Baseball will never forget Fernandez
The story of Jose Fernandez’s death isn’t, unfortunately, particularly unusual. Promising athletes have died young before, and Fernandez was both: just 24 years old, the Miami Marlins pitcher had the highest strikeout rate among starters in majorleague history.
Pedro Martinez said on Sunday that Fernandez was more talented than him, which is about as high a blessing as one can get.
But the tragedy of Fernandez’s passing — he died in a speedboat crash early Sunday morning off the south Florida coast — unfolded in a modern way, too. On social media, the pictures and highlights of his too-short career started spreading fast. It was a quick one-two: the shock of his death, and then the moments that told you something about what we had lost.
There was the photograph of Fernandez sitting on a folding chair next to the Marlins dugout after a win, gazing up at the sky and the celebratory fireworks.
There was the highlight from his rookie season in 2013, when he snared a line drive off the bat of Troy Tulowitzki, then with the Colorado Rockies, who started sprinting to first before he realized the ball wasn’t in play.
Tulowitzki asks Fernandez if he caught the ball. Fernandez, unable to suppress a huge grin, says that he did, and buries his face in his glove.
And — my favourite — there was the shot of Fernandez, in the Miami dugout, when his Marlins teammate Giancarlo Stanton crushes a majestic home run. Fernandez positively explodes with joy. People have undoubtedly celebrated lottery jackpots with much less abandon. We should all find such happiness in our lives, at least once.
On Sunday, at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, and in every park around baseball, there was recognition that this thing had arrived to remind everyone that baseball is a game. These are the pennant races, the terrifying and exhilarating stuff of baseball’s best high-wire act, with careers and legacies and millions of dollars at stake, and then a young man dies and it takes a second to regain your footing.
Toronto Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro, who was a young Cleveland executive in 1993 when Indians players Tim Crews and Steve Olin were killed in a boat crash, called it a “perspective blast,” a fine way to put it.
In Toronto, which still hasn’t shaken the euphoria of a return to baseball relevance, and has coupled it this season with the gloom of a September slump — one that now seems fully behind after a wild 4-3 Jays victory over the Yankees — Sunday was a day to remember wins and losses can sometimes feel very small.
Fernandez’s story was already so remarkable it almost seemed apocryphal. He and his mother tried to defect three times from Cuba when he was a teen, and twice he was imprisoned as a result. On the fourth attempt by sea, when he was 15, he jumped into the water to help someone who had fallen into the waves and discovered the person who had gone overboard was his mom.
They both made it to Mexico, and flew to Tampa, Fla., where Fernandez became a high school star and first-round draft pick, then National League rookie of the year at 21.
Seemingly all of baseball had a story for the infectiousness of his personality.
“It’s so horribly sad on so many different levels that there will be no more of that, there will be no more of him … that young man with such a gift, such a great smile,” Pittsburgh Pirates manager Clint Hurdle told mlb.com.
Fernandez was a fabulous pitcher, a Hall of Famer if his arm held up, but he could also strike out a dozen batters and then just want to sit and watch fireworks.
Hurdle, who had spent time with Fernandez at an awards dinner in 2013, was clearly moved by the attitude of a young guy who had risked his life, repeatedly, to chase a pro career.
“I’ve been trying to live that life for a while now. I wasn’t always in that place,” Hurdle said. “Be where your feet are. Enjoy the moment.”
Yes — because they can be fleeting.