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Hall of Fame baseball writer Hal McCoy is in his 36th year of covering the Cincinnati Reds, the longest tenure for any active writer covering one team. Counting spring training and postseason games, McCoy has covered more than 7,000 major-league baseball games, written close to 18,000 baseball stories and eaten enough hot dogs to give Babe Ruth indigestion.Home > Blogs > The Real McCoy | Cincinnati Reds baseball news > Archives > 2008 > June > 05 > Entry
No conspiracy with Griffey
Dusty Baker knows about Conspiracy Theories. Not only is he a history buff who knows a few things about the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, he knows about baseball conspiracies.
And one of them wasn’t The Ken Griffey Conspiracy. To listen to the Philadelphia media when Griffey didn’t start the first three games in Philly you would have thought Griffey took a bat and cracked the Liberty Bell or traded the recipe to Cincinnati five-way chili for the recipe for Philly cheesesteaks.
Baker was batting behind Hank Aaron in 1974 for the Atlanta Braves when they opened the season in Cincinnati and Aaron was one home run short of Babe Ruth’s 714.
The Braves wanted to keep Aaron out of the lineup so he could hit the historic home run in old Atlanta/Fulton County Stadium. But they made their intentions known and didn’t have Aaron come up with general soreness.
Commissioner Bowie Kuhn stepped in and said, “Hank, though shalt not sit. Thou shalt play and smote one into the great beyond.”
And that’s what Aaron did, hitting No. 714 against Cincinnati’s Jack Billingham, then hitting the record No. 715 in Atlanta later in the week against LA’s Al Downing.
Now it is Ken Griffey Jr. trying for home run No. 600, and suddenly he doesn’t play Monday in Philadelphia. General soreness, they said.
Out came the conspiracy theorists. One Cincinnati TV station said Griffey wouldn’t play in the Philadelphia series because his family couldn’t make it to Philly and he would wait until the Reds got to Florida on Friday. He could do it there in front of family.
What a joke. If I’m not mistaken, wasn’t that No. 3, batting third, bashing a double that one-hopped the left-field wall in the third inning Thursday? Guess he was playing, huh?
And wasn’t that Griffey pinch-hitting Tuesday and Wednesday? On Wednesday, he took a hefty-bag swing at a 3-and-0 pitch and Baker said, “You don’t think he wasn’t trying to hit that ball out of the park? He wasn’t swinging for a single to left, that’s for sure.”
Here’s the thing, and it’s one of the many things I admire about Ken Griffey Jr.
On Memorial Day, an off day after a trip to LA and San Diego, Griffey was in the training room. They drained 50 cc’s of fluid out of his left knee. Then he took TWO cortisone shots — one on the outside of the knee and another on the inside.
Don’t know if any of you have had cortisone shots, but I’ve had one. I’d rather chew thumb tacks and drink vinegar straight up than have another cortisone shot in my knee. When they put the word pain in the dictionary, they should include a photo of a cortisone needle.
Anyway, Griffey played the next seven games until Baker noticed him limping last Sunday and took him out. Then he gave him Monday off and didn’t start him Tuesday or Wednesday.
The mistake is that the Reds said he wasn’t playing because of general soreness. What’s that? No wonder folks were skeptical. I was skeptical. General Soreness? I thought he was commander of the 7th Confederate Division in the Civil War.
Why don’t they just come out and say: “Ken Griffey Jr has a sore left knee. We took 50 cc’s of fluid out of it on Memorial Day and he had two cortisone shots. The knee is a day-to-day thing.”
Instead it’s another conspiracy and the Philadelphia media thought he was ducking their fair city. All that was missing was the Zapruder film.
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Comments
By tim
June 6, 2008 7:46 AM | Link to this
I think the conspiracy was hiring Dusty Baker!By bigdoc1
June 5, 2008 7:01 PM | Link to this
Thanks for the inside scoop on Junior’s knee—His left leg is where the power comes from on HRs—which may explain why he’s hit so many ‘warning track-ers’ lately.By Mike
June 5, 2008 3:40 PM | Link to this
Why is Griffey playing anyway if he is NOT 100%? Thats all the Reds need is to lose him for 6-7 week with the “soreness” or whatever made worse. Even if he hits he still has to run, cut and stop or even slide, let alone going on the run for a ball in the gap. This type of playing is what you do in the playoffs, post season when there is no tomorrow..not in early June.By GeorgeNYC
June 5, 2008 3:14 PM | Link to this
Well Hal, you hit the nail on the head. It was the “general soreness” listing that caused the controversy. However, the team may have been hamstrung (no pun intended) by medical rules. Griff may not have wanted the real ailment revealed.