The day a great Jay was felled by a pitch
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This weekend, as part of the Toronto Blue Jays’ 40th anniversary season (and how are you enjoying that?) they’re going to start announcing the top 40 players in club history this weekend, and assuming they start at the 40th, we’ll be waiting a while to hear the name Tony Fernandez. Fernandez, who had four separate stints with the Jays and is the best shortstop to ever play for the franchise, had the third best on-base percentage and fifth best batting average in Jay history as a third baseman in 1999, some 16 years after he was called up as a shortstop during the September roster expansion. He was the first bona fide star infielder developed by the Jays, and probably should have been regular shortstop at least a year before he took over from the popular Alfredo Griffin for the 1985 season. In my books, the only sure bets ahead of him as top Jays ever are Roberto Alomar, Dave Stieb and Roy Halladay. And I think about Tony just about every time I see a major league hitter get hit in the face by a pitch. It happened to Tony early in 1989, the year Jays’ fans were hoping 2017 would resemble once it started to go off the rails early — a big late-season rally to make the post-season. I was covering the team pretty heavily (120 games or more per year) for The Spectator then, and the entourage was in Texas for Toronto’s second series of the year. They’d lost two of three in Kansas City and would do the same in Texas, but won the first game on April 7 — the 12th anniversary of the very first Blue Jays game — a 10-9 shootout on an eighth-inning Kelly Gruber home run. Three pitches after Gruber’s homer, Ranger pitcher Cecilio Guante’s hard slider broke high and in on Fernandez, soared up under his batting helmet, and smashed into his right cheek. Arlington Stadium was a small, almost Meccano-like structure that had a minor-league feel. Montreal’s Jarry Park without the joie de vivre. You were close to the action, so the whole stadium heard that pitch hit Fernandez. And there is no sound like a bone being cracked by a hard pitch. Sickeningly evocative. Fernandez immediately hit the dirt and there was dead silence, especially on the Blue Jays bench, as he lay motionless. He had hit his first career grand slam earlier and Gruber had hit the go-ahead homer right before him but the Jays didn’t rush the mound in retaliation because they were in shock, and because they didn’t think the pitch was intentional. Guante, Fernandez’s friend from the Dominican, adored his fellow countryman. Normally, when Fernandez would get hit by a pitch during batting practice, his teammates would immediately begin yelling a chorus of “Aii, Aii, Aii,” anticipating his angry verbal reaction, which was always a trifle overboard. This time, everything was soundless. They knew it was serious. He’d suffered a fractured orbital bone which had to be repaired by surgery two days later at nearby Arlington General Hospital. George Bell was the first to the plate, and cradled Fernandez’s head. He was taken to hospital, without losing consciousness. It was Fernandez who had rushed out to hug Bell when he caught the ball against the Yankees that gave the Jays their first division title in 1985. Bell, also Dominican, had had his jaw fractured by a pitch seven years earlier in triple A, and knew the pain and uncertainty Fernandez was going through. We were officially permitted to see Fernandez in hospital on Sunday. He said he’d been worried about losing an eye but added it could have been worse, and as a Christian had placed his fate in the higher power. A few of us, including Dave Perkins of the Toronto Star and Larry Millson of the Globe & Mail, already knew that because we had unofficially talked to Fernandez a couple of hours after he’d been hit. We’d finished our game stories and probably had enjoyed a couple of cold ones before deciding it might be jolly good journalism to try to get past the heavy hospital security and interview him. We expected two things: that security would intercept us, and if that didn’t happen — which somehow it didn’t and I don’t know how they could have missed us — that Fernandez wouldn’t talk. He was notorious for his frequent uncommunicative moods when reporters came calling. But we somehow snuck into the hospital, ducking behind and under things, and about 10 minutes in, around the corner rolls a gurney with a patient on it: Tony Fernandez. And he was smiling and shockingly happy, almost thankful, to see us, calling each of us by name, telling us he would be OK, that he’d worried about his eye but that he had that concern under control now. Jesse Barfield was nearby and, ironically, it wasn’t security who eventually turfed us out of the place for trespassing but Barfield’s wife, Marla. Fernandez missed about 20 games that season, and it seemed clear that he was a little iffy at the plate when he came back, as most players are after they’ve been seriously beaned. He denied it, but his .257 batting average was the worst of any season in which he had 200 at bats or more. Despite that, he still drove in 64 runs and scored exactly the same number, and fielded like the magician he always was. He was a real player and, when the Jays lost the final two games of that Texas series, it made 17 straight games the team had lost when Fernandez was not in the lineup. Although the trade with San Diego brought the great Alomar to town after the following season, it was tough to see such a homedeveloped talent sent elsewhere, so it was poetic justice that Fernandez came back a couple of years later to join Alomar in a World Series-winning middle infield. Two of the top four Jays of all time, traded for each other and playing within metres of each other. Steve Milton has pretty much seen it all in his 40 years covering sports around the world, and, in Being There, he relives special moments from those stories, from the inside out, every Friday. If there’s a memorable sporting event you would like Steve to write about, let him know at smilton@thespec.com. Chances are, he was there.