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 Post subject: Vladimir Guerrero
PostPosted: Thu Jan 25, 2018 7:14 am 
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Lost in the Jim Thome deification parade is the fact that the best damn ballplayer I've ever seen, Vladimir Guerrero, got in the Hall of Fame.

Vlad's longtime manager Felipe Alou once said of Vlad "it's like God put his arm around his shoulder and said 'son, you're gonna play baseball" and hey, Tony LaRussa once said of Felipe Alou "if everything's equal Felipe wins"

To that end, I'm pretty sure Vlad's baseball story starts witg playing stickball in the slums of the Dominican Republic. Armed with just a broomstick, you'd stand in front of a brick wall while kids would run up and try to throw some kind of ball past you to hit the brick wall. They could throw it 5-10 ft above your head if they wanted to so you'd have to go up and hit that... Go figure Vlad had legendary plate coverage in MLB.

I'm also pretty sure a young Vlad hitched a ride on the back of a motorcycle to the Expos tryout in the Dominican . When he got there he was so poor he had two different sized baseball cleats so he had to stuff a sock in the toe of the shoe that was too big for him. Despite that he hit a double or an inside the park homerun or something (I'm doing all this off the top of my head) so yeah, color the Expos impressed. I think they even signed his brother Wilton too to be cool.

So he comes up and I wanna say .312/38/109 in his first full year? I first noticed the guy in 2001 when I was invited into a fantasy baseball league ("you dont know baseball but you're smart enough to figure it out") and despite a team loaded with Sammy Sosa (.321/64/160) and Jason giambi Bret Boone and rich Aurelia steroid era-ing up the IF and an OF with magglio ordonez and Mike Cameron (and I took a chance on a young cardinals 3B named Albert pujols a week or two into the season) I had this other guy in the OF named Vladimir Guerrero, who had video game #s (hearkening the legendary Paste from bases loaded) of .345/45/123 in 2000. His name just looked so damn cool, some confluence of Russian snd Spanish, that I had to watch the guy on ESPN on July 4 when I saw the Expos were on.

Dude, no batting gloves? Throwing his back out on every swing? I immediately went with my gut and said "fuck it that's my guy that's my team fuck the bullshit" and Vlad has never steered me wrong since. Ask Ryan Dempster, who was a Marlins SP back in the early 2000s and busted Vlad a foot inside so Vlad took it about 3" off of his thumbs down the left field line for a HR. After the game Dempster said "I put that pitch exactly where I wanted it and he took it down the LF line for a HR? There's nothing you can do about that, that's God in baseball cleats"

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