Former Brave of the Fortnight: Fred McGriff

           His Atlanta debut was stuff of forced mythology, a coincidence turned canon by circumstance and fate.  The story would instantly become his legacy; that the preordained tale held true is only reaffirmed his place in Braves lore.

            Fred McGriff was born in Tampa, Florida and drafted in the ninth round of the 1981 draft by the New York Yankees.  He was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays as a minor leaguer; he debuted with the Blue Jays and provided immediate power.  McGriff hit 20 homers in a partial 1987 campaign, then launched 34 in 1988, his first full year in the Bigs.  McGriff led the league the following year with 36, and didn’t slow down.  After the 1990 season, he was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays , along with Tony Fernandez, for Roberto Alomar and Joe Carter.  McGriff continued to rake in San Diego, but the team’s potent offensive weaponry (McGriff played with Gary Sheffield, Tony Gwynn, Bip Roberts and Benito Santiago) weren’t enough to overcome holes in the lineup and suspect starting pitching, and the Padres meddled just above .500. 

McGriff arrived in Atlanta on July 18, 1993.  For his services, the Braves sent the Padres prospects Vince Moore, Donnie Elliott and Melvin Nieves.   This trade would become one of the Braves biggest coups, as Vince Moore, Donnie Elliott and Melvin Nieves all turned out to be terrible at baseball.  McGriff, however, ignited the Braves. Following the stadium light fire that coincided with his debut, McGriff led the slumping team to a division title, hitting .310 with a .392 on-base percentage and 19 homers in the final 68 games of the season.  The team went an absurd 51-19 during this stretch, eventually losing the National League Championship Series 4-2 to the incorrigible 1993 Philadelphia Phillies.

            McGriff continued to hit with Atlanta, forging his place in the heart of the lineup and the fans.  Tall, sleek, lithe and powerful, he became entrenched at the clean-up spot.  The chiseled lefty, with his big, shallow Motown mustache and era-perfect close-cut flat-top, looked less purely athletic than highly refined at distinct baseball skills.  He was the big robotic lefty, a power guy with a long carved swing.  When it was on, we salivated at replays of his longball shots, all ending with McGriff - bat artfully slanted in one hand - almost taking a scissor-step towards the mound.  At the plate, his perfect posture and robotic motions made his stance perhaps the most instantly recognizable and imitated on the team, as well as practically a template for video game first basemen.

When balls didn’t leave the park, McGriff was notorious for his slow speed on the bases, but the phrase “pretty fast when he gets up to speed” was an oft-used and apt descriptor.  McGriff ran the bases like an 18-wheeler coming out of an interstate stoplight, churning and jerking as the engine revved before finally coasting along at a seemingly unstoppable rate.  Watching him try to stretch a stand-up double into a triple was one of the rarest and most exciting experiences a Braves fan could ask for.

Following the 1997 season, in which the Braves fell to the mercenary Florida Marlins in the NLCS, McGriff’s contract was purchased by the expansion Tampa Bay Devil Rays.  His power had been dipping slightly already, and he hit just 19 homers in his first year with the team.  But he soon experienced a resurgence, hitting 32 in 1999, with a .310 average and .405 OBP.  In 2001, he was traded to the Chicago Cubs, but had just one more productive year, hitting .273 with 30 homeruns in 2002.  After a largely unproductive 2003 with the Dodgers, McGriff, at 40 years old, played 27 games with the 2004 Devil Rays.  It would be his last season in the big leagues.

            McGriff’s power was potent, but not quite prodigious.  He homered in throwback fashion, regularly if not immensely.  McGriff was among the last of the old-school sluggers, at a time when McGwire and Canseco were already pumping themselves full of pick-me-ups in Oakland men’s rooms.  McGriff led each league in homers, with 36 in the ’89 AL, then 35 in the ’92 NL; by the end of his career, those totals were achieved by a handful of middle infielders.

            McGriff’s Braves legacy makes Atlanta one of the few places he will be remembered more for his play on the field than his endorsement off it.  McGriff was the celebrity spokesman for one of the longest-running commercials of all time, Tom Emanski’s Baseball Training videos.  With an un-bent foam trucker’s cap so comically placed it seems almost intentional, McGriff (introduced as “Major League Super Star" Fred McGriff) deadpanned his endorsement of the video drills used to produce back-to-back-to-back AAU champs.  The video was unavoidable during ballgames and weekend cartoons.  McGriff appeared between low-quality cuts of horrifying amounts of children identically completing specific drills – hitting balls of tees with a disjointed swing, throwing a baseball in a plastic tub from the outfield – and made every little leaguer fear his coach would actually subscribe to the successful tactics and make summer baseball practice even more boring than it already was.

            In Atlanta, McGriff’s firestorm arrival at least equaled his Emanski notoriety.  Symbolic and absurd, it set the stage for a memorable run.  In the aftermath, McGriff’s nomenclature was so similar to that of basset hound/detective/children’s safety advocate McGruff that no one could find a nickname for McGriff that didn’t end in dog.  Crime Dog and Fire Dog both floated about, with Fire Dog particularly relevant and unfortunately less catching.  At some point, the distinctive ring of ‘Fred McGriff’ proved enough to quell the search for a more fitting nickname, and Fred McGriff went eponymous.

            McGriff’s baseball legacy finds him alongside Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmeiro - company he’d surely just as soon not keep, for myriad reasons - on the borderlands of a milestone and on the outside looking in at Cooperstown.  McGriff finished his career with 493 homers, begging for a contract but ultimately shut out, retired against his will on the cusp of 500..

            Five hundred home runs was once an instant ticket to the Hall of Fame, but McGriff fell just short of the marker.  As demonstrably unfair as this fact is, it has enveloped McGriff’s legacy.  Though McGriff seems to feel that seven more bombs would have punched his ticket, it’s more likely that even 507 wouldn’t get McGriff to baseball’s Ragnarok.  He was the first case study in an era of re-examination for the 500 Club; his candidacy suffered under the closer scrutiny of raised standards, just prior to the mandatory contextualization of steroid enhancement.  Shortly after McGriff retired, Jose Canseco tested the Hall of Fame concept to its limits with his failed admittance and bitter exposal of baseball’s deepest secrets.  McGriff has avoided steroid scrutiny, but he remains linked to an era in which power numbers are graded on a scale.

            Ironically, McGriff was both overrated and underrated statistically as the result of his tweener-era status.  He retired with a .284 batting average and .377 on-base percentage.  The average was respectable, but the on-base percentage was wildly underappreciated in the pre-Moneyball era.  Had McGriff retired five years later, his on-base percentage would have been a key point of discussion; five years sooner, his power numbers would have been more appealing.  As it is, McGriff was born at the exact wrong time and, over 19 notable seasons, fell just short of his Cooperstown dream.

            McGriff will always be remembered as one of the most unintentionally hilarious Braves.  The fire, the Fire and Crime Dog nicknames, the Emanski hat, the baserunning, and even his tragi-comic career curtailment; all emotionally endearing, especially for a man as consistently stoic as McGriff himself.  But his public perception never entered into his play, where he gave Atlanta power and [atience in the heart of the order, at the team’s loftiest heights.  Whether he was ever in on the joke or not, McGriff’s affective comedic stylings only enhanced the memory of his time in town.  Though the Hall of Fame may never find him, he will live on infinitely on a smaller scale, in the hearts and souls of die-hard Braves fans.  Don’t stop the Chop.