Posted on 06/26/2002 8:24:32 PM PDT by 2Trievers
Darryl Kile, RIP: Everyman Mourned As A Star
How otherworldly, it seemed for a short but telling while. A pitcher barely a grain beyond his league's average, in a season in which his league's pitching improved noticeably enough, should be struck by death on active seasonal duty, seemingly out of nowhere, and mourned as though the grandest star were stolen from baseball's sky.
Darryl Kile had been a pitcher of occasional height and hour, performing usefully enough to lack no major league employment before his twelfth season ended with such shattering abruptness. And yet the news whipped around baseball as the wind around Wrigley Field, where his St. Louis Cardinals' game with the Chicago Cubs was called on account of his death. By day's end Kile had cut into his country's grain more deeply than he had in life beyond the clubhouses of his employment and the shelter of his family.
The game start had delayed without account and Wrigley Field fans were puzzled but patient until Cub catcher Joe Girardi took a microphone behind home plate. He delivered the news in a voice choking with grief. The crowd waiting patiently now stood empathetically to mourn with the visiting team so cruelly rent. It was a very long time to my knowledge since baseball last saw fans of a longtime, occasionally harsh rival give that rival a mourner's embrace.
Kile even became a matter of debate across no few Internet forums, wherein the question arose soon and disgracefully enough as to what right had we to mourn a man not our husband, father, son, sibling, or teammate.
He was far enough from the most incandescent among the boys and men we watch and enjoy at play in baseball's existential act and rhythm. It was said his two seasons pitching in the Colorado purgatorio compromised him as it does too many, but a close gaze upon his earned run averages suggests something slightly awry in the perception. Remove from his first eleven seasons his two in Colorado and his earned run average is .10 below his league - but include the Colorado seasons and it is .13 below league. And in the season now ended he was .04 below league.
But within few enough hours after his death became known, his loss became one of our own as surely as his fellows'. We have strained enough of late to find the man we might respect behind the ballplayer we might admire, in a game so stained by the sleazeball down the pipe. One was taken to see teammates incumbent and past, enough of whom remained friends, speak of him foremost as a teammate, friend, and man, and as a pitcher almost incidentally by comparison.
They spoke without pretense about a man who embraced highest ace and most modest scrub alike in any clubhouse where he played; a man who savoured his fellows without their stations, offering his hand to anyone needing a guide through baseball's often testy navigations. Death came prematurely to a fundamentally decent Everyman who pretended nothing of himself and met his world on similar terms, and if our grief was anything it was that which wished it might have known more of his like around our badly enough compromised game.
Such decency lost often moves men of dubious bearing to transcend the failures that rend them before their peers and constituents. Bud Selig moved and postponed the day's Cardinals-Cubs game in a gesture magnanimous for exposing a heretofore undetectable empathy toward the men whose play irrigates his domain. If he affronted that crowd which fumed because the two clubs should have been left to lump it for the guts and the glory, he had yet engaged those who distinguish between sport and war, who understand baseball season is long and unfatal enough to withstand one game's postponement on humane behalf. Let his tug upon Darryl Kile's impact as a man stand to date as Selig's finest hour among too many of dubious cost.
The lump-it-and-go crowd shall have to settle for Jeff Bagwell. His friend and former Houston Astros teammate's death had wracked him enough to withdraw from that night's starting lineup against the Milwaukee Brewers. But he stepped to the plate pinch hitting in the extra inning and rapped the game-winning base hit.
And Darryl Kile, whose decency transcended his pitching delivery, was last seen pitching as only fate's singular perversities could design, starting on the night the Cardinals' broadcasting bellwether had passed at last. Kile had worn a small black patch with Jack Buck's initials on his right sleeve. Buck had gone down swinging after long extra innings; Kile in three days would take a line drive to his body. Neither loss failed to hit where it hurt.
Otherwise...
Their Games Called, Too. These, to my knowledge, are the only other major league baseball players to die of natural or medically-related causes during a seaon while they were still on active major league rosters:
Ernie (Tiny) Bonham. Pitcher, New York Yankees, Pittsburgh Pirates; a 21-game winner for the 1942 Yankees. He died during emergency appendectomy surgery. 36 years old. 15 September 1949.
Harry (The Golden Greek) Agganis. First baseman, Boston Red Sox. Early in his second season, showing more the potential that provoked the Red Sox to sign the former two-sport college star, Agganis contracted pneumonia and died of an arterial blood clot. 26 years old. 27 June 1955.
Dick Wantz. Pitcher, California Angels. Rookie reliever made the team with an exemplary spring training; gave up two runs on three hits in his first and final appearance for the club, before he died of a brain hemorrhage. 25 years old. 13 May 1965.
Walter Bond. Outfielder/first baseman, Cleveland Indians, Houston Astros, Minnesota Twins. After he couldn't live up to his early hype in Cleveland (The Sporting News predicted he would be the 1960 American League Rookie of the Year), he had his career year with the 'Stros in 1964: 20 home runs, 85 runs batted in, 228 total bases, .420 slugging percentage, 138 runs scored in 143 games. Bond was diagnosed with leukemia during 1967 season with the Twins, though he may have had the illness longer, and died toward the end of the season. 29 years old. 14 September 1967.
They Might Not Be Giants? Barry Bonds believes he is entitled to make his $25 million. "Is entitled," not "Has earned." Does it still surprise people that he cannot get better than mere admiration even in his own clubhouse?
Manager Dusty Baker, saying he is surprised how often the intentional walks work when the other guys give Bonds the passes, has irked the fellow who usually bats behind Bonds. "I think we've dones all right dealing with the amount of times Barry's been walked. I think it's pretty chickenshit of clubs across the league walking him so many times," says Jeff Kent, who doesn't say what he thinks about just why the strategy does work so often.
Triple Doubles? Arizona first baseman Mark Grace, on how he reached 500 lifetime doubles: "It's been more a case of turning triples into doubles. I hit them and a parachute goes out."
The Question Before The Diamond District's House: Why don't Donald Fehr and his Players' Association leaders try a proposition upon the owners like this: "Tell you what: We'll let you test for steroids at random, if you guys cut the bullshit and open the books - all the way"?
©2002 Jeff Kallman
However, in his nearly two-and-a-half seasons with St. Louis, Darryl Kile was very good, well above average: 41-24, a .631 winning percentage, with a 3.54 ERA. Contrast that with the two preceding years in Colorado: 21-30, .412 winning %, 5.84 ERA.
Kile had off-season shoulder surgery, so he got off to a slow start this year. His record this year was 5-4, 3.72, but he had really picked it up in the last month, was pitching great, and looked like he might end up with numbers like last year (16-11, 3.09; in 2000, he was 20-9, 3.91).
So I think those two "rockie" years ('98-'99) really skew his career statistics.
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