Describe Ken Griffey Jr in one word..... Smooth

Its a sad but great day for the game of baseball. Ken Griffey Jr, the greatest baseball player I have ever had privilege to watch play the game is calling it a career after 22 one of a kind seasons. Numbers wise he is no doubt one of the greatest players of all time and in my opinion a modern day legend. He finishes with 2671 games, 630 homeruns, .284 batting average, 10 consecutive gold gloves, and 1 AL MVP Award.

The problem with remembering Griffey is that he played for 22 seasons and most people will only remember him playing for the Cincinnati Reds since the year 2000, and that's a shame. The Griffey in Cincinnati isn't the same Griffey that played for Seattle for the first 10 years of his career. Most of my middle and high school days were in the 1990s and that's the time in my life when I was the most enamored with sports. I would watch sportscenter every day for hours on end, and when the baseball highlights came on there was one guarantee.... Ken Griffey Jr. did something spectacular. Griffey had a skill set and a game that you haven't seen since him in his prime. He didn't just hit for power but he hit for average, take away the last few years and he is up around .300 for his career batting average which is ridiculous, not to mention the fact that he was all over the field defensively. It seemed like every game he played he was climbing the wall to rob a homerun or making some ridiculous diving catch at the batters expense.


Not only did Griffey make all of the plays in the field but he made them look easy, he played with such grace and elegance that he made the hardest play look routine. Watching him play defense was like watching animal planet. He was like a cheetah sitting and waiting for his prey to walk out in the open. In his case his prey was a baseball, he would just stand there... waiting... finally it would happen, someone would get a hit.... and he would take off. Striding and stalking it, closing ground with every step he takes, you think to yourself there is no way he can get to it, and just as you think the ball is going to land safely on the ground he dives, getting his leather just under the ball, eating it up like the cheetah when it catches the gazelle. It was a thing of beauty, pure instinct and skill, pure baseball the way it should be.

Smooth, that is what I have been waiting to talk about, the thing Ken Griffey Jr. is known for.. his sweet, smooth swing. His swing was smoother than Bill Clinton hitting on an intern, and his stance never changed once throughout his career. He would stand there with a slight knee bend, hips turned in, elbow up with the bat at shoulder level rotating it slightly. His bat was Potential energy just waiting to be converted to Kinetic energy, the pitch would come and in the blink of an eye he would decide if he was going to swing, what kind of pitch it was, and where its location would be. Then he would uncork a swing so smooth that it looks like he is barely even swinging the bat, as if he were taking batting practice off a high school pitcher before the game. He would make contact and the ball would jump off of the bat like a rubber bouncy ball bouncing off concrete, and as he finished with a one handed follow through he would drop the bat. He did this 630 times for a HR, simply beautiful to watch.

Its a sad day because Ken Griffey Jr. will never grace the field again, but its a great day because he is leaving as one of the greatest players of all time. He finished his career where it all started, with the Seattle Mariners, the team that drafted him number 1 overal in the 1987 draft, its only fitting that he heads to Cooperstown playing his final game for them. It wont be long after he arrives in Cooperstown that he will be considered a legend, and guys like me can sit and talk about how we got to watch arguably the best center fielder of all time, with the smoothest swing of all time. To quote the movie The Sandlot "Hero's are Remembered, But Legends Never Die." and neither will Ken Griffey Juniors game.