Yeah, I remember when he broke his arm slamming into the centerfield wall at full speed going after a fly ball (he made the catch).
If you look over the list of players in the Mitchell report, the majority of them don’t have what you would consider a ‘Steroid’ body. I thought the myth that steriod users have to look like hulking sluggers was busted.
As for lingering injuries, many players who were caught use the ‘recovery from injuries’ excuse…wether it helped them come back sooner or not. The fact remains that Jr, who seemed to be on a one way train to 755, broke 30 HRs a year only twice, playing mostly in a hitter’s park, between 2001-2009.
Now that I’ve said that, I don’t want to argue that he was a user. I don’t think he was…but it’s naive to start saying that you know that he didn’t use. Baseball created this state of distrust, and it will (and should) always come up till it’s fixed. Junior gets caught up in it as a product of the times. It’s sad, and I blame MLB & The players union for allowing it to go the way it did.
Ah, horseshit. His production peaked in 2000, well before the peak of the steroids era, and 2008 aside he didn’t play more than 117 games in the years you’ve listed.
Shit … I remember when his DAD broke into the majors. And I’m not that old. Really I’m not.
If only, if only, Cincinnati had replaced that green concrete at Riverfront with some modern turf, Junior wouldn’t have destroyed his knees, and he’d have caught Bonds for the HR record.
Eh, maybe. Griffey only played 3 years on it as GABP opened in 2003.
One of the classiest guys ever to don a uniform, and in an era of cheating, he was always clean, even though he clearly would have been helped by juicing later in his career, as the injuries started snowballing.
He’ll be missed.
The point is that the damage was done by then.
Didn’t the Mariners have astroturf when he played for them, too?
Was the Kingdome’s turf especially light on the knees or something?
The foam padding under AstroTurf breaks down and needs replacing periodically. Other places spend the money; Cincinnati didn’t.
The same thing happened to Andre Dawson in Montreal, remember.
There is no such thing as a steriod body. Abuser have come in all shapes and sizes. I don’t think the injuries show much of anything either. Plenty of players took stuff to try to heal faster from injuries and plenty of times it didn’t work. The point is lets treat him as a great baseball player and not a guy who was morally superior, since we have firm evidence of the former and no way of knowing the latter.
No - his dad graduated from Donora High School in Pennsylvania - this is now part of the Ringgold School District.
Shit…I misread that! I thought you meant Junior.
Trivia Time: Little Donora is also the hometown of Stan Musial. You can pass the time there by visiting the Donora Smog Museum, in honor of the 1948 temperature inversion that killed Stan’s Dad.
Sweetest swing in the game.
If you could define your use of the word “peak” in this post, I’d appreciate it.
The peak of the steroids era? Testing began in 2003. PEDs of all kinds have been in use for many years before that. There’s still no test for Human Growth Hormone. A-Rod has admitted to using PEDs upon his arrival in Texas in 2001. Do you believe that’s all he did? Do you think some of his 40 homer seasons in Seattle, while he was Junior’s teamate, might have been chemically enhanced?
The peak of his production? I’d argue that his production peaked somewhere around 1997, but every year where his production was at a HOF level, including 2000, there was no testing for PEDs of any kind. Oddly, after testing was implimented, he could never seem to stay on the field.
If you’d like to ignore things like facts, stats and what seems like endless reports of players cheating and feel good about Griffey’s clean career based on your gut, go for it. I’ve seen too many users surface to ever give anyone who played in this era the benefit of the doubt. My gut feeling? He didn’t use…but I won’t be among shocked people if it turns out that he did.
I like Junior. He’s one of the greats. I’ll cheer for him in Cooperstown in 5 years. I can’t bring myself to give him extra credit for doing it clean because there’s no way to know if he did, and plenty of reason to think that he didn’t…Not because I think Griffey is a cheater, but because there’s plenty of reasons to think that *any *great player from that era used PEDs of some kind.
There’s no evidence he ever used steroids, but assuming he did not is a recipe for disappointment. And 2000 is not “well before the peak of the steroid era.” That’s just ridiculous. The peak of the steroid era would be something like 1994 through 2003.
Griffey’s injury woes and production falloff started in 2001, before PED testing. His peak year was at age 27, which is exactly what more than 100 years of baseball history would tell us to expect.
If he lost ability because he was reacting to PED testing we would expect to see a dropoff beginning in 2003 or 2004, but that is not the case. As a matter of fact, in 2005 he had his best season in five years, hitting .301 with 35 homers while playing in only 128 games. The following year he hit 27 homers in only two thirds of a season, and the year after than he hit 30 more, and at that point the man was 37 years old. There’s no obvious power dropoff after PED testing. He wasn’t hitting homers quite as often as he did in the 20s but that’s what would normally happen, and his worst run was just BEFORE PED testing.
Irrespective of whether or not Griffey ever used steroids, I think the record shows that his injury-plagued decline started (a) before PED testing, and (b) was almost certainly just because players quite often start getting hurt in their 30s. (and as Elvisl1ves points out, Griffey had by then played hundreds and hundreds of games on some of the worst artificial turf in the major leagues, which is rightly regarded as toxic for outfielder’s careers.) Some guys get hurt and some don’t, and Griffey was after all entering the time in their career when guys are likelier to get hurt.