Ken Griffey Jr. retired today. For those of you that don’t understand, Griffey was for a period of 10 or 12 years widely considered the best baseball player on the planet. I won’t go into specifics like how he won 10 gold gloves and hit 630 home runs, because any baseball fan of my generation will tell you had it not been for various injury plagued seasons and a strike, he would hold both the single season home run record as well as the career home runs record.
As a kid I wanted to be Ken Griffey Jr. I wore my Seattle Mariners hat backwards during BP and pick up games, wanted to get my ear pierced, wore number 24, and even modeled my swing after his swing. Even playing baseball video games, I would be the Mariners just to play as Junior. He was so ferocious, that my brother had to intentionally walk him or else I was hitting it out. And even though I eventually lost interest in playing baseball, I never lost interest in him.
So even though countless sports writers will put it more eloquently than I could ever hope to, I really don’t care. Because they will never be able to accurately describe what watching him play meant to me. He goes the way of Magic, MJ, and Barry Sanders. And to all you young kids out there laughing at me you just wait. Soon it will be Kobe, Pujols, and LeBron. Then you will know how all of us old guys feel today.
I'm sorry...all I read was blah blah baseball blah blah blah :)
ReplyDeleteI understand what you are talking about Bobby, it really is the end of an era.
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