.

There's an argument that with some if not quite a few managers you're not going to make your kind of baseball work unless you have the kind of players who can execute that kind of baseball. With his pre-Oaks clubs, Stengel had maybe one or two such players to work with. With the Yankees, he had those players practically at his beckon call. He also had something most managers today don't have anymore---Stengel made as many of the personnel moves as the front office when he saw players who couldn't execute to his liking and chances to get those who could. Managers had that kind of authority in Stengel's generation; they really haven't in Torre's. (Hell, they can't even discipline players in Torre's generation the way they could in Stengel's, and managers today who think about such discipline often as not run into recalcitrance in the front office.)

But whatever his kind of baseball is, Torre didn't have those players in New York (with the Mets), Atlanta (one fluke division winner notwithstanding), or St. Louis; with the Yankees, he did. And when he did, he won.

Don't make the mistake (God knows how many make the mistake), though, of thinking that all he needed was the Steinbrenner money to win with those Yankees. The nucleus of those World Series winners was a) homegrown talent (believe it or not, and I do wish people would look it up for themselves rather than refuse to let the facts get in the way of a pleasant prejudice) and b) shrewd horse trading. Let's put it this way: Balance between the years in which the Yankees won those World Series with Torre at the helm and the years in which they didn't---the Series winners were dominated by the homegrowns and the traded-fors; the clubs who got nudged or shoved out of the postseason or lost Series had more of the actual or alleged Big Signings on them. (And anyone who thinks mere spending equals championship clubs ought to take a real close look at whatever's passing for my New York Mess---er, Mets---these days . . . )

Some managers make an impact, some don't. (Some don't even get the chance, really, if you know anything about how the Oakland Athletics in the Billy Beane era have been doing business: Beane makes it plain enough that his manager is going to manage but one way---Beane's way.)

I hate seeing great players diminished, too. I don't think Ted Williams was that badly diminished by his time managing the Senators, even if he was up against an impossible wall after his Manager of the Year season. (You'd almost wish to be the fly on the wall when Teddy Ballgame was learning he was going to be getting such help as the falling Denny McLain, to name one example . . . )

Frank Robinson may have been a better manager than his overall won-lost record. He nearly won a division title with the 1989 Baltimore Orioles and he took the 2002 Montreal Expos to a second-place finish in a year that the Atlanta Braves broke away from the pack. He was certainly a more successful manager than Ted Williams in terms of winning percentage, but I'm not entirely convinced that either man would have turned out the same way had either or both been afforded better or at least different players.

And I'll guarantee you that neither one of them would have blown a pennant by burning out his regulars or his pitching staff. (Leo Durocher, anyone?)

I almost don't want to think of what would have happened if Charlie Lau or Walt Hriniak had ever caught hold of people like Mel Ott, Stan Musial, Ty Cobb (you think that split-handed grip would have flown with Churlish Charlie or Uncle Walt?), Hank Aaron (the reverse-handed grip he started his career using), Mike Schmidt (I can just hear Churlish Charlie now: Sit on it, Swivelhips!), Jack Clark (The Ripper used to pump his back leg as he launched into his swing, a kind of secondary power generator and a lot of his bombs weren't mere homers, they were conversation pieces), or Darryl Strawberry (who had an almost Ott-like front leg kick when he swung) . . .

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.

His kind of bat speed wasn't just good for hitting for distance---he was quick enough to hit one down the lines if need be, hard enough to elude an oncoming outfielder. He was also pretty good at dumping balls into the gaps if he took a pitcher's measure and figured he wasn't going to get much of anything to try driving the distance.

As for pitching him inside, the only way to get him out inside was to pitch him above the belt. You pitch him inside between his belt and his knees and, when his swing was right, one of two things would happen: a) He'd rip one right down the right field line; or, b) he'd fist it the other way and usually find himself a hole for a hit. And not necessarily a single base, considering his speed . . .

Prettiest swing I ever saw: A dead heat between Junior and the Straw. Ugliest swing I ever saw: Rich Gedman, for a time the Red Sox's catcher.

Most monstrous home run I ever saw: Dave Kingman, in spring training 1975, watching a contest between the Mets and the Yankees---whose pitcher was the freshly-made-millionaire Catfish Hunter. Kingman caught hold of a Hunter slider and drove it over the wall, out of the yard, higher than the six tall palm trees behind left field, and the ball didn't land until it reached second base on the practise field behind the field on which the game was played. Not even the blast Jack Clark hit to break Los Angeles's heart when Tommy Lasorda decided it was smart to pitch to him with first base open and the Dodgers an out away from the 1985 World Series---and they still don't know whether that one landed in Pasadena or in Casey Stengel's old back yard in Glendale---was that monstrous. Not even the punt Darryl Strawberry hit in Shea Stadium to lead off the bottom of the eighth in Game Seven, 1986 Series, to give the Mets a very badly-needed first insurance run (Jesse Orosco's shocking fake-bunt RBI single provided the other insurance later in the inning) was that monstrous.

Best line I ever saw about such a bomb: Roger Angell, about the Kingman shot: It occurred to me that the real impact of Kingman's blow was to speed Hunter's acceptance by his new teammates. There is nothing like a little public humiliation to make a three-million-dollar executive seem loveable.

If only the pitcher in question could have thrown the slider the way the pitchers who bedeviled the Splinter threw it to him . . .

Some managers, whatever kind of players they were, have no clue about pitching even when they become manager. Classic examples: Tommy Lasorda (who was a pitcher himself, once, and really should have known better) and Pete Rose. Anyone who wanted to beat Lasorda or Rose just had to force his way into the L.A. or the Cincinnati bullpen, where their relievers would be gassed when they got into the game with their managers having no clue that warming them up, sitting them down, warming them up again, and repeating that a few times before finally bringing them in, blissfully ignorant of the possibility that those pitchers might already have thrown enough pitches to equal a complete-game start.

"I liked Pete," Whitey Herzog once wrote, "but I loved managing against him."

The White Rat went the opposite way: his rule was that if he warmed you up in the pen but didn't bring you in, you had the rest of the day or night off. He wasn't going to gas his bullpen like that. No relief pitcher on a Herzog-managed team ever experienced fatigue or arm or shoulder trouble, but whenever he got relievers back from Rose or Lasorda teams, he'd hear stories about how they were wrecking the bullpen staffs. (Going to the Dodgers may have been the worst thing that ever happened to Todd Worrell, and nobody should wonder that the once-famous Cincinnati "Nasty Boys" bullpen trio of Dibble, Charlton, and Myers all experienced arm and shoulder miseries later in their careers: they'd first joined up when Rose was still managing the Reds . . . )

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