Much will be said about the players who did not make the Hall of Fame on Wednesday because of the belief that they cheated with performance-enhancing drugs. How did this become their day?
This moment should belong to the player who, in his era, best symbolized respect for the game in a time when it was routinely dishonored. Ken Griffey Jr., one of the greatest sluggers (630 homers), one of the most daring center fielders (10 Gold Gloves) and one of the best all-around ballplayers who ever lived, will be remembered as the honest one. That’s probably part of why he got the highest percentage of votes in Hall of Fame history — 99.3 percent.
In a period when many, including his friend-but-rival Barry Bonds, appeared to do everything possible to break the records of such legends as Hank Aaron and play as if they were still 28 years old when they were 40, Griffey took a less-traveled road. His final decade — still good, no longer sublime — was a dignified battle against steady decline because of injuries, just like the previous century of normal men.
You can’t prove a negative, so you can’t prove Griffey never took PEDs. But he’s the best bet we have. One reason those “others” don’t belong in Cooperstown is because he so clearly does. Now he’s there. Can a bronze plaque have a hat on backward?
“I don’t lift weights. Never have,” Griffey said back in 1998, a year after he had hit 56 home runs and was named MVP. “I probably can’t bench press 200 pounds. The barrel of my bat is probably bigger than my biceps. Flexibility is the key. It’s the rubber band effect. Pull them suckers way back.”
Then the 6-foot-3, 195-pound Griffey would play golf with Tiger Woods in his prime and against Michael Jordan and, sometimes, outdrive both of them.
Of all the sublime talents of his generation, Griffey was the one who played with graceful exuberance while relishing jokes with teammates more than public attention. He also was the one who ran into walls (or went far above them) because he found the temptation of a highlight catch equal to any NBA dunk or NFL touchdown grab — and too irresistible to pass up.
Wise? Maybe not. Necessary, if you were “The Kid,” apparently. Even if he broke both wrists, one requiring a four-inch metal plate and seven screws.
Having stood beside his father — all-star Ken Griffey Sr. — in the clubhouses of some of the great Reds and Yankees teams of the 1970s and 1980s, amid Hall of Famers aplenty, Junior was exposed to the entire template of playing styles and baseball temperaments. He evolved as an extreme example of one type of player — the all-out all-the-time set-the-sky-afire star who was The Anointed One all his life. Bryce Harper has lived a similar baseball youth. Such players tend to have amazing years but also tend to be the ones who get hurt.
To say that such players have a conscious daily choice may be incorrect. Sometimes personal identity and athletic style are too close to separate.
Play free association with Griffey. Babe Ruth: “He had fun.” Roger Maris: “His hair fell out.” What did Griffey’s father teach him? “Rule 1: Don’t show up anybody on the field. Rule 2: Have fun.”
Few have been given a better code to play by or a harder task in actually doing it. Griffey was blessed with such enormous talent that, when he was drafted No. 1 overall out of high school, he was called “the best prospect ever.” Scouts analyzed film of his liquid yet quick swing, with the bat staying on plane throughout the strike zone yet finishing full and high, and declared it “perfect.”
His mother once told me that when he was 15 he threw a tantrum after popping up. Mythology holds that he had never previously made an out in an organized game. Whether that tale is true, his mother says she then told him, “It’s okay. Your dad makes outs all the time.”
“I’m not my dad,” Griffey said. “I don’t make outs.”
It took Griffey years — and considerable psychological trauma in his late teens — to find some peace between his talent (and his love of using it) and the constant demands — spoken or assumed — by everyone around him that he would smash every record in history. Willie Mays, who ended with 660 homers and a dozen Gold Gloves in center, was the name usually mentioned by way of comparison.
“I felt like everybody was yelling at me,” he once told me, describing those years. That’s when he decided to wear his hat backward whenever he was at the ballpark — except during the games themselves. It became both his trademark and also a kind of defiant indifference to the measuring sticks of others.
“The only person you measure yourself by is you,” he said. “I have to play the only way I know how to play, and whatever happens, happens.”
Even a powerful preference for joy has a price. Baseball loves all-time records and rings. Griffey loved incandescent moments and, if baseball can reach it, split seconds of art. He thought the B&O Warehouse at Camden Yards was there to hit a ball off — and, once, he did. And he thought a clubhouse was a place for comrades to talk their craft and joke. But he wasn’t a driving, fierce leader.
As a superstar he could have signed with powerhouses like those with which his dad had won World Series. Instead, Junior spent his career in lovely Seattle and Cincinnati, which felt like home. But he never made a World Series. In a sense he has been forgotten for more than 15 years since he was named to the all-century team at 29.
Be great. But be happy. Be public but private, too. Quite a challenge. To the degree he could, Griffey wanted baseball to make him as happy as it made those who watched him. To do it, he discovered that he excelled most when he tried to prove nothing, when he didn’t add up every stat or even every award. Sometimes he wanted it both ways and felt like he didn’t get full respect. But he had chosen.
Away from the park, he often carried a briefcase, wore unpretentious clothes and was delighted at how little he was recognized. Something in him may have wanted to stay a few steps farther from the fire of fame than his hyper-ambitious golf buddies, Woods and Jordan. They carried their sports. Griffey just played his.
But how he played. With Hall of Fame performance and 99.3 percent pure.
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