Garret Anderson, RIP: The quiet, infectious Angel

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Garret Anderson

All business in the batter’s box or left field, Garret Anderson was liable to break into an infectious smile and good baseball and life talk with teammates otherwise.

“Maintaining an even strain” was a way of life for legendary military test pilots and often a way of anguish for their wives. It’s also a way of life for enough baseball players, and often a source of anguish for enough of their fans. Show me the player who maintains an even strain, and I’ll show you the fans who mistake it for indifference.

Garret Anderson, whose death of a heart attack at 53 Thursday shocked his sport, was such a player. At least, until his Angels shocked his and their sport and won the 2002 World Series in seven rather thrilling games.

“I used to be called lazy,” he told one reporter, after his three-run double in the fifth inning of Game Seven put the Angels ahead to stay. “Now that we win a World Series, I’m called graceful.”

Anderson at the plate was a sight more likely to inspire engineers than artists. He didn’t look at pitchers as though he wanted to carve his initials into their foreheads. He didn’t look or act like an ogre measuring up his next meal or a junkyard dog finding intruders under every wreck. He swung methodically but attentively, line drives a specialty, even if he did win the 2003 Home Run Derby.

“So stoic was Anderson in the box,” wrote Sports Illustrated‘s Tom Verducci in tribute, “that he came to the plate 9,177 times and saw 30,503 pitches and was hit by only eight of those pitches, the fewest ever by anyone who came to the plate 9,000 times. There was no filigree to Anderson. No self-promotion. Nothing extraneous. How he played happened to be exactly how he lived his life.”

“That swing that I was using tonight is not a swing that I try to use during the season,” he said after he won that Derby. “It was just strictly for trying to hit balls over the fence. During the season, mentally and physically, I don’t do that. I look for mistakes and try to hit them hard.”

Pitchers, other opponents, and even teammates understimated or dismissed Anderson at their own peril. In a seventeen-year career, all but two seasons of which were with the Angels, Anderson was as reliable as the day or night was long. He led the American League back-to-back in doubles; he averaged 21 home runs per 162 games; he didn’t walk much but only ever struck out 100 times once; he finished with his play in left field worth 95 total zone runs above his league average, fourth on the all-time list.

Still, there were those who assumed Anderson too benign to make the Big Plays. They assumed incorrectly.  “He doesn’t dive for balls because he gets there quicker than most guys,” said Darin Erstad, Anderson’s longtime Angels outfield partner, and a classic junkyard dog type of player. If that type holds Anderson in high esteem, best listen.

Not that Anderson was allergic to diving or lunging. He simply thought it meant he’d been caught unawares for a very rare moment. “I never should have had to dive for that ball,” Anderson once said after making a diving catch against the Twins. “I got a bad jump. I study hitters. I have an idea of where the ball is going. I don’t dive because I don’t have to.”

Somewhere in the Elysian Fields, Joe DiMaggio must be grinning, if not ready to mix Anderson a tall, cold one.

So the 2003 All-Star Game MVP didn’t resemble the offspring of a secret in vitro union between Rickey Henderson and Robin Williams. The laugh tillers still need the straight men.

“His passion to play this game was very real, and although maybe it didn’t manifest itself the way it did with some other players, Garret played hard, he wanted to win,” said his longtime Angels manager Mike Scioscia, when Anderson was inducted into the team’s Hall of Fame. “He’s got that internal competitive nature that every great player has to have, and he was really the foundation of our championship run back in 2002 and for many other years. He just was a terrific talent and a terrific person.”

Teammates were also among the first to get tastes of Anderson’s dry, disarming wit. Midwest-born former first baseman Scott Spiezio learned the hard way when his fashion sense, or lack thereoff, came into Anderson’s sights. “I’d get on the [team] plane, he’d be like, ‘Spiez, you got on a horse blanket? You’re giving me allergies’,” Spiezio said. “Before you know it, I’m buying Canali, Hugo Boss and Armani.”

Like George Harrison’s reputation as the “Quiet Beatle,” Anderson’s reputation as the Quiet Angel was often deceptive. And, like Harrison, in a good way.

Win or lose, by blowout or by single run, Anderson prided himself and his best teammates on consistency, whether fellow stoics or class clowns alike. “You can’t get wrapped up in one game,” he said in April 2002, after the Angels blew Cleveland out 21-2 one fine day.

Guys’ personalities on this team are the same day-to-day. Guys are walking around the clubhouse the same way they were last week when we were getting our butts kicked. That’s good to see. We have a lot of games to play.

“Yes, he was quiet, but let me tell you that if you entered his inner circle, he was deeply, deeply engaging, even loquacious,” said Joe Maddon, eventually a World Series-winning manager himself but then the Angels’s bench coach. “I so enjoyed our conversations. He was just a sweetheart of a guy. All of us who knew him are just broken up about [his death]. We all loved him. This is really, really hard.”

Maybe the hardest hit might have been Tim Salmon, drafted by the Angels a year before Anderson. A pair of southern California guys, one from Los Angeles (Anderson) and one from Long Beach (Salmon), who forged a deep brotherhood out of opposites, but also out of a few common threads (each married their high school sweethearts, for one), Anderson’s even strain somehow finding its neatest complement in the far more outgoing Kingfish.

“I mean, it’s devastating. As devastating as anything can be in your life,” Salmon began when reached by a reporter.

We’ve pretty much been in this game together at the same time the whole time. I just remember seeing this kid driving this really nice Mustang [in their instructional league days]. He must’ve spent his entire signing bonus on it. Here comes this tall, lanky kid. I was like, ‘Oh, what kind of attitude we’re gonna have here?’ And it was the complete opposite. He was just so mild-mannered and quiet, and you had to draw it out. But he was infectious. He became a favorite of his teammates from the beginning.

“When I first got drafted,” said Angels outfielder/DH Mike Trout, long enough The Man in Anaheim before the injury bug rudely interrupted him, and the only Angel to score more runs lifetime than Anderson, “[Anderson] was the guy. He meant a lot to this organization . . . I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything bad said about him. It’s just a tough, tough loss.”

Anderson’s impact wasn’t just on his own team. He made a big impression on another southern California kid who drew up making Anderson—who was also respected for signing autographs for kids for long periods daily while he played—his baseball hero.

“You always hear, ‘Don’t meet your heroes’,” said Freddie Freeman, the Dodgers’s Hall of Fame-bound first baseman. “But then I got to meet him, and I was like, ‘I’m glad I did.’ Because he was a beautiful man. And I wish he was still here. He meant a lot to so many people … I’m at a loss for words really.”

The only people to whom he could mean more were his wife, Teresa; their daughters, Brianne and Bailey; and, their son, Garret (Trey) Anderson III. As great as baseball’s grief is, theirs is greater. Lord watch over them as You welcomed him home, a little bit early, but no less safe and sound.

Phil Garner, RIP: Two sides of scrap iron

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Phil Garner

Phil Garner debates with umpire Larry Young in 2006. He didn’t always act like his Scrap Iron nickname.

Phil Garner was nicknamed Scrap Iron for his feisty side but had a side gentle enough that he once promised his wife to hit a grand slam for her when she missed the first one he hit as a major leaguer. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Unless you can. And he did.

Garner was a rough-and-ready second baseman whose fortés did not include power hitting. (He averaged nine homers a year lifetime.) So, after Mrs. Garner missed him taking Cardinals pitcher Bob Forsch in the bottom of the sixth on 14 September 1978, the loving husband promised her another salami slice ASAP.

Naturally, it came the next day, against the Montreal Expos. And neither Garner had to wait beyond the bottom of the first, when hubby squared off against Woodie Fryman with the pads padded and hit one over the left field fence. It was the first time a National League player sliced salami in back-to-back games in 77 years.

That was the guy who’d grow up to manage the Astros to their first pennant in 2005, when they were still a National League club. The bad news was the Astros grappling their way to it through the Cardinals only to get swept by the White Sox.

And, the who’d go from there to the Athletics’ front office as an advisor, to the team who once traded him after the guy they traded to manage the Pirates, Chuck Tanner, told his new team to trade for the second base slasher. In that advisory role, Garner proved invaluable to an old teammate named Bob Melvin, when both were Giants and Garner was near the end of the line.

Maybe that was also because, when managing the Brewers and the Tigers once upon a time, Garner made Melvin his bench coach at both stops, and Melvin appreciated Garner talking to him in terms of actualities and not what-ifs.

“When he would talk to me,” said Melvin to The Athletic‘s Tyler Kepner about Garner, who died of pancreatic cancer Saturday night, “he would always say, ‘When you manage …’ Not one time did he ever say, ‘If you manage …’ And it just resonated with me that he had that much confidence in me. Obviously, I did end up managing, and a lot of my philosophies and a lot of my values in baseball come from him. There’s no more impactful guy in my career than Phil Garner.”

Garner did that in a lot of places. When he became a Pirate, he engaged in some good-natured jousting with Hall of Famer Dave Parker, who’d first been astonished that his team sent six players to Oakland in the swap that made Garner a Pirate in the first place.

Parker zinged him, Garner zinged back, and the new guy’s “initiation was complete,” as Parker remembered in his memoir, Cobra, “and I had a new sparring partner.” He also had an almost immediate appreciation for Garner one spring training afternoon after Garner’s arrival.

“In the twilight,” the Cobra wrote, “ol’ Scrap Iron was still out there, hours later, taking extra fielding practice at third base. As pissed as I was about the trade, I knew it was the smart move and we got ourselves a winning player.” A guy to win a World Series with, as they did with the Fam-I-Lee Pirates of 1979.

And, a guy who knew how to help bring a roster together, as the team’s relief ace Kent Tekulve told Kepner. “Our team was known to be, oh, a little rowdy, a little cocky, and nobody was safe in the clubhouse,” Tekluve began.

It didn’t matter where you stood in the pecking order, everybody was fair game, and a lot of that was Gar. It was hilarious every day when we’d come in. Whichever one got there first—Parker or Gar—you were waiting for the second one, because it was going to start. You’ve got this 6-foot, 5-inch, huge Black guy and this 5-foot, 9-inch little redneck, and they’d just start in on each other, and that spread. Everybody’s involved now.

And he knew what was going on. I mean, Phil was a smart guy. He knew if he got on Parker, then everybody else would get on him, too. And Parker liked that, because that gave him a reason to prove you wrong.

That’s the man whom Tigers pitcher C.J. Nitkowski once ripped publicly after “a frustrating game,” as Kepner phrased it. Garner bawled him out for it in a clubhouse meeting the next day . . . but accepted the pitcher’s apology privately. Garner even tried to acquire Nitkowski when managing the Astros later on.

“It really spoke to me and made me reflect on how I want to handle myself,” said Nitkowski, who went from the mound to the broadcast booth in due course. “He showed what professionalism looks like, and what forgiveness looks like.”

Another of his pitchers, Steve Sparks, remembered a tough loss that stirred Garner to “shredding us in the locker room” and turning the postgame food spread into a miniature landfill. If Garner couldn’t cool himself off, his lady could—and did.

“At the end of [the tirade],” Sparks remembered, “his wife Carol has a Harley-Davidson wheeled into the clubhouse for his birthday—and right away he turns into Jerry Seinfeld in the ‘schmoopie’ episode, from one character to another in the blink of an eye. He was so relatable. He knew how to laugh at himself.”

Hopefully some of that laughter will come through the tears when they lay the body to rest and wish the man a safe journey home to the Lord. Where Dave Parker’s just liable to be waiting for him with a cold beer in hand and a mouthful of wisecracks with which to serve it.

First published by Sports-Central.

Three swipes, you’re out

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Jo Adell

Jo Adell (7) holds the ball in his glove aloft after his third Saturday night home run theft proved the most spectaculer of the three.

Let’s assume there were cynics in Angel Stadium Saturday. Let’s assume at least a few of them said, “I’d like to see him do that again,” when Jo Adell took a flying leap and robbed Mariners star catcher Cal Raleigh of a home run. Those cynics and Raleigh hadn’t seen anything yet.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a guy rob two homers in one game, much less three,” said Raleigh after the game. “Baseball can amaze you night in and night out. You can see something you’ve never seen before. I’ve never seen anything like that.”

Did the Big Dumper say three?

He did.

And he wasn’t just whistling tea kettle, either.

Raleigh was only the second batter of the game. It took until the eighth inning for Adell to get another crack at grand theft homer, when Josh Naylor lofted a long fly to just about the same right center field real estate over which Raleigh tried to fly. Once again, Adell took a flying leap. Once again, he snatched the fly before it could hit the high wall above the yellow line that determines whether a drive might be a homer or not when hitting the wall.

Adell had one more piece of business to tend an inning later. This time, J.P. Crawford thought for dead last certain that his long fly toward the seats behind the lower right field corner wall would make it into those seats for the run that eluded the Mariners all game long to that point.

Not quite.

Adell ran toward that wall, leaped with his back to the fans in that section, extended his glove hand, and speared the ball, snapping his glove around a split half-second before he fell all the way behind the wall . . . before springing up none the worse for wear and with the ball still secured.

Only two players stole four home runs at all all last season, Jacob Young of the Nationals and Fernando Tatis, Jr. of the Padres. Adell stole three of them in one night’s work.

For an outfielder who’d always had the tools but not always the results, you could only imagine what was or wasn’t shooting into and back out of his head after the Angels banked the 1-0 win. (The lone run? Zach Neto taking Emerson Hancock’s fourth service of the game over the left center field fence in the first.)

“Defense was something that I struggled with,” Adell told reporters postgame. “Just finding ways to improve and get better and find a way to learn. At the end of the day, defense is one of those things where it’s just about trying to get the job done.”

Sounds very much like a man who took some wise counsel on more than one occasion from former Angel and longtime former Twins center field star Torii Hunter. But what did Hunter think? “It’s amazing, man,” said the man who’s mentored Adell during spring trainings. “That’s probably the greatest defensive game I’ve ever seen.”

“Front row seat to the Jo Show,” Xtweeted Mike Trout, whose healthy resurgent season took a rude but hopefully very short disruption Sunday afternoon, incurring a contusion when hit by a pitch late in the Angels’s 8-7 win.

“You just get there, and it’s just decision-making,” said Adell of his backward leap and fall while robbing Crawford. “Just got there, and was able to fall over and end up in somebody’s lap. I don’t know who, but it was a softer landing than I thought it would be. It’s kind of crazy.”

“Kind of crazy” might be a kind way to phrase it. He may have been lucky the landing was far more shallow than the one Tampa Bay’s Manuel Margot had catching one in a flying leap over a right-side wall with a deeper landing in Game Two of the 2020 American League Championship Series. But then Margot was lucky to come up with his skeleton intact.

The Mariners proved to be good sports about it all. On their clubhouse bulletin board, someone inscribed the Sunday game plan: “Don’t hit the ball to Joseph Adell.” They only hit three in Adell’s direction Sunday—once for a double, once a home run, and once an RBI single.

The home run, from second baseman Cole Young in the top of the fifth, flew high enough over the right field fence in front of a ballpark maintenance alley that Adell couldn’t have even thought of stealing it, even by catapult. Even the best of thieves need time off for good behaviour.

So this was Opening Weekend . . .

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The Las Vegas Aviators celebrate an Opening Night 12-1 blowout laid upon the Salt Lake Bees . . . (Photograph by your correspondent.)

Opening Weekend. The most certain sign that we’ve survived winter.

Netflix Loss Dept.—The Yankees and the Giants started it last Wednesday night. The game happened to air on Netflix. The game turned out to be secondary to practically everything, but especially a pre-game show that seemed mostly to be about the rest of Netflix’s broadcast/streaming schedule and offerings.

But there was a game. And the Yankees shut the Giants out 7-0 to open despite Aaron Judge striking out four times for the first time on any Opening Day in his career. It only began with the Yankees slapping Logan Webb silly for five in the second.

Double Zero Dept.—That Opening Night shutout was just the beginning. Cam Schlittler followed Max Fried’s splendid work with some splendor of his own: a 70-pitch limit not stopping him from striking eight out in five and a third innings, en route the Yankees’s franchise-first back-to-back season-opening shutouts.

Judge Not Dept.—Judge shook off those Opening Night strikeouts with a pair of home runs over the rest of the set, in which the Yankee shutout streak was broken by their winning 3-1 Saturday.

Trout Time Dept.—Mike Trout spent Opening Weekend uninjured . . . and doing Mike Trout stuff: he led the weekend in plate appearances and walks (six, all unintentional) while bopping two home runs and scoring four runs as his Angels went 2-1 against the Astros to open.

Piracy Dept.—Opening Day:  Paul Skenes opened his Cy Young Award defense Thursday by getting destroyed for five Opening Day runs and having to leave the game in the bottom of the first in Citi Field. He had help, alas: a pair of Oneil Cruz outfield miscues left room for Mets infielder Brett Baty’s three-run triple into right.

The Mets won that one, 11-7, then took the second game in extras, 4-2, thanks to Luis Robert, Jr.’s three-run homer in the bottom of the eleventh. The Pirates up and won the third of the set Sunday, this time in ten, when the Mets allowed a pair of RBI singles in the top of the frame but couldn’t get more than one back in the bottom—Juan Soto’s RBI double turned into an out when Francisco Lindor was thrown out at the plate, and that was all the Mets could summon.

But starting 2-1 in the tough NL East isn’t exactly starting from weakness.

Saturday Fright Live Dept.—C.B. Bucknor is somewhat notorious for, shall we say, fluctuating accuracy rates, but Saturday the veteran ump found himself called out seriously by the new automated ball-strike system: Working behind the plate for the Red Sox against the Reds, Bucknor had eight pitch calls challenged and six overturned.

“The Red Sox blew all their ABS challenges early against the always horrible CB Bucknor,” posted veteran sports observer Bill Simmons, “and now he’s running amok like Jason Voorhees. I like ABS it’s a brand-new way to get aggravated during a baseball game.”

Referencing Alex Cora, Red Sox manager, hustling out to protect his batter Trevor Story on  a check swing call (Story asked Bucknor to get help from first base; Bucknor kinda sorta declined) and getting himself tossed for his trouble. All that because the Red Sox spent all their challenges early and often.

The Reds eventually won, 6-5, in eleven innings. Which seemed forgotten, almost, amidst the controversy whipped up by the Bucknor overthrows.

Friday Night Frights and Lights Dept.—The Las Vegas Aviators opened their Pacific Coast League championship defense rather emphatically on their Opening Night: they destroyed the Salt Lake Bees, 12-1, the big drop a seven-run fourth in which Colby Thomas hammered a three-run homer high over the center field fence.

Then followed a season-opening fireworks show, the first of six such Friday shows scheduled for the year. A splendid time was had by the sellout crowd, which including your correspondent and his son, who attended his first game at Las Vegas Ballpark since moving to Las Vegas over two years ago.

The Aviators went from there to sweep the Bees over the weekend. Already they look like potential repeat champions.

The Parent Trap Dept.—Oft-beleaguered Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm destroyed Rangers pitcher Nathan Eovaldi in the bottom of the fifth last Thursday at Citizens Bank, sending a 2-0 service for a three-run homer helping the Phillies to a 5-0 shutout.

The day before he made Eovaldi a personal piñata, Bohm revealed he’s suing his parents for a figure described only as “millions,” accusing them of turning “a sizeable amount” of his money to themselves for their own use.

It may yet prove tough for Bohm to play ball with that to bother him. The Phillies went from their Opening Day triumph to a setback or two, losing the next two to the Rangers, 5-4 (in ten innings) and 8-3.

Bobbleheads Up Dept.—In the middle of the Dodgers’ season-opening sweep of the Diamondbacks, catcher Will Smith:

* Had his bobblehead night.

* Had his wife and two little daughters heave the ceremonial first pitch to him to start that night.

* Hit what proved the game-winning home run on that night.

As Jayson Stark would say, because . . . baseball!

Three-Bomb Blues Dept.—Two rookies bombed their ways into the record books: Munetaka (White Sox) and Chase DeLauter (Guardians) spent Opening Weekend each hitting three home runs in their first three ever major league games.

They join Trevor Story and Kyle Lewis as the only other rookies to deliver that kind of three-peat to open their major league careers.

Interesting observations in Rob Shandler’s 2026 Baseball Forecaster:

“If he can hit an MLB fastball and keep his strikeouts within reason, his ceiling might be a poor man’s Kyle Schwarber. Let’s just hope his floor isn’t a rich man’s Daniel Vogelbach.”—On Murakami.

“[C]ontinues to be injury prone and hasn’t reached 250 plate appearances in any of the last three seasons . . . With an elite knowledge of the strike zone and big power and hit tools, he is a good bet to succeed.”—On DeLauter.

And to think, the season has a mere 159 games to go!

Griffin’s lines of early spring

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Konnor Griffin, striking for Opening Day at age nineteen.

Opening his poem, “Lines Written in Early Spring,” William Wordsworth lamented,

I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

That could have been the opening spring lament of baseball fans whose teams are owned by those to whom building and sustaining competitive rosters is an impediment to making or further augmenting fortunes. It’s not impossible to conceive Wordsworth living in America in our day being, say, a Pirates fan.

Except that, for now, early enough in spring training still, the Pirates make some sounds not associated with them too frequently.

A child prodigy, shortstop Konnor Griffin, considered the absolute best of baseball’s youth in waiting, last year’s Minor League Player of the Year, electrifies Pirate fans long bereft of spiritual electricity and non-Pirate fans who savour the excitement young sprouts generate often enough.

Griffin at this writing has slugged his third home run of the spring exhibition season. The co-owner of a baseball laboratory known as Maven Baseball Lab compares him to top-of-the-line performance cars. “You’re looking at a Ferrari. You’re not looking at a little Fiat.” ESPN’s Jeff Passan says Griffin “represents more than a glimmer of hope for a woebegone organization.”

He is the dream of any franchise: top-of-the-scale power and speed, with a nifty glove and a shotgun-blast arm, the kind of work ethic that will make any slacker in his orbit feel like a lout, and a demeanor so polite and accommodating that the words “yes” and “sir” might as well be surgically attached to one another.

Top power and speed? Nifty glove and shotgun blast arm? Work ethic that embarrasses slackers? It sounds rather like Mickey Mantle without the notorious leg trouble and long nights out on the town, at least before the Yankees discovered he might be useless as a shortstop but had center field potential to match his otherworldly power.

Polite? Accommodating? “Yes” and “sir” might as well be surgically grafted? When was the last time we heard a boy shortstop with Griffin’s upside described that way? Cal Ripken, Jr.?

“Can you imagine what John McGraw would say if he saw this kid?” Mantle’s first Yankee manager Casey Stengel said about him in his first Yankee spring. Ripken invited comparisons to Honus Wagner both at the plate, with the glove, and off the field. The Pirates may have to be careful. May.

No, scratch that. At nineteen years old, Griffin so far displays disarming maturity. Either that, or he’s learned some lessons in how not to do media blarney from Bull Durham‘s million-dollar-armed, ten-cent-headed pitching phenom Nuke LaLoosh. LaLoosh was (shall we say) a loose cannon before Crash Davis polished him just enough, including his press cliches.

“I’m happy to be here, and I hope I can help the ball club,” LaLoosh says to the fictitious sports reporter after his late-season call-up to the parent club. “You know, I just want to give it my best shot, and the good Lord willing things will work out. You know, you got to play ’em one day at a time.”

Griffin seems neither that callow nor that scripted. So far.

“I felt really comfortable,” he told reporters after the Sunday game where he delivered spring homer number three. “I’m really working on just being present, taking each game one game at a time. I’m enjoying where I’m at right now, but still got to continue to work and get ready to go tomorrow again.”

A young man on the threshold of his twenties who swung, caught, and threw his way through three minor league levels last year and keeps his head while turning enough others this spring training, thus far, isn’t quite the living, breathing resurrection of a thunderbolt arm attached to an airhead.

Griffin even has room enough to thank the Pirates for letting him be him and letting him let his own serious work of play define him for them. “They’ve done a great job so far allowing me to be free in the minor leagues and be able to move and continue to face challenges,” he tells Passan.

But this spring, I’m really trying not to think about it too much. There’s a lot of noise. I’m just trying to treat it just like I did last spring. I knew I had no chance of just making the big league team. And so every day I was just trying to be a sponge and soak up the advice of these great players who’ve been through it. And I’m trying to do the same thing this year. I know there could be a chance I make the big leagues at some point soon, and that’s great, but I just want to feel ready.

Passan thinks Griffin’s some point soon may come sooner than either he or Pirate fans think. The veteran writer could hardly resist reminding one and all that no teenager has made an Opening Day debut since the year the Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the original World Wide Web debuted. That teenager’s name was Ken Griffey, Jr. No pressure, you understand.

“Goes to church every Sunday, doesn’t cuss, doesn’t do any of that stuff, married at 19,” says the Pirates’ youthful super-pitcher, Paul Skenes. “It’s not common, but nothing about him is common. Everything screams uncommon. And if you want to be uncommon, you want to do uncommon things, it starts with thinking uncommon—and he does that.” Put some Caesar dressing on that word salad if you must, but take it as high praise.

All Griffin has to do is continue living up to it. Even with his well-composed head, that will prove at least as much of a challenge as refusing to let opposing pitchers decompose him or opposing liners and grounders disintegrate him.

He seems aware enough of his game and its encyclopedic history to know that, for every Griffey that arrives on Opening Day still in his teens and goes all the way to the Hall of Fame, there are several hundred who go over, under, sideways, and down, for numerous reasons, and under numerous circumstances. It’s a cinema show for fans—equal parts romance, drama, comedy, horror, psychological thriller, and back—but potential hell for players.

If Griffin keeps the good work up and convince the Pirates he should play on Opening Day, he may or may not have his work cut out for him. The Pirates will face the new-look Mets, who’ve announced Freddy Peralta (import from Milwaukee) as their Opening Day starting pitcher.

The good news for Griffin: Peralta can be prone to the home run. (He surrendered 25 last season.) The bad news: Peralta also struck twice as many out as he walked last year (3.09 K/BB rate) and 10.4 per nine innings. The worse news: Griffin is trying to make a team retooled toward a postseason expectation or three but with ownership known for mistaking monkey wrenches for baseball equipment.

Wrote Wordsworth four verses later:

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.

Yep. Wordsworth among us today just might be a Pirate fan. Or, at least, an empath toward their current most shining prospect.