Before I get to my blog about Ken Griffey Jr. retiring last night all I can say about this is that it is unequivocally the worst call in the history of baseball. Bar none. So bad that I almost feel bad for the umpire Jim Joyce here? Like I can't name a single umpire in all of Major League Baseball, but this guy's name will be burned in to my brain forever. Not to mention this is already in the first three sentences of Joyce's Wikipedia page. Tigers fans everyone logging on to edit that in milliseconds after that game. This reminds me of the CC Sabathia debacle in Pittsburgh two years ago except that at least that call was made early and there wasn't the build up of a no-hitter or perfect game. To quote a modern day philosopher, both incidents were simply turrible. And how does Galarraga feel. All the way to the last friekin out and then to have history wrenched from his hands. It reminds me of when I played an entire Packer's season on Playstation in a single day. 15 hours. Then during the Super Bowl my PS2 froze and I hadn't saved anything. I didn't talk to anyone for days. So yeah that's essentially what it's like to lose a perfect game.

Anyhow buried under that unmitigated disaster is the fact that one of my boyhood idols retired from baseball yesterday. Hell you'd be hard pressed to find anyone between the ages of 18-35 that didn't have a man crush on Ken Griffey Jr. growing up. Dude was a class act the entire way and did not ONCE have his name linked to steriods. It's a shame he couldn't stay healthy his entire career otherwise he would have been the one to break Hank Aaron's record and not that professional ass Bonds. Griffey hit 630 bombs in his career and probably missed two or three full seasons worth of games due to various injuries. He played 150% effort in every game and for about 5 years in the mid to late 90's pitchers reacted about as well as I do in one on one situations with women when Griffey stepped in to the batter's box. Not to mention his 1989 Upper Deck rookie card was IT back in the day. Like I would have traded my entire collection for that one card. I would have given up my Huffy 10 speed for it. And he created one of the greatest video games ever to hit Nintendo 64:

Anyone who owned that game system owned that game. I would wake up in cold sweats singing "C-c-c-call me Junior." I'm also 350% confident that NO ONE could beat me in that game. They didn't invent a difficulty setting high enough to contain me. I was hitting 60 bombs a year with Jay Buhner in that game and his hitting circle was the size of pea! Calm down ladies, I know that's a turn on. Bonus word: Griffey.