One of our all-time favorites made it to Cooperstown this week, and no one in recent memory is more deserving. Congratulations to the great Vladimir Guerrero, the happy warrior who expressed his love for life by playing baseball with the joy of a child, the wicked swing of a samurai, and the best throwing arm since Roberto Clemente. The numbers are there, but the sheer enjoyment of watching Vladimir Guerrero play baseball went 'way beyond statistics. Like Clemente, he had a natural gift for making solid contact with a pitched ball regardless of where it went, and once he hit that thing it might go anywhere, too. He's 6-3 but with those legs looked even bigger as he swung his seven-league stride around the bases; you'd swear he stretched a single into a double in just three steps. Long ones! And out there in right, he'd be ready for anyone trying to go first to third: for seven straight years, double-digits in assists. Most were afraid to run on him; those that weren't, well, he got 'em.
Almost everyone has likely forgotten this by now, but as the 2003 season wound down and the Giants once again screwed the pooch in the postseason, there was talk, serious talk, of free-agent Vlad coming to San Francisco. "Vladimir Guerrero and Barry Bonds on the same team!"... the mind's eye fairly watered with the possibilities. Giants skipper Felipe Alou had managed Vlad in Montreal and loved him like a son; oh, it was a match made in heaven. And how we hoped!
Of course, as we all know, it didn't happen, and an embittered few cried "sellout." But truth be told, after toiling in the far outpost of Montreal for seven years, Vlad joined the Angels because the Latin community there welcomed him like no other. He promptly led them to five division titles in six seasons; his lowest average in LA was .295, in his last year at age 34. And yes, we saw him one last time in the 2010 World Series, his arm all but gone, his majestic stride slowed. He could still hit, all right: .300, 29 homers, 115 RBI, and 11th in the MVP voting, as a DH, at age 35. But the Giants fed him a steady diet of bouncing balls in the dirt and he went 1-for-14 and didn't even start Game Five against Tim Lincecum. Worse, after only 18 games in the outfield all year, the Rangers put him in Pac Bell Park's spacious right field for Games One and Two. It wasn't so easy to watch, even for a Giants fan. Vlad Guerrero was one guy you just never wanted to see on the decline.
He swung at everything because he could hit everything; a .318 career average doesn't lie. And despite his reputation, most seasons his walks outnumbered his strikeouts and at his peak, he'd walk about 10% of the time and shoot his OBP up well past .400. Thinking about it now, we wonder how many of those walks were intentional. A lot, you bet.
Congratulations to a great player, a good man, a brother in Christ, and one who really did look like a man playing a kid's game, in the best possible way.
Our other inductees, Chipper Jones, Jim Thome, and Trevor Hoffman, all are deserving as well. Jones' numbers parallel Vlad's over roughly the same time period-- a few more hits, a few more homers, a little less average, excellent defense at a different position. His teams won all the time, unlike Vlad's; both guys won, and deserved, MVP awards. Chipper's best season may have been 2008 (.364, .470, .574), long after all those great Braves seasons had passed; the team lost 90 games and he was still 12th in the MVP vote. He was 36 then, the same age at which Vlad would choose to retire four years later, plenty of base hits still in him had he chosen to stay on. One of the best third basemen ever, Chipper Jones unselfishly moved to left field for two years to let the club get Vinnie Castilla's bat into the lineup and try to grab one more ring before that 14-year string ran out; afterward, he moved back to third and was great again. That's a man you want on your team.
Anyone who can hit 600 home runs in the major leagues deserves to be in the Hall of Fame, and so Jim Thome joins the greatest of the greats. He is so indelibly associated with those fine Cleveland teams of the 1990s that it's something of a shock to realize he played 22 years for six different teams-- did you know he was a LA Dodger for all of seventeen at-bats at the tail end of the 2009 season, and faced one of his old teams, the Phillies, in the NLCS?-- and was still averaging a homer every 14 ABs at age 39.
We'll be blunt here; we were never fans of Trevor Hoffman, and that goes double for 1993 and afterward. But he has the numbers and it would be silly to deny them, not when every one of his peers is already in the Hall. He deserves his spot as one of the best for a long, long time at a position where few make it past one or two seasons.
Congratulate yourself if you made it this far: Tim Brown of Yahoo Sports has a fine and funny article about Vladimir Guerrerro right here: https://sports.yahoo.com/theater-vladimir-guerrero-232105973.html
And yes, we've been paying close, extremely close attention to the recent moves by our own favorite ballclub. We've been saturating the Comments board of the Giants website with our humble opinions, and we're sure to have a screed befitting all the action once the team is done dealing. Right you are, we don't believe they're done yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment