(Note: This originally appeared Thursday, June 22.)Once in a great while, we are privileged to experience a television event so extraordinary, it becomes part of our shared heritage. 1969: Man walks on the moon. 1971: Man walks on the moon... again. Then, for a long time, nothing happened.
Until tonight, when Carlos Delgado, now a member of the New York Mets, plays in Toronto for the first time as a visiting player. (Richard Griffin had a superb column in yesterday's Toronto Star.)
Not to go all Bill Simmons and write some 20,000-word rambling screed about Carlos' place in the Toronto Sports Pantheon, but the occasion demands it.
Toronto has a bad track record with how it treats and receives its superstars. Nothing Mats Sundin has done has ever been good enough for the bulk of Leafs fans, but lesser players like Tie Domi and Darcy Tucker are worshipped. Go figure.
It was the same with Darryl Sittler, who got booed when it was obvious he was on his way out of town, and the same with Frank Mahovlich back in the '60s.
Part of it that Toronto is an easy-gratification kind of place with a very unsophisticated sports-watching public. (That goes for the great Canadian sport of hockey as well as those U.S. imports, basketball and baseball.)
It's also very insular, so it's assumed, Hey, if this guy is a superstar, he should be able to win a championship by himself. It's also hard for certain fans to fathom why anyone would want to live and make his money elsewhere than in the self-proclaimed Centre of the Universe. Doesn't everyone want to come to Toronto?
So when Vince Carter's fortunes turned sour, and it was as much the fault of inept Raptors management as it was his own emotional immaturity, VC forever became anathema in Toronto. That also happened to Roberto Alomar, the greatest player ever to wear a Jays uniform, whom the team went out of its way to portray as a petulant prima donna when he was on his way out in 1995.
(Alomar probably was a petulant prima donna. He's a baseball player. It goes without saying. Yet people can't seem to accept this.)
So yes, the worry is that Delgado is going to get booed when he comes to bat for the first time tonight, and by more than the usual beered-up contingent who show up at any ballpark on a Friday night. He doesn't deserve it.
WRONG TIME, WRONG PLACE
Still, there's always going to be a Paradise Lost kind of feeling with respect to Delgado's Jays days. Here was a ballplayer who should have owned Toronto.
What was not to like? A home-run hitter who also hit for average and was, at times, capable of carrying a team for weeks at a time. Big smile, easy-going, comfortable in his own skin and its own set of human frailties.
He showed off his shaved head and never seemed to get overly defensive about the fielding flubs that often plagued him at first base. This is who I am. I have no hair and I'm not going to win a Gold Glove any time soon. So take me as I am.
Unlike your typical pro athlete who seems removed from the people who pay to watch him play, he embraced Toronto, by all accounts earning his epaulets as a bona fide culture-vulture.
Yet the vast majority never embraced him back. The timing and tide was all wrong. In a sense, Carlos was born 10 years too early. If he'd come on the scene in 1984, when the Jays were an exciting young team, the Leafs were in disarray and the NBA coming to T.O. was a pipe dream, it would have been different.
Instead, he had to arrive on the scene after the 1994 strike. It was the darkest days of the transitional period between the the original ownership and the absentee Interbrew S.A. group, with the holdovers from the World Series teams -- Alomar, Devon White, Al Leiter, to name a few, with Pat Hentgen as a shining exception -- all speed-dialling their agents to see how fast they could get out of town.
There were vast expanses of empty seats at Skydome, ugly uniforms and the this-is-too-surreal-to-enjoy experience of having Roger Clemens for two seasons. Oh, and for part of one season, Jose Canseco had to play left field.
In the early '90s, you had to explain yourself if you weren't a Jays fan. By the end of the decade, you had to explain why you still were one. That's trendy Toronto for you.
From '98 through 2003, Delgado embodied Bill James' line about Eddie Murray -- his best season was every season. He was automatic for 30-plus homers, more than 100 RBI and an OPS in the .950 range. And there's the rub. No matter what he did, it could never get the Jays higher than third place, perennial also-rans behind the Evil Empire and the Red Sox, who didn't really become Evil Empire 1-A until 2003.
It wasn't his fault the Jays, then as now, were lacking in pitching and defence. They could mash those home runs, but not quite at the rate of the best teams.
Carlos' year-in, year-out consistency probably cost him recognition in the press, and at least one MVP award. No one notices if you play for a team that's a perpetual also-ran, put up pretty much that same stats every year and top it off by playing in Canada. Besides, with the Steroid Era, weren't a lot of guys putting up big numbers every season?
That said, the two years he came closest to capturing the MVP -- 2000 and '03 -- it seemed like the right guys won, at least at the time. (After all, we know more about the 2000 winner, Jason Giambi, now, than we did back then.)
Still, there was always this element of dissatisfaction with whatever Delgado did. Just read between the lines of what one wannabe Knight of the Keyboard wrote in November 2003, after he finished a close second to Alex Rodriguez in the MVP balloting.
"If the Rangers probably "could have finished last without (A-Rod)," it stands to reason the Blue Jays could finish third in the AL East without Carlos Delgado having an MVP-type season. In fact, for six straight years, Toronto has finished third whether Carlos Delgado hits .272 or .344, slugs 33 or 44 homers, or whether he knocks in 102 runs or 145."
What ingrate wrote that? Me, at my old blog.
Even those who champion Carlos never seem to quite get it right. Griffin is being a little revisionist when he says it's "somewhat ironic" that after one year without Carlos' big bat, the Jays went out traded for a power-hitting corner infielder in Troy Glaus, although it is rather symbolic that Glaus is wearing Delgado's old No. 25.
In that regard, the tempest-in-a-dugout over Delgado's silent protest a couple years ago -- his refusal to stand on the field, during the playing of God Bless America during the seventh-inning stretch, instead disappearing into the clubhouse tunnel -- has been misconstrued.
Griffin, today, characterizes it as his "anti-war stance." That's what you get in sound-bite society, since Delgado did call the American conquest in Iraq "the stupidest war ever" a long time before polling showed a plurality of people in the U.S. and Canada would tend to agree with such a statement.
In actuality, Delgado's protest had more to do with the American government allegedly refusing to be accountable for the pollution problems and skyrocketing cancer rates caused by over 60 years of U.S. Navy weapons testing on the island of Vieques in Delgado's Puerto Rico.
GAVE US PLENTY
So now Carlos, the best player the Jays farm system has ever developed, is coming to town. He's having a fine season with the Mets. It looks like he'll play in the post-season for the first time after spending some 1,700 games in the majors. With his 34th birthday falling on Sunday, he's 11 homers shy of 400 for his career, meaning he has an outside shot at the 500 which used to guarantee you a plaque in Cooperstown, pre-Rafael Palmeiro.
It may not get noted in the papers, but the definitive Delgado-in-Toronto moment will always be another Sunday in June, another game that fell on his birthday: June 25, 2000, against the Red Sox.
Then as now, the Jays had stayed on the fringe of the playoff race until June. Pedro Martinez, Delgado's present-day Mets teammate, was pitching for the Red Sox. This was the Pedro Martinez, the one whom that Grady Little thought he had when he let him come out for the eighth inning of the 2003 ALCS against the Yankees.
Chris Carpenter got knocked out early, but the Jays bullpen kept the game close and the hitters pecked away at Pedro, even in the midst of his obligatory one-walk, 10-strikeout performance. It was 5-3 in the bottom of the seventh when Carlos came up with two out, representing the tying run.
And he crushed it. Wayyyyyyyy back in right field, a no-doubter off the best right-handed pitcher in the game to tie it up, and the 30,000 or so in the park sounded like the full houses after the "Winfield Wants Noise" edict was thrown down back in '92. Jays win it in extra innings.
It was definitive since the deed had only a temporary glow. By the dog days of July and August, the Jays' pursuit of the playoffs would take on a doomed quality. Raul Mondesi suffered a season-ending injury; once again, there wasn't enough pitching. The Jays finished with their usual 83 wins, four and a half lengths behind the Yankees.
However, that wasn't Delgado's fault. What he did was plenty.
Well, the last sentence brings it to 1,638 words. I can hear it now: Hey, Sager, Simmons would have made it to 20,000.
Send your thoughts to neatesager@yahoo.ca.
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