Posted on 05/20/2006 6:07:09 PM PDT by West Coast Conservative
As far as I know, Steve Garvey was the real deal. I have a picture of him holding my son at age 2 1/2 at his first Dodger game.
He passed me by about '66 or '67 at Wrigley without even a wave - I got Woody Woodward, Rico Carty, and Pat Jarvis' autographs but Hank wouldn't even acknowledge us kids being there. I counted him as a bum ever since, home runs or not.
In my youth my brothers and I derived a great deal of pleasure arguing baseball stats, who was the greatest, who was the most interesting, did you like so and so? The most fun home run hitter I ever personally watched was Harmon Killebrew. I understand his drug of choice while on the road was some kind of whiskey. To me that is sort of understandable. My job took me on the road a great deal and many times nights could get long and dull.
Nevertheless, Killebrew hit some beauties that I recall seeing from some box seat my dad took us to at Metropolitan Stadium. He was the first right handed hitter to hit a ball over the roof in Tiger Stadium (I saw that one on TV and recall the image of Rocky Colavito just turning a one-eighty and pointing up). He had two home runs deep into the upper deck in left field at Metropolitan Stadium, and I think only three were ever hit there in the history of that stadium.
One of the home runs I actually saw him hit, I'm pretty sure is still in orbit.
George Will once said in looking at the "greatest" it matters little era to era. You need to look at the other players of the same era as comparison candidates. I thought Will said it best. Ruth was so much larger than life, he was Everest in Kansas. If Bonds or Aaron or Killebrew or any other power hitter, for that matter, want to be Ruthian, let them first go out and set some pitching records that last five or six decades that they can put along side the power records, then they can engage in the comparison game of brag.
I was one of the morons who stupidly thought that if anyone was going top break Ruth's single season record, I wanted it to be Mantle not Maris. I wanted the record to go to a power hitter. Besides, Mantle was likeable and Maris wasn't...so I thought. Question: How many HR's does it take before you are considered a power hitter? Then it turned out in real life that Maris was a true and great family man and one of the nicest guys to play ball in that era. Stupidity can be contageous.
To the extent that Bonds speaks in public, he sounds as dumb as a box of rocks...they ought to call him Rocky. I think it was around 1991 or 1992 that steroids became illegal. They didn't start testing for them seriously until last year. Maybe every record from 1992 on should be printed into the record books using a different color ink.
it's said that Aaron is still very bitter over all the racist Crap he took befoe and after tying Ruth. He did it with Class and grace.
My incident with Aaron was years before he was anywhere near 714 - I just figured he was an ignorant self-important prick.
I see your post #23, that would have turned off me as well.
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