SEATTLE – By the end, there was no body there. Just an eye, a heart, two hands and a foot. But when you think about it, that’s about all Jay Buhner really needed.
An eye to see the baseball. A heart to drive him. Two hands to swing a bat and to catch and throw. And a good right foot to motivate a teammate now and then.
The biggest thing of all, though, was that heart.
It was immeasurable.
That and his soul. Oh yes, the man had heart and soul. And for more than a decade, he provided both for the Seattle Mariners.
Neither could be broken. If only that’s the way it worked with the body. But it isn’t. The body gets dinged and damaged and eventually doomed.
For the athlete, one life ends and another begins. For the man known as “Bone,” baseball ended in his mid-30s.
Too young for one so spirited. Too young for one so driven. Too young for one so gripped by the game.
Oh, how he loved the game. Not for the money. Not for the fame.
“I played for the game,” he said. “I simply went out there and tried to play the game the way I thought it should be played.”
He played aggressively. He took chances. He smashed into walls. He dove over them. He dug up more dirt diving for balls than a ditch digger.
And he paid for it. He paid for it with injuries galore.
The doctors patched him up, the trainers rehabbed him and Buhner marched back onto the field, a game old warhorse with a scarred body and a dirty uniform and a kid’s glee to play the game.
By the end of his career, not much of his body was left unscathed. An eye. A heart. Two hands. And a foot.
That’s all that was showing on a screen in a downtown hotel during a luncheon to honor Buhner on Tuesday, several hours before he was inducted into the Seattle Mariners Hall of Fame.
Mariner trainer Rick Griffin was detailing the injuries that Buhner suffered during his 14-year career with Seattle. Griffin started with an entire Buhner body on the screen. As he described each injury, a part of the body disappeared. At the end, there were just these four little islands left in a sea of nothing.
And you wonder what Buhner could have done had he stayed healthy. Four-hundred home runs instead of the 310 he hit? Another couple of hundred RBI on top of the 965 he had?
As it was, he accomplished a lot. With his bat. With his glove. With his arm. With his heart.
“His leadership was invaluable on the team,” said his former manager, Lou Piniella, in town this week with his Tampa Bay Devil Rays. “He was so well respected by his peers, by his teammates.
“When he said something, people in that clubhouse listened and he always had the right message. In the 10 years I was here, I relied on my veteran players a lot to help out with leadership. Jay was always one of the first guys I would go to. This honor he is getting is very well deserved. Very well deserved.”
That it is.
He earned it the hard way – with injuries to just about every conceivable part of his bony body. And he kept on pushing. “When he strained his left hamstring,” Griffin said, “he went to Edgar (Martinez) to see how to run the bases with sore legs.”
There were fractured ulna bones. There were sprained ligaments in his wrist. There were sprained ankles. There was a bruised pelvis. There were bone spurs. There was inflammation in his knee. There was “Tommy John” surgery on his elbow.
Still, he came back and played. Again. And again. And again.
For his career, he batted a modest .254. Disregard the average.
“He was a big-game player,” Piniella said.
The year the M’s put Seattle on the baseball map, 1995, Buhner hit 40 home runs and drove in 121 runs.
Big-game, indeed.
When the M’s started to get hot in August of that year, everyone figured they were playing for the American League wild card. The hell with that, Buhner said. We’re gonna win the division.
His play, his inspiration, Martinez said, was contagious.
“When Jay was at home plate,” Piniella said, “I always felt good things were going to happen.”
When a ball was hit to right field, you always felt Buhner would get it, however uncatchable it might have looked as it came off the bat. My favorite: the grab he made to steal a home run before tumbling over the fence in Fenway Park. That said it all about the kind of player he was. Lay it all out there and see what happens.
In the clubhouse, nobody had more respect. “He was a force,” said Mariner broadcaster Dave Niehaus. “We haven’t had a leader like that since.”
No, they haven’t. But then, characters like Jay Buhner don’t come along often.
He knew people, knew how to motivate them, knew how to “reprimand someone in a nice way,” said Dan Wilson.
“He just always had the right thing to say at the right time,” the M’s veteran catcher added. “He was just the epitome of a clubhouse leader.”
Buhner could get a little testy at times. “I enjoyed watching him get the pinky,” Piniella said with a chuckle. “I really did. I got a kick out of it when he’d have a little tantrum.”
In testimonials by former and current teammates, showed at the luncheon, you got the picture of a man who liked to cut up in the clubhouse by juggling baseballs or instigating stickball games, a man who was as “old school” as they come (“he believed in earning your stripes,” Bret Boone said.), a man who didn’t know the word “loaf.”
“He came to play every single day,” said ex-M’s catcher Dave Valle, “and his uniform showed it.”
Buhner could scare the fainthearted with his bald head and his goatee. But he has a confession: That, he said, is his security blanket.
“Deep down,” he said, “I’m a softy.”
And the sensitive side was about to reveal itself.
His voice breaking, Jay Buhner said, “There’s nothing wrong with crying in baseball, is there?”
No, there isn’t.
Even if you are bad to the Bone.
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