Sunday marked the annual occasion on which thousands of fans trek to Cooperstown, N.Y., to join hundreds of baseball’s greatest for the sport’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony. “I was born five months after his senior year, and he made a decision to play baseball to provide for his family, because that’s what men do”. So popular, he was named to MLB’s All-Century team in 1999 though he was just 11 years into his career.
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Throughout the buildup to his Hall of Fame induction, Griffey had scoffed at the notion he would break down on the podium – even when other Hall of Famers had warned him it was inevitable.
“As a guy that gave everything he had”, Griffey said.
“I’m going to leave you with one thing”. “I’m damn proud to be a Seattle Mariner”. “You convinced the Dodgers to let a very popular catcher in Mike Scioscia go so that a veteran pitching staff would know that I was their catcher in my rookie year, no matter how many mistakes I made, or how inexperienced I was”.
“To my dad, he taught me how to play this game”.
Piazza was drafted by the Dodgers in the 62nd round of the draft.
“Just because I made it easy doesn’t mean that it was”. The two were part of the Seattle Mariners, who drafted Ortiz, briefly, but it was enough time for Griffey to get a good look at the future Red Sox star.
“You know what they say when you’re a kid: ‘Don’t do that?”
But in September 1990, Senior, 40, and Junior, 20, hit back-to-back homers against the Angels in Anaheim, an episode so mathematically and generationally preposterous that the first flying hippo would take second place in the Absurdity Matrix. “Tommy, you were always there for me”, Piazza said during his speech. The legendary catcher gave an emotional speech, thanking a number of special people who helped to get him from his childhood and adolescence, and through his tenure in professional baseball.
He said he hopes he’s remembered for how hard he played – both as a Silver Slugger at the plate and a 10-time, wall-crashing Gold Glove center fielder. “Now it’s time to smell the roses”.
In front of the second largest crowd on record, Mike Piazza and Ken Griffey Jr. were enshrined in the national baseball hall of fame.
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Any omissions were the outcome of his taking the Hall of Fame’s suggestion on speech length – try to keep it in the 14-15 minute range, he was told – more literally than Piazza, whose lovely but long acceptance address included words for his father (spoken in Italian) as well as quotations from Pope Francis and Teddy Roosevelt.
