Junior Griffey hit his 600th career homerun last night. He is only the sixth player in MLB history to accomplish that feat. And really in my mind the fourth player to do it naturally.
In the age of steroids and performance enhancing drugs, I'm pretty confident when I say that Junior probably didn't hit a single one of those 600 homeruns using steroids. When he was young, he was a scrawney lad...no steroids there probably. As he got older and more injuries he wasn't recovering that fast....no steroids there probably. When I saw him in Anaheim at the World Baseball classic two years ago and he was standing in center field all flabby and looking like the Pillsbury Dough boy trying to run down a fly ball...no steroids there probably unless you think hamburgers and french fries are performance enhancing. Babe Ruth did.
There was a time when Junior was in his early 20's that he was a lock to break Hank Aaron's lifetime homerun mark. But stuff slowed him down. That's what happened to Dave Parker. That's what has happened to a lot of people in baseball. But I'll take his 600 homeruns, (even though he hit a lot of them terrorizing my Angels when he was with the Mariners) because I'm pretty sure he didn't cheat doing it. Griffey is a real home run king.
Commentary by Allen Bacon, Editor, The Daily Bosco
Photo Credits: Eliot J. Schecher, Getty Images for ESPN.com
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