Baseball Digits

I’ve been meaning to brain dump on this dude for a while. In 1987 when he was rookie with the Cubs, I was hording his rookie cards like crazy. I saw him as someone with real potential. Most saw him as a singles/doubles hitter, but I looked at his college stats compared to his teammate that all thought was so great… Will Clark. For the first several years of his career my baseball card buddies thought I was crazy. But I stuck by him. Then he started cranking up the homers with that beautiful swing of his (hate him if you want, but roids can not create such a swing). Good eye! Sweet swing! What was there not to like.

Then a few years he got in front of congress, pointed at them, and said that he had never done steroids. I was pumped. Finally someone with the gonads to sit there and say he had not done them, while those other heros sat there and babbled about the past and moving forward (what crap). Again… I was pumped. Look at Raffy, that’s not a steroid body. His feats were accomplished by pure skill and hard work.

Dammit.

Then he gets busted for testing positive. He claims that he was given a vitamin shot that must have been tainted. Damn I wanted to believe him, and was not about to bitch at him for ratting out a teammate. I mean, you work hard for your entire career and have it thrown away by seomthing like this… if you were innocent, you’d rat out anyone. I kept waiting for the test to be reviewed and the decision reversed.

Dammit.

Over 3000 hits, fast approaching 600 HR, and it’s all gone. All down the tubes.

Dammit.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 1st, 2007 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Rafael Palmeiro. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.