#ryan klesko

From Sports Illustrated, April 08, 1996

The driver turns the corner, kills the headlights and closes in on the first crack house of the evening. There are 14 law-enforcement officers and one big league baseball player in the back of the van, and as it approaches the address on the search warrant, their idle chatter stops. The cops tighten their helmet straps and grip their weapons. The player adjusts his bulletproof vest. "Thirty seconds out," says the driver, a narcotics agent who is overseeing the operation. "Time to go to work."

As the van tears up the driveway, its doors swing open. The cops spring out of the vehicle as if their seats were on fire and dash toward the house. A team of snipers carrying AR-15 assault rifles surrounds the small, run-down house. One officer totes a boomer, a tool designed to break open doors. Others are armed with MP5 semiautomatic weapons and with handguns. Ryan Klesko, the 24-year-old left-fielder for the Atlanta Braves and an honorary deputy sheriff for Palm Beach County, Fla., waits for the last officer to exit the van and then follows closely behind, his cheek full of chewing tobacco and his eyes glowing with anticipation. Lots of people enjoy watching the TV show Cops. Klesko, who hit three home runs in the Braves' World Series triumph over the Cleveland Indians last fall, prefers the real thing.

The Palm Beach County sheriff's office is holding search warrants for four houses on this unseasonably cool Friday night in March, and this first house is the one from which the other three obtain their drugs. The raid begins with the report of a flash-bang, a small explosive device whose loud and frightening detonation announces the arrival of the Special Response Team, a SWAT-like elite unit of the sheriff's department.

The flash-bang is tossed through an open door of the tiny house, and when it explodes, the house fills with smoke. Some of the occupants hit the floor and wait facedown to be handcuffed. One suspect, in an attempt to dispose of drugs, pushes his hand through a windowpane in the back of the house, slicing open his arm. The cops search for drugs and weapons quickly and efficiently, as if the operation were as routine as stopping a speeder. The ballplayer watches in awe, like a wide-eyed kid who has been invited to sit in the dugout at a World Series game. There are lots of things to do on Friday night in South Florida, but as far as Klesko is concerned, nothing beats busting bad guys.

To those wondering how this blog got its name, here's the story:

This man, Ryan Klesko, the most legendary of all .279 career hitters, assisted me in almost achieving my life-long pursuit of defeating my former roommate in Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball for N64.

Now, to the layman, this may not seem like a big deal.  This would be wrong.  My roommate, Andy, was an odd bird.  He played a lot of N64 when it first came out, as many of us did.  What made him different, however, is that once new systems came out (Playstation and its lineage, GameCube, hell, even DreamCast if you want to get frisky), he continued to play N64 exclusively.  And more importantly, he continued to play the SAME GAMES exclusively.  One of these games was Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball.  To call him a savant would not do him justice; he had this game perfected.  While many shifted to the more realistic games on PS2 circa 2000, Andy continued to perfect his craft at a game few would ever play again.  This monk-like pursuit of Griffey mastery continued until 2008, when he finally found a challenger (read: whipping boy), me.

Having been a decent video game player in my day, I unwittingly challenged Andy to the game I always saw him playing.  What followed was a streak of losses for me that bordered on impossible to estimate, but I think about 300 straight is in the ballpark.  More importantly, even though I never really came close to winning, Andy reveled in his beat-downs.  Nothing gave him more pleasure than destroying a completely over-matched opponent, especially if that opponent was me.  He wasn't in it for the competition; when he picked up the three-pronged controller, he was a soulless robot.  A robot programmed to flawlessly execute every nuance of the game, steamrolling anyone that stood in his way without a shred of remorse.

One day was different.  Somehow, in the midst of a Griffey marathon and something like 17 consecutive losses, I found myself down only one run in heading into the bottom of the ninth inning.  Everything had gone right in that game.  John Smoltz was electric, keeping his 105 mph (or so the game told me) fastball down in the zone and running curveballs out of it at will.  Andres Galarraga had gone yard, and even Mark Lemke was contributing instead of pulling his usual scarecrow-with-a-bat routine.

Andy got two quick outs to start the last half-frame, including a line out to the formidable Galarraga.  That left Ryan Klesko, who was at the time the bane of my existence, stepping up to the dish in the most important Me vs. Andy moment in history.  The batting circle for Klesko was roughly the size of the actual baseball on the screen, so contact hitter he was not.  I don't think he had reached base in the game so far, or in any other game when I played as the Braves (which was often).  Nevertheless, my hopes and dreams were on this man's 64-bit shoulders.

I was sitting on the super change-up, only because I did not have confidence in my ability to get his tiny circle on the ball in time to hit a fastball squarely, and I didn't have the dexterity to properly follow the path of a breaking ball with a guy who had a sweet spot the size of a dime.  Luckily, Andy found my entire Griffey career riding on the man named Ryan Klesko amusing and not in the least threatening.  So he did was any good, respectable asshole would do: he lobbed a super change dead up the middle, belt-high, and dared Klesko to hit it.

But, to everyone's surprise, hit it he did.  I absolutely tattooed the ball, kindly depositing it in the upper deck out in right field.

What happened then, you ask?  Andy then made a diving catch for the third out, and proceeded to hang three runs on me in the 10th that I couldn't match.  I lost the game, sure, but this had bigger ramifications.  Andy was fallible, human... He was vulnerable.  Because hey, if Klesko can take you deep, any half-way decent joe in the game can.  

And for that moment, Ryan Klesko earned my eternal respect.  His name has since been on my fantasy teams (in their title, not on the roster sadly), on my back, and now adorns this blog.