Well its that time of year again. Time for visions of Bowies and Darkos and Kandi-Men to dance in the heads of GMs. Time for "wingspan", "upside", and "added thickness" to add themselves to our vocabulary for an evening. Yes sir, its time for the NBA Draft! This year is sure to be a great Draft, chock full of future All-Stars and potential Hall of Famers! I'm very confident in my mock draft this year, I think its pretty accurate! I'm lying! Only one of the previous three sentences is the truth!
NBA MOCK DRAFT 2011!!!!
1. Washington Wizards: John Wall, PG, Kentucky
2. Philadelphia 76ers: Evan Turner, SG, Ohio State
3. New Jersey Nets: Derrick Favors, PF, Georgia Tech
4. Minnesota Timberwolves: Wesley Johnson, SF, Syracuse
5. Sacramento Kings: DeMarcus Cousins, PF, Kentucky
6. Golden State Warriors: Greg Monroe, PF, Georgetown
7. Detroit Pistons: Ed Davis, PF, North Carolina
8. Los Angeles Clippers: Al-Farouq Aminu, SF, Wake Forest
9. Utah Jazz: Luke Babbit, SF/PF, Nevada
10. Indiana Pacers: Ekpe Udoh, PF, Baylor
11. New Orleans Hornets: Gordon Heyward, SF, Baylor
12. Memphis Grizzlies: Paul George, SF, Fresno State
13. Toronto Raptors: Patrick Patterson, PF, Kentucky
14. Houston Rockets : Cole Aldrich, C, Kansas
15. Milwaukee Bucks: Xavier Henry, SG, Kentucky
16. Minnesota Timberwolves: Eliot Williams, SG, Memphis
17. Chicago Bulls: Avery Bradley, PG/SG, Texas
18. Oklahoma City Thunder: Larry Sanders, PF/C, Virginia Commonwealth
19. Boston Celtics: James Anderson, SG, Oklahoma State
20. San Antonio Spurs: Kevin Seraphin, PF, France
21. Oklahoma City Thunder: Hassan Whiteside, C, Marshall
22. Portland Trailblazers: Gani Lawal, SF/PF, Georgia Tech
23. Minnesota Timberwolves: Solomon Alabi, C, Florida State
24. Atlanta Hawks: Tiny Gallon, PF/C, Texas
25. Memphis Grizzlies: Eric Bledsoe, PG/SG, Kentucky
26. Oklahoma City Thunder: Damion James, SF, Texas
27. New Jersey Nets: Jordan Crawford, SG, Xavier
28. Memphis Grizzlies: Craig Brackins, PF, Iowa State
29. Orlando Magic: Devin Ebanks, SF, West Virginia
30. Washington Wizards: Dominique Jones, SG, South Florida
Honestly, I don't expect to get more than two right. So many teams will be trading, so many teams will be moving around and on top of that...I never really know what I'm talking about. Either way, the NBA Draft is always a good time and tonight it will be EXTRA special, because you can join a live chat with Joe Giglio, Tyrone A. Johnson, and myself on www.shoresportsnetwork.com. Ask us questions, give us your take, mock our statements. Whatever floats your boat. Talk to you then, monkeys.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Dear Ken
The human memory works in funny ways. There are people I know who can't remember what they had for breakfast but can tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing at a certain moment in time eons ago. Hell, I had a great-great aunt who called me "Gordon" and insisted she worked with everyone from Al Roker to Hulk Hogan at the "telephone factory", but still could tell stories about her and her sisters from some 7 decades prior. Maybe its that whole "selective memory" thing, maybe its a matter of hearing stories so many times that you manufacture the memories...I don't really know. But I do know that I am one of the aforementioned people. Listen to the show for just an hour and I guarantee you'll hear me either forget what guest is coming on next or parrot a point, verbatim, I just made 26 seconds before. Yet I've got these grainy video tapes in my brain...a veritable Netflix of parties I barely remembered the next day, kisses that seemed too good to be true, and breakups I wish I could forget playing on a loop. Its no surprise however, that the biggest collection in that library is entirely sports related.
Here's one that I've nearly worn out I've played it so much: Its September 1990. I'm living in Piscataway, NJ (I don't remember my address or phone number, but I can tell you the house was blue...I think.). My father had already realized that while he didn't have the next Mickey Mantle on his hands (Perhaps he still had hope for my brother Christian: 6 months old at the time. Anyone who knows my family knows how that turned out.), he sure as hell had a little sports fan sponge...I wanted to know every team, every player, every stat and I wanted to know them backwards and forwards. I remember walking to the "Ducky Park" and hearing all about the MLB, the NFL, and the NBA. I was hooked. This stuff was MUCH cooler than that whole "alphabet" business and "sharing" nonsense they were preaching at The Sundance School, man. I'm not going to pretend that at 4 years old, I knew what made a great ballplayer. I was too busy drawing on the wall and going down slides headfirst to understand the nuances of the game. In fact, my little toddler brain looked at things like "Batting Average" and "Runs Batted In" the same way my little adult brain looks at things like "WAR" and "UZR"...utter confusion. The only sports factoids I knew for sure at this point were that my father was a Yankee and Giant fan and my 6 year old sister's favorite players were Don Mattingly (because Dad liked him) and Darryl Strawberry (because he was handsome...Her words, not mine.) It was on one of these jaunts to the park that my longest committed relationship to date began. It was the first time my father told me about the young centerfielder way out west with the sweet swing. It was the first time I heard the name Ken Griffey Jr.
It wasn't his amazing upside that hooked me. It wasn't even any of his five tools either. In all actuality, the thing that began my Griffey fandom, and in turn, my Mariner fandom was a seemingly insignificant little factoid, a blip in the baseball annals. It was the story of this Griffey Jr. character hitting a home run RIGHT AFTER his daddy had hit one. This was mindblowing to me. I needed to know more. "How old is he? How old is his Daddy? What team do they play for? Who were they playing?" How this wasn't being taught in the "Moon Room" was beyond me. Once I had processed all of the pertinent facts, I came to the only obvious conclusion...."We'll do that too someday, Daddy."
From that moment on, "Griffey J.R." (no one ever said I was the smartest child) became my true passion. If his face was on it, I had to have it. I studied Griffey facts harder than I would ever study anything else in the years after and "impressed" my family with them at the breakfast table. I remember telling my mother that he hit a home run on the first pitch HE EVER SAW at the Kingdome! I'm pretty sure she responded with "Wow!...Michael you're spilling syrup on yourself!" but that's really beside the point. I started wearing my hat backwards, much to the chagrin of my father, solely because Junior did it. I nearly got into a fist fight with another kid on my block who INSISTED J.T. Snow was the best player in baseball and another in my 1st grade class who said Pete Incaviglia was MUCH better than Griffey. I had two little brothers who I desperately tried to shape into Mariner fans, dangling the greatness of Griff in front of their faces like candy bars. One of them never got into the whole sports thing and the other fell for the alluring charm of Willie McGee, Ray Lankford and the St. Louis Cardinals. My heart broke right along with Jr.'s wrist in the summer of '95, but was repaired by "Refuse to Lose" and of course, the ALDS (OF COURSE I didn't know Joe Giglio then, but was his best friend by 2001. Real fair.) I told anyone who'd listen that he was going to break every home run record there was...Maris', Aaron's, Oh's...They'd all be Junior's someday. To paraphrase another favorite of mine at the time...He was the best there was, the best there had ever been, and the best there ever was going to be.
Shockingly, I was the lone Mariner fan at St. Joseph's Grade School in Toms River, so my allies were few and far between. Even my own brother, who was a hair over 5 when Jr. won his MVP was quick to remind me that "Willie McGee had won it first." But I had someone whose opinion who mattered much more than any other 5th graders or thumbsucking Cardinals fan's ever would in my corner...Dad's. The man who knew EVERYTHING there was to know about sports agreed with ME! The man who taught me more than any teacher would dare try thought I was RIGHT! We didn't agree on much at the time, but every day I'd go to school armed with a new "Well my dad told me..." fact to unleash on Mrs. Heitz's 5th grade class. "Right up there with Mantle" he'd say, "Probably a little better than Clemente." That was all I needed. The Oracle agreed with me, so who cared what anyone else thought.
Ken Griffey Jr. was a whole hell of a lot more than a baseball player to me. The evidence of this comes in a confession I'm about to make that has not ever hit human ears. I kept a journal from the 3rd grade til about the 7th. It was filled with all the angst that comes with being the first kid in your grade to ask a girl out and get rejected. The were entries about the lighter stuff (my favorite colors), the medium stuff (girls I liked, homework I didn't do), and the heavy stuff (familial issues). Is being a male who keeps a journal embarrassing enough? Sure. But these weren't your run of the mill "Dear Diary" entries, no sir. Every single one of them was formatted as a letter to the one person who I knew was there, the one person who seemed to have the whole damn thing figured out, the one person who I truly believed could bring me out of the funkiest of funks.
Yes, every journal entry was formatted as a letter to Ken Griffey Jr..
I threw the damn thing away right before 8th grade for fear of it falling it into the wrong hands, but I'll never forget how cathartic it felt to write out all my thoughts and tie them into a constant in my life: The Seattle Mariners and specifically, Ken Griffey Jr.. To this day I don't truly understand my thought process. I certainly never sent them to him and I certainly never had any intention to. Something about it just helped. A lot. I even asked him for a home run a couple of times when some 4th grade Jezebel had me really down. It didn't always happen right away...but he always delivered.
But as these things sometimes go, injuries started to pile up, my Dad's statements became punctuated with "Ifs", the journal was in the trash and before I knew it...February 10th, 2000 rolled around. The day Ken Griffey Jr. became a Red is still one of the saddest days of my life and I don't foresee it ever being pushed out of the top ten. (Sorry future ex-wife...I already know you don't compare.)
Flash forward another 9 years, almost to the day. After nearly a decade of Mariner triumph (2001), Mariner tragedy (2001), but mostly Mariner mediocrity, many things had changed. The little sports fan sponge who lived to know half as much as Dad had grown into cool guy rebel who knew more than everyone, ESPECIALLY his fossil of a father and simply couldn't find the time for anyone other than ol' number one and whatever girl was I was hanging all over at the time. Just like I had grown distant from one of my childhood heroes after that fateful day in 2000, I had grown even more distant from the other...my father. Throughout the four years I was at college, I simply could not find the time to call home and have those sports conversations that had shaped me so much in the 18 years prior. In fact, some of the only sports conversations we had were shallow covers for the real reason I was calling...grade reports were coming home, I had gotten into a "little bit" of trouble, I needed some extra cash for the bar...The disappointment in his voice when the truth would come out was palpable, but what did I care? I had a party to get to! I was a college graduate with little more than a piece of paper and a terrible attitude. The only future that looked bleaker than mine was that of the freshly minted 100 loss squad with the $100 million dollar payroll...The Fishermen. To say nothing was going well would be...well it'd be the f***ing truth.
However, things changed, as they oft do, on a dime. I was at my then girlfriend's house when a text came in from a good friend of mine that simply said "The Kid is Back!" I ran to the computer to confirm that what I'd been hoping for for nearly a decade was finally happening. Ken Griffey Jr. was coming home. Sure he was old, sure his Mariner jersey would certainly be a few sizes bigger, sure he wasn't half the player he once was...I didn't care. Griffey J.R. was an M again. Visions of one last 30 HR season and a dramatic playoff push danced in my head. I grabbed the phone and called the one person who I simply needed to discuss it with...The Oracle himself. After I breathlessly told him the news, he responded in that oh so saccharine Frank Krenek tone..."So? Is it 1998 or something?" For a moment or so...it was. I was a little kid again with no concerns further than Ken Griffey Jr.'s next at bat and I just HAD to know what my Dad thought. Flash ahead a few weeks later and I'm sitting next to Joe Giglio in a meeting with Millennium Radio higher ups about a project they were developing. To say everything was going well...well it'd be the f***ing truth.
One more flash-forward before your nose starts bleeding LOST-style...the Mariners season had drawn to an inauspicious close...a good deal of improvement, but ultimately, no postseason. The Kid found a way to run into 19 dingers, but he clearly had become The Old Man. I got my fair share of ribbing for his .219 average and the refrains of "time to hang 'em up" were ringing from all over. My dad's question from a few months ago had been resoundingly answered...it was indeed NOT 1998 anymore.
The writing was on the wall, not just for "The Kid" in Seattle, but also for "The Kid" in Toms River. Maybe it was time for Ken to go home, but it most certainly was time for me to grow up. But neither Ken nor myself was willing to turn the hat forward just yet. The Mariners announced that he'd be returning for the 2010 season to much eye-rolling from the M's faithful. I imagine truly "letting go" of your days as an elite level athlete is as much of a struggle as truly "letting go" of the mentality of being a responsibility-less 21 year old. Sometimes it takes a "wake-up" call moment. I had mine in December of 2009, when that same snotnosed Cardinal fan brother of mine called me and said I needed to get home because "Dad was sick." I'll never forget that day...rushing home to find the man I had viewed as invincible for so long helpless on the floor. Its an image that stays with you, no matter how much you'd like it to kindly leave. My 18 year old brother and I stood wordlessly as he was loaded onto a gurney and the entire "Dad" section of that mental Netflix started rolling...Walks to the Ducky Park, trips to Yankee Stadium when the Mariners were in town, and those "Greatest of All Time Discussions". The memories were almost cruelly vivid. The next few weeks were a blur, but within that blur came a moment that I can only imagine will still be with me years from now. It just so happened that I was the only family member currently at the rehab center when the doctor came in to review some "Post-Stroke Life" pamphlets. It was at this moment that I heard a question that bordered on the absurd....
"Are you the primary caretaker present?"
Pardon me, doc? Do you not know whose laying in that bed? Do you not know who you're talking to? You've got the roles completely backwards! Suddenly, maturation had been thrust upon me without anyone asking if I was OK with it. It was enough to make your head spin. I went home that night, shaken to the core by the whole situation. I turned on the MLB Network at around 3am only to find them discussing the one and only Junior. As they showed the obligatory crawl of highlights that accompanies any discussion of all time great, I couldn't help but notice a fleeting shot of Griffeys Jr. and Sr. embracing at home plate after their back to back home runs. It was the only time throughout the whole ordeal that I cried.
I'm sure some have wondered why I was so damn sad every time a new "Ken Griffey Jr. can't hack it story" came out. The fact of the matter is this...I like to think I did a lot of growing up in the past year or so. I've got a legitimate dream job, I get to work with my best friend every day, and I've made a lot of headway on repairing the relationships I disregarded for far too long. I look around and see the people I grew up with growing up around me. One's engaged, one will be very soon (O/U is 2.5 months...I'm all in for the under), and 98% are in situations that they are happy with. Most importantly, my dad made a full recovery and is back to calling/texting (a new talent he's picked up) The Shore Sports Report to tell us all the things we're doing wrong. We never did hit those back to back home runs, but I can't help but think the 2 or 3 times he's ever called the show to agree with something I said and take it to the next level, I can't help but think that's the industry equivalent. I am truly blessed for a billion reasons. But Ken Griffey Jr. in a Seattle Mariner uniform was the one thing still tangible at 24 that was tangible at 10. So many things have changed in the 20 years I've covered in this overlong post, but Junior? Junior came back. And just like he had been throughout the "journal years", Junior was there when I needed him the most. And with his quiet retirement today, that last iota of youth will quietly fade away too. But I, like millions of other Jr. fans will always have the memories. The 630 HRs, the 1836 RBIs, the 10 Gold Gloves, the Warehouse Home Run, scoring from first in '95...and even all those memories stats can't measure. The man made countless people love the game. Count me among them.
If you'll indulge me, I'd like to write one last letter to The Kid. I know this isn't a journal, but at 24, its the closest thing I've got.
"Dear Junior,
Thanks.
Your Friend,
Mikey"
Here's one that I've nearly worn out I've played it so much: Its September 1990. I'm living in Piscataway, NJ (I don't remember my address or phone number, but I can tell you the house was blue...I think.). My father had already realized that while he didn't have the next Mickey Mantle on his hands (Perhaps he still had hope for my brother Christian: 6 months old at the time. Anyone who knows my family knows how that turned out.), he sure as hell had a little sports fan sponge...I wanted to know every team, every player, every stat and I wanted to know them backwards and forwards. I remember walking to the "Ducky Park" and hearing all about the MLB, the NFL, and the NBA. I was hooked. This stuff was MUCH cooler than that whole "alphabet" business and "sharing" nonsense they were preaching at The Sundance School, man. I'm not going to pretend that at 4 years old, I knew what made a great ballplayer. I was too busy drawing on the wall and going down slides headfirst to understand the nuances of the game. In fact, my little toddler brain looked at things like "Batting Average" and "Runs Batted In" the same way my little adult brain looks at things like "WAR" and "UZR"...utter confusion. The only sports factoids I knew for sure at this point were that my father was a Yankee and Giant fan and my 6 year old sister's favorite players were Don Mattingly (because Dad liked him) and Darryl Strawberry (because he was handsome...Her words, not mine.) It was on one of these jaunts to the park that my longest committed relationship to date began. It was the first time my father told me about the young centerfielder way out west with the sweet swing. It was the first time I heard the name Ken Griffey Jr.
It wasn't his amazing upside that hooked me. It wasn't even any of his five tools either. In all actuality, the thing that began my Griffey fandom, and in turn, my Mariner fandom was a seemingly insignificant little factoid, a blip in the baseball annals. It was the story of this Griffey Jr. character hitting a home run RIGHT AFTER his daddy had hit one. This was mindblowing to me. I needed to know more. "How old is he? How old is his Daddy? What team do they play for? Who were they playing?" How this wasn't being taught in the "Moon Room" was beyond me. Once I had processed all of the pertinent facts, I came to the only obvious conclusion...."We'll do that too someday, Daddy."
From that moment on, "Griffey J.R." (no one ever said I was the smartest child) became my true passion. If his face was on it, I had to have it. I studied Griffey facts harder than I would ever study anything else in the years after and "impressed" my family with them at the breakfast table. I remember telling my mother that he hit a home run on the first pitch HE EVER SAW at the Kingdome! I'm pretty sure she responded with "Wow!...Michael you're spilling syrup on yourself!" but that's really beside the point. I started wearing my hat backwards, much to the chagrin of my father, solely because Junior did it. I nearly got into a fist fight with another kid on my block who INSISTED J.T. Snow was the best player in baseball and another in my 1st grade class who said Pete Incaviglia was MUCH better than Griffey. I had two little brothers who I desperately tried to shape into Mariner fans, dangling the greatness of Griff in front of their faces like candy bars. One of them never got into the whole sports thing and the other fell for the alluring charm of Willie McGee, Ray Lankford and the St. Louis Cardinals. My heart broke right along with Jr.'s wrist in the summer of '95, but was repaired by "Refuse to Lose" and of course, the ALDS (OF COURSE I didn't know Joe Giglio then, but was his best friend by 2001. Real fair.) I told anyone who'd listen that he was going to break every home run record there was...Maris', Aaron's, Oh's...They'd all be Junior's someday. To paraphrase another favorite of mine at the time...He was the best there was, the best there had ever been, and the best there ever was going to be.
Shockingly, I was the lone Mariner fan at St. Joseph's Grade School in Toms River, so my allies were few and far between. Even my own brother, who was a hair over 5 when Jr. won his MVP was quick to remind me that "Willie McGee had won it first." But I had someone whose opinion who mattered much more than any other 5th graders or thumbsucking Cardinals fan's ever would in my corner...Dad's. The man who knew EVERYTHING there was to know about sports agreed with ME! The man who taught me more than any teacher would dare try thought I was RIGHT! We didn't agree on much at the time, but every day I'd go to school armed with a new "Well my dad told me..." fact to unleash on Mrs. Heitz's 5th grade class. "Right up there with Mantle" he'd say, "Probably a little better than Clemente." That was all I needed. The Oracle agreed with me, so who cared what anyone else thought.
Ken Griffey Jr. was a whole hell of a lot more than a baseball player to me. The evidence of this comes in a confession I'm about to make that has not ever hit human ears. I kept a journal from the 3rd grade til about the 7th. It was filled with all the angst that comes with being the first kid in your grade to ask a girl out and get rejected. The were entries about the lighter stuff (my favorite colors), the medium stuff (girls I liked, homework I didn't do), and the heavy stuff (familial issues). Is being a male who keeps a journal embarrassing enough? Sure. But these weren't your run of the mill "Dear Diary" entries, no sir. Every single one of them was formatted as a letter to the one person who I knew was there, the one person who seemed to have the whole damn thing figured out, the one person who I truly believed could bring me out of the funkiest of funks.
Yes, every journal entry was formatted as a letter to Ken Griffey Jr..
I threw the damn thing away right before 8th grade for fear of it falling it into the wrong hands, but I'll never forget how cathartic it felt to write out all my thoughts and tie them into a constant in my life: The Seattle Mariners and specifically, Ken Griffey Jr.. To this day I don't truly understand my thought process. I certainly never sent them to him and I certainly never had any intention to. Something about it just helped. A lot. I even asked him for a home run a couple of times when some 4th grade Jezebel had me really down. It didn't always happen right away...but he always delivered.
But as these things sometimes go, injuries started to pile up, my Dad's statements became punctuated with "Ifs", the journal was in the trash and before I knew it...February 10th, 2000 rolled around. The day Ken Griffey Jr. became a Red is still one of the saddest days of my life and I don't foresee it ever being pushed out of the top ten. (Sorry future ex-wife...I already know you don't compare.)
Flash forward another 9 years, almost to the day. After nearly a decade of Mariner triumph (2001), Mariner tragedy (2001), but mostly Mariner mediocrity, many things had changed. The little sports fan sponge who lived to know half as much as Dad had grown into cool guy rebel who knew more than everyone, ESPECIALLY his fossil of a father and simply couldn't find the time for anyone other than ol' number one and whatever girl was I was hanging all over at the time. Just like I had grown distant from one of my childhood heroes after that fateful day in 2000, I had grown even more distant from the other...my father. Throughout the four years I was at college, I simply could not find the time to call home and have those sports conversations that had shaped me so much in the 18 years prior. In fact, some of the only sports conversations we had were shallow covers for the real reason I was calling...grade reports were coming home, I had gotten into a "little bit" of trouble, I needed some extra cash for the bar...The disappointment in his voice when the truth would come out was palpable, but what did I care? I had a party to get to! I was a college graduate with little more than a piece of paper and a terrible attitude. The only future that looked bleaker than mine was that of the freshly minted 100 loss squad with the $100 million dollar payroll...The Fishermen. To say nothing was going well would be...well it'd be the f***ing truth.
However, things changed, as they oft do, on a dime. I was at my then girlfriend's house when a text came in from a good friend of mine that simply said "The Kid is Back!" I ran to the computer to confirm that what I'd been hoping for for nearly a decade was finally happening. Ken Griffey Jr. was coming home. Sure he was old, sure his Mariner jersey would certainly be a few sizes bigger, sure he wasn't half the player he once was...I didn't care. Griffey J.R. was an M again. Visions of one last 30 HR season and a dramatic playoff push danced in my head. I grabbed the phone and called the one person who I simply needed to discuss it with...The Oracle himself. After I breathlessly told him the news, he responded in that oh so saccharine Frank Krenek tone..."So? Is it 1998 or something?" For a moment or so...it was. I was a little kid again with no concerns further than Ken Griffey Jr.'s next at bat and I just HAD to know what my Dad thought. Flash ahead a few weeks later and I'm sitting next to Joe Giglio in a meeting with Millennium Radio higher ups about a project they were developing. To say everything was going well...well it'd be the f***ing truth.
One more flash-forward before your nose starts bleeding LOST-style...the Mariners season had drawn to an inauspicious close...a good deal of improvement, but ultimately, no postseason. The Kid found a way to run into 19 dingers, but he clearly had become The Old Man. I got my fair share of ribbing for his .219 average and the refrains of "time to hang 'em up" were ringing from all over. My dad's question from a few months ago had been resoundingly answered...it was indeed NOT 1998 anymore.
The writing was on the wall, not just for "The Kid" in Seattle, but also for "The Kid" in Toms River. Maybe it was time for Ken to go home, but it most certainly was time for me to grow up. But neither Ken nor myself was willing to turn the hat forward just yet. The Mariners announced that he'd be returning for the 2010 season to much eye-rolling from the M's faithful. I imagine truly "letting go" of your days as an elite level athlete is as much of a struggle as truly "letting go" of the mentality of being a responsibility-less 21 year old. Sometimes it takes a "wake-up" call moment. I had mine in December of 2009, when that same snotnosed Cardinal fan brother of mine called me and said I needed to get home because "Dad was sick." I'll never forget that day...rushing home to find the man I had viewed as invincible for so long helpless on the floor. Its an image that stays with you, no matter how much you'd like it to kindly leave. My 18 year old brother and I stood wordlessly as he was loaded onto a gurney and the entire "Dad" section of that mental Netflix started rolling...Walks to the Ducky Park, trips to Yankee Stadium when the Mariners were in town, and those "Greatest of All Time Discussions". The memories were almost cruelly vivid. The next few weeks were a blur, but within that blur came a moment that I can only imagine will still be with me years from now. It just so happened that I was the only family member currently at the rehab center when the doctor came in to review some "Post-Stroke Life" pamphlets. It was at this moment that I heard a question that bordered on the absurd....
"Are you the primary caretaker present?"
Pardon me, doc? Do you not know whose laying in that bed? Do you not know who you're talking to? You've got the roles completely backwards! Suddenly, maturation had been thrust upon me without anyone asking if I was OK with it. It was enough to make your head spin. I went home that night, shaken to the core by the whole situation. I turned on the MLB Network at around 3am only to find them discussing the one and only Junior. As they showed the obligatory crawl of highlights that accompanies any discussion of all time great, I couldn't help but notice a fleeting shot of Griffeys Jr. and Sr. embracing at home plate after their back to back home runs. It was the only time throughout the whole ordeal that I cried.
I'm sure some have wondered why I was so damn sad every time a new "Ken Griffey Jr. can't hack it story" came out. The fact of the matter is this...I like to think I did a lot of growing up in the past year or so. I've got a legitimate dream job, I get to work with my best friend every day, and I've made a lot of headway on repairing the relationships I disregarded for far too long. I look around and see the people I grew up with growing up around me. One's engaged, one will be very soon (O/U is 2.5 months...I'm all in for the under), and 98% are in situations that they are happy with. Most importantly, my dad made a full recovery and is back to calling/texting (a new talent he's picked up) The Shore Sports Report to tell us all the things we're doing wrong. We never did hit those back to back home runs, but I can't help but think the 2 or 3 times he's ever called the show to agree with something I said and take it to the next level, I can't help but think that's the industry equivalent. I am truly blessed for a billion reasons. But Ken Griffey Jr. in a Seattle Mariner uniform was the one thing still tangible at 24 that was tangible at 10. So many things have changed in the 20 years I've covered in this overlong post, but Junior? Junior came back. And just like he had been throughout the "journal years", Junior was there when I needed him the most. And with his quiet retirement today, that last iota of youth will quietly fade away too. But I, like millions of other Jr. fans will always have the memories. The 630 HRs, the 1836 RBIs, the 10 Gold Gloves, the Warehouse Home Run, scoring from first in '95...and even all those memories stats can't measure. The man made countless people love the game. Count me among them.
If you'll indulge me, I'd like to write one last letter to The Kid. I know this isn't a journal, but at 24, its the closest thing I've got.
"Dear Junior,
Thanks.
Your Friend,
Mikey"
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