NO DOUBTER, VLAD!
There was always something special about Guerrero, the greatest Expo of all time
MONTREAL — It was a foul ball, and in the low-slung press-box at what was then Pac Bell Park in San Francisco, it was coming right at us.
It was the eighth inning, and with East Coast deadlines for a West Coast game we were typing furiously away when I heard the crack of the bat and glanced up. A line-drive foul off the bat of Vladimir Guerrero was screaming right at the head of Serge Touchette, the inimitable baseball writer for Le Journal de Montréal, who was sitting next to me.
“Touche!” I yelled. Touchette looked up and somehow grabbed his laptop before he dove out of the way. The ball whizzed through the spot where his head had been an instant before and went right through a sheet of plywood in front of the unfinished press seating behind us, leaving a neat, baseball-sized hole.
When we had finished filing that night, I took a pen and wrote the date above the hole in the plywood, with the tongue-in-cheek words: “In memoriam, Serge Touchette. Courtesy Vladimir Guerrero.”
Because with Vladimir Guerrero, even the foul balls were special.
That Guerrero somehow finished behind fellow inductees Chipper Jones and Jim Thome when the Hall of Fame vote was announced Wednesday is absurd, but there was never any doubt he would end up in Cooperstown. Not from the moment when Expos super scout Fred Ferreira first saw the gangly, 16-year-old kid with the mismatched shoes show his stuff at a tryout camp in the Dominican Republic. Ferreira saw Guerrero run as well as he could with one shoe two inches longer than the other and saw him throw. He didn’t even see him hit because Guerrero pulled a groin muscle on a ground ball to shortstop and his tryout was over.
“From what I saw of the running and throwing,” Ferreira said later, “I projected the hitting.”
Some projection: 449 home runs, 1,496 runs batted in, 2,590 hits, a slugging percentage of .553 and what is to me one of the most remarkable stats in the history of the Grand Old Game: a career batting average of .318 for a guy who swung at every pitch in his postal code.
The numbers unlocked the door to Cooperstown, maybe, but the numbers were not Vladi. They weren’t the kid with the infectious smile who thought he could go from first to third on any single. They weren’t the young man with the rocket launcher in right field who thought he could throw out any runner at home.
Above all, they weren’t the hitter whose personal strike zone was the ankles to the ears. And through it all, Guerrero played the game with an infectious joy that went back to Willie Mays, a joy that took us back to the time when we all liked to run and hit and throw for the pure hell of it.
From Rusty Staub until the sad day the Expos packed up the trucks and moved to Washington at the end of the 2004 season, I saw them all. Guerrero was a talent apart, a man so gifted that you would have to turn to fiction for his rival, to Bernard Malamud’s The Natural and Roy Hobbs. He was the point where man meets myth, where you would dissolve in laughter from the delight of watching the doing of the thing, without regard for the result.
It was Felipe Alou who sent me out to see him the first time. Said I should go to the back diamond at spring training, because Guerrero would be hitting. And he was: a double off the wall on a pitch that bounced in front of home plate the first time I saw him swing a bat.
When he came up to the majors at the end of the 1996 season, Guerrero crashed into other outfielders going after every ball, ran through stopsigns on the basepaths, hit balls that would go down as a wild pitch with anyone else at the plate. Alou watched and said little, because he knew what he had.
Guerrero would tame some of those wild impulses, but only to a degree. In 2002, he would treat Montreal fans to one of the great seasons in the history of the game, when he hit .336 with 39 home runs, 37 doubles, 111 RBIs, 84 walks and 206 hits. And it would have been 40 home runs if an umpire had not blown the call and ruled one of his shots a double on the last day of the season.
And he did it all with that same infectious smile. Like the time during warmups when I was kibitzing with other reporters on the field at the Big O and wandered a bit too close to the foul line. I heard a sound like a swarm of angry hornets buzz past my head. A hard-thrown ball had missed me by maybe an inch.
I spun around, ready to be furious with someone. And there was Vladimir Guerrero, grinning from ear to ear. I laughed, because, well, Vladi.
Congratulations, Vladimir. the greatest Expo ever.
And now we can visit you at Cooperstown, any time we please.