"I played a lot of games and I said I would never embarrass myself on the field," said Roberto Alomar Saturday. He proved that in 1988, playing his first Major League Baseball contest. The San Diego Padres rookie whacked the first of his 2,724 major league hits off Nolan Ryan, who was so impressed that he sent Alomar on his can the next time up. Fat lot of good that did pitchers over most of the 17 seasons that went on from there.
"I had a long career, but I can't play at the level I want to play, so it's time to retire." Alomar is a man who once said with no false or rhetorical pride, "Whenever I am done with this game, I am going to say, 'I played all those years and did not miss a chance to play' ... The smell of the ballpark–hot dogs, grass. This is what God chose me to do. He sent me here to play baseball."
Alomar's March 19 announcement was provoked in good portion by Alomar's day at the office Friday, a sad climax to a three-season downturn that surprised an awful lot of people for its rapidity. Struggling to stay aboard with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, two errors in one inning of a spring training game, to climax a spring in which he had been plagued by back and vision trouble. That would provoke serious thought in a 37-year-old man whose lifetime range factor through last season's finish had been 33 points above his league's average.
"I just can't go anymore," he said, as if having stood at a crossroads he hoped could be wiped off the map. "My back, legs, and eyes aren't the same. I don't want to embarrass myself or my teammates."
There go 10 Gold Gloves (Alomar owned the award in the 1990s and the first two years of the new century, except for one rude burglary by Chuck Knoblauch in 1997), 210 home runs, 12 all-star selections, 1,134 runs batted in, 180 runs produced per 162 games, and a lifetime .300 batting average. None too gently does he go into that good green day where memory remains sweet and hitting, hustling second basemen turn the sweetest double plays or drive the sweetest base knocks. In five years, Joe Morgan and Ryne Sandberg are going to have company in Cooperstown as the greatest all-around second basemen the game has ever seen.
They will, that is, on the assumption that Hall of Fame voters decline to judge the entire man and his entire game on the basis of one disgraceful incident in which Alomar was not the provocateur, but the provoked. To this day there are those, and they are wrong, who believe Alomar should be refused the keys to Cooperstown he has earned robustly enough, because of that single incident.
We take you back to September 27, 1996, Baltimore Orioles versus Toronto Blue Jays, the Orioles needing to beat the Jays to move to the postseason, then-Oriole Roberto Alomar hitting in the first inning. He watched home plate umpire John Hirschbeck call strike three on a pitch wide enough to pass a train unobstructed and objected. Then, he walked back toward his dugout, Hirschbeck trailing him with the glare of a private investigator trailing a suspected philanderer, before Alomar turned and uttered two words which got him an early night off.
The two obscene words, as related by a teammate standing within earshot: "Just play!"
The Orioles probably thought to themselves that their man should have been grateful not to have said a certain two-word euphemism for fornication. Alomar might have been bound for drawing and quartering then.
He charged Hirschbeck, properly enough outraged that a non-obscene comment, proffered en route his dugout, got him sent to bed without his supper. And then it happened. Alomar's manager, Davey Johnson, could not move him away fast enough to avoid Hirschbeck calling him a four-syllable euphemism for maternal fornicator. That–no sooner, no later–is when Alomar gobbed the ump. "I would advise everybody," Alomar said in due course, "not to say that to the Latin guys."
He was not merely spitting in the wind. There are neighborhoods enough in which "that" has provoked many a Latin guy to replies among which assault with a deadly weapon is deemed merciful. Excusing Alomar not one degree, for the most infamous spit since Ted Williams (who is called a "cantankerous character" for it) sprayed upwards toward his beloved Knights of the Keyboard, there is something to be said for guys to whom motherfucker is no less obscene for having graduated from alley vernacular to mainstream moboisie rhetoric.
Alomar had only one deadly weapon following that game. "I used to respect (Hirschbeck) a lot," he said. "He had problems with his family when his son died. I know that's something real tough in life. But after that he just changed, personality-wise. He just got real bitter."
Hirschbeck had lost his younger son, at age eight, to a rare brain illness known as adrenoleukodystrophy. The ump got real mad the following day, requiring a colleague to prevent him from disemboweling Alomar in the Baltimore clubhouse.
With that reprieve and the one brought by his appeal of his suspension, Alomar turned his fury toward far more beneficial destruction the following night. He merely sent the Orioles into the postseason with a three-run walk-off bomb in the 10th inning. The umpires threatened to boycott the postseason rounds when Alomar's suspension was itself suspended to the following season's birth. A federal judge, mindful of the no-strike clause in the umpires' collective bargaining agreement, told the judicial tyrants don't even think about it.
"No baseball person condones what Alomar did," wrote George F. Will, the following April. "But many baseball people believe that baseball's biggest on-field problem is not the impulsive misbehavior of players in the heat of competition, but the incompetence, confrontational surliness, and premeditated misbehavior of some umpires ... Part of the problem may be .... the declining professionalism of some players–arrogance, disrespect for the game, and an inclination to blame their failures on umpires ... Still, umpires are baseball's designated grown-ups and, like air traffic controllers, are paid to handle pressure."
Having survived Hirschbeck's kind of pressure drop, Alomar told his Orioles in effect to think about nothing except meeting the New York Yankees in the coming League Championship Series. He tied the deciding division series game, against the Cleveland Indians, with a ninth-inning single, and he won the game with a solo bomb in the 12th. Then, the Orioles met the Yankees, where another blown call–with an over-the-rail assist from Jeffrey Maier — the most notorious fan in baseball until the advent of poor Steve Bartman — enabled the Yankees to send the Orioles on an early flight south for the winter.
Alomar had apologized to Hirschbeck repeatedly, when first they met following the gob heard 'round the world. And a funny thing happened on the way to the Hall of Infamy: Roberto Alomar became a Cleveland Indian in 1999 ... and John Hirschbeck became his friend.
Thank Jack Efta. He administered the Jacobs Field umpires' room and had become a Hirschbeck friend himself. And Hirschbeck, who had avoided Alomar like a process server since Alomar's on-field apology and handshake, could not contain himself. What, he asked Efta, was Roberto Alomar really like?
"(H)e's one of the two nicest people I've ever met," Efta answered emphatically. "And you're the other one."
Apparently, Hirschbeck was so flattened by that pronouncement that he approached Alomar himself. The two men talked the whole thing out. And each found a friend. "If that's the worst thing Robbie ever does in his life," said Hirschbeck to a reporter about the great expectoration, "he'll lead a real good life. People make mistakes. You forgive, you forget, you move on."
Among the best things Alomar has done in his life: becoming a significant bench player for the foundation Hirschbeck helped establish to cure the disease which killed one Hirschbeck son and afflicted another.
A Sports Illustrated writer, Tom Verducci, thought last year that those Hall of Fame voters who will not forgive, forget, or move on, will be a small minority. Baseball's version of judicial tyranny provoked an ugly aberration between two customarily civil and diligent men. But baseball justice should demand the volume of that minority equals zero.
"I wish it never happened," Alomar has said, "and I hope that's not how people remember me."
An awful lot of us would prefer to remember a gazelle of a second baseman and a hell of a hitter. An awful lot of Toronto Blue Jays fans would prefer to remember those eleven hits, four runs scored, two home runs, and four runs batted in, that helped the Blue Jays beat the Oakland Athletics for the pennant. An awful lot of them would prefer to remember, even better, the 1993 World Series, where Alomar's 12 hits and six runs batted in did an awful lot to help Toronto Blue Jays overtake the Philthy Phillies for the ring.
Let us not judge Alomar, either, on the grounds of three seasons (with the New York Mets, the Chicago White Sox, and the Arizona Diamondbacks) worth of a too-fast downslide during which frustration was often enough mistaken for misanthropy.
"I learned a lot from him and I have all the respect in the world for him," said Jorge Cantu, the likeliest candidate to man second base for the Devil Rays now. "I watched him when I was a kid and looked up to him all through the minor leagues. You have to respect what he's done."
Maldiga el derecho. Véale en el Vestíbulo de la Fama.
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