One Night In Ohio

About 6 or 7 years ago, I took a road trip to Cincinnati in the middle of the summer to see a Reds game. I had wanted to take a road trip for a while, and I thought it would be fun to see a game in one of the new ballparks. I'll explain how I settled on Cincinnati in a minute. I made a 3 or 4 day vacation out of it. One day driving there, one or two days in Cincinnati and one more day driving back.

The ride there was interesting. If you've never done it, driving through Pennsylvania is a harrowing experience, it is impossibly long. I stopped just south of Pittsburgh to try a Primanti Bros. sandwich. I have to say, I was not impressed. Yes, the fries were right there on the sandwich. Unfortunately, the flavor was not right there on the sandwich. The flavor was, in fact, nowhere to be found. The highlight of my trip to Primanti Bros. was actually the Iron City Beer, which was a little bitter for my taste, but not half bad.

Growing up in New York, I really never understood what it was like in parts of the world where people don't live. The stretch of I-71 between Columbus and Cincinnati isn't completely deserted, but it's pretty damn close. I felt like I was driving through the science fiction movie right after the part when the aliens destroy everything.

Cincinnati itself is a perfectly nice little town. The people were super friendly in that chatty, mid-western sort of way that annoys New Yorkers like me. Also, did you know Cincinnati is the chili capital of the world? Me neither, if you had given me 50 guesses before I took this trip, I wouldn't have gotten it, but they swear they are. I actually drove just over the boarder to Kentucky and sampled a place called Skyline Chili. They'll put chili on anything. Hot dogs, potatoes, spaghetti, whatever you want. I think if I had pulled up to the drive thru with some of my own food, they would have been willing to dump some chili on it for a dollar.

The Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati is a really cool place to see a game. It isn't big and flashy like some of the other new stadiums, but it's perfect for the team and the city. Small, classy, understated. Not a bad seat in the house. I had a great seat about five rows back right behind the visiting dugout (by the way, Albert Pujols is huge in person, HUGE! I can't even come up with a funny comparison to do him justice. He is a gigantic man). You can walk the concourse from foul pole to foul pole and get a clear view of the game from any angle. Great food too. More chili, but also fantastic BBQ pork sandwiches. I may have had one or two, or four, or twenty, I can't remember. Positive experience all around.

OK, so why Cincinnati? Well, I knew I wanted to see a baseball game at one of the nice new ballparks, and I knew I wanted a decent drive, but no longer than one day. That narrowed it down a bit (Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Baltimore). Each option had pros and cons (for example, Detroit. Pros: the team has great history and I know they did a good job honoring it in the new ballpark. Cons: Detroit's chief export is sadness). Cincinnati had one thing that put it over the top, one person actually, Ken Griffey Jr. I figured Griffey would be retiring in the next year or two (whoops) and I wanted to see him play in person.

If life was fair, this would be where I would tell you how great it was to see Griffey play up close. How he hit a home run to break a tie in the bottom of the 8th and how you could feel the buzz in the stadium as he moved one homer closer to Hank Aaron's record. How he wasn't as fast as he used to be, but he still had those great instincts in centerfield. But life isn't fair, at least it wasn't for Griffey. Between the time I booked the trip and the time I got there, Griffey went down with yet another hamstring injury. He was on the DL when I got to Cincinnati. I wasn't disappointed, I knew the risk when I planned the trip.

That's my Ken Griffey Jr. story. Griffey is the Willie Mays of his generation, the Babe Ruth even. Older baseball fans all have their stories about the best players they saw and the great things they did on the field. I wonder how many people my age have a Griffey story that involves him being injured rather than doing something great. I hope it doesn't cheat him out of his rightful place in history.

What is his rightful place?
First, he was the best player of his generation. Only Barry Bonds comes close. Bonds was a great player before the steroids, but only the steroids made him better than Griffey. Griffey started his career with five straight seasons hitting over .300, two of them over .320. Between 1993 and 2000, he hit 40 home runs every year, except for 1995 when he got hurt. That includes the strike season in 1994 when he hit 40 home runs in just 493 at-bats. 13 all-star games, 10 straight gold gloves between 1990 and 1999, and 0 steroid accusations. None. If you forced me to bet everything I own on one power hitter from the steroids era being clean, I'd bet it on Griffey. He may be the only player left who would surprise me if he came out tomorrow and said he used steroids.

Second, He's somewhere between the fourth and sixth best centerfielder of all-time. Willie Mays, Ty Cobb and Mickey Mantle are the top three. The next three are Tris Speaker, Joe DiMaggio and Griffey (some people would even put DiMaggio ahead of Mantle, I call those people communists). Early reaction to Griffey's retirement seems to be putting him below DiMaggio and above Speaker. Let's look at some career numbers.

Ken Griffey Jr.: .284 avg, 630 HR, 1836 RBI, 184 SB, 2781 H, 9801 AB
Joe DiMaggio: .325 avg, 361 HR, 1537 RBI, 30 SB, 2214 H, 6821 AB
Tris Speaker: .345 avg, 117 HR, 1529 RBI, 436 SB, 3514 H, 10195 AB

A couple of things to keep in mind. First, Speaker played most of his career in the dead ball era. In 1912, he led the league in home runs with 10. Also, like Ted Williams, DiMaggio missed a huge chunk of his prime (three full seasons) to go fight in WW2 (stupid nazis, they ruin everything). And, since I mentioned Griffey's 10 gold gloves before (an award that hadn't yet been invented when Speaker or DiMaggio played), it's only fair to mention DiMaggio's impressive 3 MVP's compared to one each for Griffey and Speaker. DiMaggio, like Griffey, also had 13 all-star appearances and Speaker, well, he missed out on that too.

People will also tell you DiMaggio would have hit 500 or more home runs if he hadn't played at Yankee Stadium all those years. That's probably true, but I would have led the NBA in rebounding this year if I was 7 feet tall, but I'm not, so I didn't. Just like Griffey's injuries and Speaker's dead balls (HA!), you play where you play and you get what you get.

The point about Griffey isn't where exactly he fits with DiMaggio and Speaker. The point is that he does fit with them somewhere. He's a first ballot hall-of-famer, an all-time great and quite possibly the best all around player anyone under 40 who reads this will ever see. Injuries robbed him of the chance to be the greatest ever, and robbed people like me of a proper Ken Griffey Jr. story. But isn't the fact that he still had the career he did, even while basically never being healthy for the last 10 years of it, a testament to how great he really was? He's one of those rare "what if" guys who was still great, and even if I never got to see him in person, I can still sit back one day and tell young whipper snappers that I got to see him play at all, and that's good enough for me.