Baseball Watch: Ken Griffey Jr. Quietly Playing His Way into the Hall of Fame

In 1989, three years after Barry Bonds had entered professional baseball, Ken Griffey Jr. was drafted right out of high school by the Seattle Mariners. He didn't spend much time in Triple A baseball before making his debut with the Mariners. The center of a nucleus that included Edgar Martinez, Randy "The Big Unit" Johnson, and, soon, Alex Rodriguez, there appeared to be nothing standing in the way of the Seattle Mariners winning a pennant and ultimately a World Series.

Of course, it didn't quite work out that way. Alex Rodriguez has ended up playing first with the Texas Rangers and then with the N.Y. Yankees. Randy Johnson has ended up playing with the Arizona Diamondbacks where he did win a World Series in 2001. Ken Griffey Jr. has ended up playing for his home town of Cincinnati, the Reds, where his father had won championships in the 1970's along with such greats as Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan.

There is no questioning the star power, and hall-of-fame worthy careers of both Randy Johnson and Alex Rodriguez, but what about Ken Griffey Jr.? His name has popped up this year as an anti-Barry Bonds, the good guy of Major League Baseball, who just plays hard, hits home runs, gets RBIs, and helps his team to win. This sheds light on one of baseball's greatest players who back then, in 1989, was going to break all of the records.

"His rookie card was like nothing I had ever seen," says Eddie Williamson, my brother, and also, in 1989, a huge card collector. "There were collectors buying boxes and boxes of Ken Griffey Jr. rookie cards. He was on the cover of Sports Illustrated, as a high-schooler. It's was nuts."

Although fluctuations in prices regarding baseball cards make it a poor assessment of a player's chances to get into the hall-of-fame, the obsession with Ken Griffey Jr. in 1989 shows how popular this individual ball player really was. At one time, he was the most hyped baseball player of the modern era.

That, perhaps, is why nobody really pays all that much attention to Ken Griffey Jr. now. "It's not that he hasn't had a great career," Eddie Williamson says, "it's that once he got into the majors everyone discovered that he's not that charismatic. He's just a baseball player, doesn't say much, and never gets into trouble. He goes out and plays baseball. Then, of course, he's also gotten hurt a lot. People forget about guys like that."

In other words, the fact that Ken Griffey Jr. has not had any run-ins with the law, has not been linked to the steroid scandal, has not fathered an illegitimate child after child, plays for a paltry, by MLB standards, eight-million dollars a year, most baseball fans have forgotten about him. Yet, he's amassed, over an eighteen year career: 587 home runs, a batting average of .290, and 2,501 hits.

Pretty amazing for a guy who nobody really cares about. The stats speak for themselves, of course, and any sportswriter with a vote for who gets in and who's left out in the hall-of-fame will have a hard time not including the original "Jr.".

But, maybe there's more to this. Maybe, if Major League Baseball is really intent on helping its image after the steroid scandal, they should look to Ken Griffey Jr., past and present, and say, "See, at one time we did have it right. We did look up to the right guys."

Wouldn't that be something?