SEATTLE – On the TV in the Mariners clubhouse, Cincinnati Reds manager Bob Boone was addressing the Ken Griffey Jr. “fans are always pickin’ on me” brouhaha.
Mike Cameron glanced up at the screen as he sat at his locker opening a box of new dress shoes. “I feel bad for him,” he said. “I went through the same thing in Cincinnati.”
Someone said it seemed a little unusual that Reds fans would be so tough on one of their own considering Cincinnati is such an old baseball town.
“Yeah, but it’s old-fashioned and it’s close to the Mason-Dixon Line,” Cameron said. “That ought to tell you something.”
Isn’t it ironic that Junior is whining about the treatment Reds fans are giving him and the man who replaced him in center field for the Mariners is being idolized in Seattle?
Griffey went home again and is realizing perhaps he shouldn’t have. Cameron found a new home in the Pacific Northwest and realizes he never had it so good.
“I went to my little kid’s baseball game yesterday,” he said before Tuesday night’s game against Toronto, “and all the families made me a gigantic poster with my picture on it and the whole community signed it.”
Welcome home, Mike Cameron, from your history-making road trip.
That’s the kind of treatment you get when you become the 13th player in major league history to hit four home runs in a game, as Cameron did six days ago in Chicago’s Comiskey Park.
Now he was about to appear before the hometown fans for the first time since his big night. On the flight home from New York on Sunday, he tried to envision what was in store for him when he got to Safeco Field on Tuesday.
“I thought, ‘It’s gonna be crazy,’ ” he said. “The main thing I need to do is be sure that I’m ready to play baseball.”
He recalled his first game back after playing in the All-Star Game last year and he didn’t want a repeat of that. “I came in the next day and I was terrible,” he said, wincing. “I want to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
He had tried to put the 4-homer game behind him, but knew the minute he got to the ballpark that’s all anyone would want to talk about. Sure enough, reporters started arriving at his locker before he even got out of his street clothes, a light blue workout suit with “Phat Farm” on the front.
Streamers and balloons decorated his locker. A clubhouse boy came over to shake his hand as Cameron read a letter from some admirers.
It’s been like this since that night on the South Side of Chicago. Cameron even had White Sox fans cheering him when he came to bat after slugging home runs in his first four at-bats. “Since I’ve been over here (with the M’s), that’s the first time they ever cheered me in Chicago,” said Cameron, who started out in the White Sox organization. “Sometimes special feats take over the competition of the game and I guess that was one of those times.”
This is how nutty it got. White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf was pulling for him to hit his fifth homer. They talked after the game and Reinsdorf said it was the first time he had ever rooted against his own team.
Can you imagine George Steinbrenner doing that?
When Cameron got to New York, Yankee fans brought him back down to earth. “Oh, yeah, they booed me,” he said, laughing. “They booed me to death.”
That’s nothing new. They boo their own players.
He had heard that his home runs were shown on the big screen in Times Square. “They stopped everything … to show the game,” he said. “To take part in that game was an historic moment. The only place better that it could have happened was in New York, but the fact that it happened in Chicago almost made it a little bit sweeter.”
If Cameron felt some pressure going into Yankee Stadium, you can understand why. “I had players watching me like I was going for 70 home runs,” he said. “I tried to tune it out, but I didn’t get any hits the next day.”
Now he has an itsy-bitsy idea of what Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds went through when they were breaking down home run barriers. “Every single day,” he said. “It’s got to be mentally stressing.”
If he never hits another home run, Cameron can say that he did something his idol, Hank Aaron, never accomplished.
“He never hit three (in a game),” Cameron said. “He hardly ever hit two. Never had more than 40 in a season.”
You’ve studied his career?
“I just know,” he said. “I know a lot about baseball.”
Now he knows what the first Mariner ever to hit four home runs in a game did his first night back before the hometown fans.
Got one hit in four at-bats and drove in the M’s only run in a 4-1 loss. And got a standing O.
Eat your heart out, Junior.
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