January 6, 2010

• The Hawk!

  Everyday for the last 9 years, I've known just exactly the day that the Baseball Hall of Fame voting is announced. When the day starts to get close, I start to mentally countdown the days with hope that my all time favorite athlete, Andre Dawson, might be elected to the Hall of Fame. This week I told people that I thought he would not make it this year, but thought there might be a chance. Maybe I just didn't want to get my hopes up only to find out that he didn't make it. Well, today I went to lunch and checked my email on my phone and saw the email I got from Cubs.com: Andre Dawson had been elected to the Hall of Fame!

  I've never been the type that has had heroes or people I looked up to. I fell in love with baseball in 1985. A couple of years later, Dawson was a free agent and he wanted to play for my Cubs. I didn't know a lot about him and didn't really have an opinion on him, except that he was a pretty damn good player. Well in spring training of 1987, he showed up at the Cubs spring training site and made them an unprecedented and unheard of offer from any athlete in any sport. He gave them a blank contract and told them to name his salary. In an industry in which players demand to be paid certain amounts of money and players who whine to no ends about the money they make, this was a refreshing attitude. Of course, the Cubs signed him on the cheap, for only $500,000. To me and you, even now that is not exactly chump change, but even for that day, the amount was well under what a player of his caliber could have been making. So what did the Cubs get for their half a mil? How about the National League MVP!

  I read an article on Yahoo Sports today that summed his election up perfectly. "If the Hall insists on penalizing certain players for character defects, then I have to insist that the opposite also be true. Dawson is going to be a great Hall of Famer and his example is a great one for future ballplayers." Dawson was the epitome of class, heart, soul and humbleness. It wasn't long into the 1987 season that I started to see all of that along with his many talents. Up until that point, I never had a true favorite player, but that all changed when he came around. For as long as I had seen him play, he had 2 gimpy knees that from what I've been told, he had to ice for an hour BEFORE and after games. His knees were so bad, that not only  has he had both replaced, but he also might need to have one of the prosthetic knees replaced.

  Now I'm tempted with going to Cooperstown in upstate New York in July to see him get inducted. I'm going to price hotels and things like that when I'm done posting.

  One thing I found funny is that Yahoo always lists the Web Pulse which pretty much tracks searches and what is hot on the net for the day. On today, the day he was elected Dawson was number 2, behind, get this, Bob fuckin Barker! Seriously, what the fuck? Nothing against Bob Barker, but why are people all of a sudden so interested in him, hell he hasn't even hosted the Price is Right in how long?

  • 11:21 pm
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