Before Andruw Jones Was Fat, He Was Good at Baseball

Not to get all James Murphy on you or anything, but I was there. I was there, in 1996, at the first World Series that Andruw Jones ever played in. I told him, “Adjust your stance. You’ll never even tip it away.” OK, that didn't happen. I was six. But I was at Game Four in Atlanta, sitting in the nosebleeds with my parents. We’d driven all the way down to Atlanta from North Carolina in a 1992 Dodge Caravan to see the Braves play the Yankees, because we’d gone the year before to see Atlanta host the Indians and it seemed to have worked out well.

Watching Game One of the series and seeing what Andruw Jones did to the Yankees was like having your brains seared forever. As Jones, the skinny little wunderkind from Curacao, stepped up to the plate, my dad told me, “This guy’s supposed to be special.” Three balls and two strikes later, goddamn it if the dude didn’t hit a home run. Same thing happened during his second at-bat, too. It felt like the Braves were going to win their second World Series in as just as many years, and Andruw Jones was going to be the reason why.

Of course it didn’t work out that way. The Braves, much like Frieza killing Krillin just for shits and making Goku become a Super Saiyan, Joe Torre transmogrified into a Super Manager and coerced the Yankees into staging a bullshitty comeback that kind of started in Game Three but really got going with an 8-6 victory in Game Four, which my parents and I attended at Fulton County Stadium. It was exciting, but it sucked, and that was the beginning of the end. Andruw didn’t really make as much noise for the rest of the series, but Game One had made it clear that the kid was not to be fucked with at the plate.

The next season, Jones competed for Rookie of the Year, and started an 11-year run in Atlanta that resulted in ten Golden Gloves, five All-Star Games, more weight fluctuations than you can shake a stick at, and 363 home runs (he's at 431 now). Jones’ career has always held something of a Nolan Ryan-esque narrative. Like Ryan, the big (formerly little) dude is in relentless pursuit of one thing. Where Ryan wanted to strike out everything with a pulse—he would have been the worst possible coach in a coach's pitch little league—Jones just wanted to knock the goddamn shit out of a baseball. And knock the goddamn shit out of it he did, at the expense of perhaps everything else. If prime Andruw Jones had ever gone against Nolan Ryan, Ryan might have found his match. Jones’ M.O. has pretty much always been to be bad at hitting everything other than fastballs, and Ryan’s was to throw the baseball faster than fuck. To get the picture of the two going head to head, just imagine a bullet coming up against a thing that’s supposed to send bullets into outer space (scientists: figure this shit out). But the problem with Andruw was that there were very few post-Ryan starters who had as singular an interest in throwing fastballs as him, at least when facing Jones. And so the Jones’ batting average has been fucked for years.

After the Braves let him go in 2008 for falling off, he fell even further off, bouncing from team to team (Dodgers! Rangers! White Sox!), and now he’s languishing on the Yankees, where he may see even less time with Ichiro Suzuki aboard. It’s nearly poetic, like a knight being forced to get water for the dragon he would have before been able to slay, or something. In all likelihood, Jones will end his career without having made the Hall of Fame. The numbers are there in some categories, but in others they’re just not. He was good, but got real bad, real fast. It sucks, but that’s baseball. But for me, for all the kids who watched him destroy the universe when he was 19, he’ll never suck.

@DrewMillard