Had I mentioned previously that Carlos Delgado is my favourite baseball player?

Carlos Delgado, my favourite baseball player, retired yesterday. You might find upon reflection that even though you are an obsessive and devoted baseball fan, you don't really have a favourite baseball player, exactly, and really haven't since you were twelve, and that would be reasonable and fine. But on a cold winter day not long ago -- the Saturday after the Vernon Wells trade, I believe it was, a time when I was (baseball) feeling particularly reflective -- I was asked who my favourite baseball player was, and I took the question pretty seriously. I have no doubt that we can all name, like, a dozen or so players we're really very fond of, and if pressed we could all probably cut that number in half and say, "OK, here are the best guys, seriously; I love these guys." But if you had to narrow it all the way down, and say definitively who your favourite baseball player is, that's tough, unless you've already thought it through and correctly determined that Carlos Delgado is the best, and thus totally your favourite baseball player.    


That this period of reflection came in the wake of the Vernon Wells trade was no accident: Vernon, as I no doubt mentioned in any number of posts at the time, was truly my last remaining dude, the last of the Blue Jays from the period when I was at the ballpark almost everyday for a few years (Jason Frasor doesn't count). Those Blue Jays teams weren't good, but I had never before been and will never again be that close to baseball on a day-to-day, who's-pitching-tomorrow, let's-go-down-early-and-watch-BP way, and so it's pretty likely that I will never feel a closer connection to a baseball team than I did to those generally pretty bad teams. I mean, I can tell you absolutely everything you need to know about the 1992 and 1993 Toronto Blue Jays -- of course I can -- but I can also tell you absolutely everything you need to know about the 2002, 2003, and 2004 Toronto Blue Jays, which is way different, I think, in that there is absolutely nothing anybody ever needs to know about any of those teams. But they are totally my teams. The 2003 Toronto Blue Jays are, oddly enough, my favourite baseball team. It is much less odd, I think, that Carlos Delgado is my favourite baseball player.


It's worth noting that since Delgado announced his retirement on Wednesday, almost nobody has been a jerk about it -- and this, of course, is the internet. Somebody tried for a minute to be a dick about Carlos in a thread on Baseball Primer, but he was quickly shouted down (I'd link, but that place is just kind of smug most of the time. I don't know why I still go). Delgado is almost universally admired, and rightly so, as he is the best. Stephen Brunt has a nice piece in the Globe and Mail talking about how Carlos came up (as a catcher, you will recall) just at the tail end of the Blue Jays long run of being awesome, and while Carlos himself went on to be awesome, the Blue Jays sort of did not. David Schoenfield has "Ten Random Thoughts on Carlos Delgado" at espn.com, and that's worth your time, too. Even the straight-up AP story is really good. 


What I have been most struck by, though, was Keith Law's response to a listener email on the Baseball Today podcast yesterday. Law, who worked in the Blue Jays front office from 2002 through 2006, and who as you know is generally unencumbered by any human emotion other than disdain, responded thusly when asked whether or not Carlos Delgado should be in the Hall of Fame:

Because I know Carlos, and saw that 2003 season when he nearly won the MVP, he hit the four home runs -- I actually saw a four-home run game, because of Carlos Delgado -- I would love to say yes. But I do think he falls just short, and I don't think he's going to get a lot of support from voters, unfortunately. He was -- is -- a great guy, and he was tremendously fun to watch in addition to being really productive. 

Law then goes on to talk about the enormously high offensive standards that exist for players on that end of the defensive spectrum, and says that Delgado has to be considered just behind Fred McGriff, who the voters have already decided is not a Hall of Famer, and so there's probably not much of a discussion to be had here. But again, what I think is significant here is not the analysis (which is spot-on), but the fact that Keith Law, whose response you could very well have expected to have been "lol no," instead goes with an apologetic "I would love to say yes." The only explanation that would account for that oddly out-of-place note of humanity in Law's voice is that Carlos is awesome.  


I could go on -- and will, a little -- but such is the extent of my baseball feelings on the subject of Carlos Delgado that they legitimately threaten to sprawl across an endless series of incoherent posts that mostly involve rendering his name in all-caps and with way too many o's, but I will try to reign that impulse in, and focus on a few essentials.


THE FOLLOWING THINGS ARE TRUE ABOUT CARLOS DELGADO AND I DON'T CARE IF SCHOENFIELD BASICALLY STRUCTURED HIS ARTICLE LIKE THIS I AM GOING TO DO IT TOO BECAUSE THERE IS NO WAY CARLOS MEANS AS MUCH TO DAVE SCHOENFIELD AS HE DOES TO ME:


(i) Law mentions that four-homer game. Let's start there.  


It was so awesome.


It was actually also a pretty good game, with the lead see-sawing back and forth until the Blue Jays tied it and went ahead for good in the eighth. I had uncharacteristically OK seats that game, and so instead of the upper deck I was sitting in the 100s in left-centre, which gave me a really good sense of the truly ridiculous speed with which home runs number one and four left the park and struck the restaurant in centre field. The first of the four was the 300th of Delgado's career, a three-run shot with which he broke his own team RBI record (he'd finish the year with 145). The second was a scraper; the third had a little more on it than that, but holy cow did he ever get a hold of that fourth one. Just a blast. Delgado hit the ball as hard as anyone I've ever seen. 


I think my favourite thing about the four-homer game is actually something that happened the next night: a standing ovation for his first AB, a great buzz in the crowd as he ripped a couple of balls foul, and then another big ovation when he struck out. It was great.

(ii) In the last few days, much has rightly been made of Delgado's class and dignity, and quite rightly, because, I mean, yeah, absolutely, Carlos Delgado is a classy and dignified guy. And just, like, sensible, you know? “There comes a moment when you have to have the dignity and the sense to recognize that something is not functioning," he said at his retirement speech. Dignity and Sense: The Carlos Delgado Story. 


But one of my preferred Carlos moments came in a momentary lapse in class and dignity and sense, sort of: July 15, 2002, with the Blue Jays leading the Yankees in the seventh. Orlando Hernandez had already been dinged for six runs, and was clearly not loving that. His first pitch to Delgado in the seventh actually went behind Carlos, and Carlos -- who never makes a big show when he gets pitched inside -- started yelling at Hernandez in Spanish so loudly and so clearly and so awesomely that I could hear him from my seat in 540, so we're talking upper deck, left field, 328 feet from home plate with the roof open and 25 371 people in the building (I have a scorekeeping book!), and I can hear Carlos getting heated up from all the way up there. It was totally out of character. The managers came out of the dugout, but everybody else stayed cool, until El Duque hit him with the 3-1 pitch and got tossed. 

(iii) Unfortunately I might not get the exact details of this right, but one day one of the giveaways at the park was what I believe to have been sets of Blue Jays bookmarks that had a bunch of information about different players, not stats, but the kind of information it is assumed kids will like: you know, hobbies, what they had wanted to be when they grew up, and things like that. They might not have been bookmarks, but whatever, they definitely would have marked your place in a book if that's what you were after, and they were definitely for the kids. Anyway, all the information was pretty standard, really, pretty much what you'd expect when you ask a bunch of questions like that to a bunch of ballplayers. It was all completely unremarkable. But for whatever reason, I distinctly remember that Eric Hinske listed "X-Box" as his hobby, and Carlos listed Cien años de soledad as his favourite novel, and it kind of confirmed what should already have been totally clear to anybody who'd been paying attention: Carlos Delgado was an adult surrounded by a bunch of idiot kids.

(iv) It's actually quite a feat to have played the bulk of your career in Toronto during the height of what we have apparently all agreed to call The Steroids Era and to have somehow managed to keep your name entirely, faultlessly intact. If you have perused the Mitchell Report -- and every time it comes up, I know I urge you to do just that, and I really mean it -- you will be familiar with the extent to which the Blue Jays locker room circa 1997-1998 was basically where that guy had sex with the monkey in terms of the spread of steroid use, if you follow me. OK, no: Oakland, but Toronto was right up there. And not once ever, not even in a sly kind of way, has Carlos Delgado's name every been associated with any of that. Maybe if Carlos were a slightly more serious Hall of Fame candidate, people would Jeff Bagwell him, and assume because he was a big power hitter playing in that era, there's no way he was clean (I may have mentioned before that I find this unfair to Jeff Bagwell?). But Carlos kept his name out of all of that, either by legitimately being clean, which is honestly what I think, or else by some serious Smiley/Karla-level subterfuge, and either way, you've got to respect that. The case has been made that we should look at Carlos' numbers and almost kind of adjust for the fact that he was a clean player playing in a dirty league and approach his numbers accordingly, but that's kind of crazy. Interestingly, when later asked how he felt about losing out the 2003 AL MVP to Alex Rodriguez, who of course admitted to using performance enhancing drugs that season, Delgado's answer was basically that it sucked a little.    


(v) About that 2003 near-MVP season: Carlos was an absolute beast, putting up a .302/.426/.593 with 42 home runs, but it wasn't even his best year. In 2000, the only other year he so much as made an All-Star team (isn't that weird?), he put up a .344/.470/.664 with 41 home runs and a total of 99 extra base hits. That's just so many extra base hits, man. To return unartfully to the 2003, though, one of my preferred Carlos moments is the grand slam he hit on the last day of the season. It was just, like, go Carlos.

(vi) The silent protest against the observance of "God Bless America" is something that tends to get some people riled up, and I get that. But also, you should settle down. First of all, let me say that while I am in many ways your standard issue Canadian socialist, I generally lack the knee-jerk anti-Americanism that is usually part of the package deal, so that is not where any of this is coming from. But the mandated playing of "God Bless America" at baseball games in Canada got pretty old pretty quickly, especially at a time where, you know, some pretty divisive wars totally got going. Delgado's protest was initially about bomb testing in his native Puerto Rico, but it didn't help when he went on the record calling the Iraq war "the stupidest war ever." But it was a silent protest until the Toronto Star did that big story on it; it's not like he was making a spectacle of himself. And when he eventually got to the Mets, and was directly asked to stand for the playing of the song, he did, so again I say settle down about that.


(vii) Of all the many things for which I will never forgive J. P. Ricciardi, failing to make even a reasonable effort to resign Carlos Delgado after the 2004 season is without question at the very top of that hateful list. Carlos signed with Florida for a pittance, tore a strip off the ball, and then had three solid years in New York. Why would we have wanted to see any of that in Toronto? I mean, shit, we had Eric Hinske to fall back on, so we were good, right? The one consolation here -- and it is pretty minor, but it is kind of at least something, almost -- is that we all got to see Carlos perform in the playoffs, and he was awesome in 2006, to the point that the Cardinals wanted nothing to do with him, and walked him three times in game seven.


Believe it or not, there is still much I haven't said, but this is already completely out of hand, and I don't want to keep you. But as you can see, I have a lot of things to say about my favourite player, Carlos Delgado, on this, the occasion of his retirement. I would have loved to see him stay healthy long enough to get to five-hundred home runs, but alas. I'm sure there'll be a nice ceremony for Carlos Delgado at the Skydome before too long, and you can be fairly certain I will have remembered other vital things that need saying/feeling by then.

KS


(many of those photos are from a Toronto Star photo gallery you can find here)