The World’s Okayest Hero
I‘d like to talk a bit about Henry Rodriguez.
I was a huge Montreal Expos fan as a kid, and Henry Rodriguez was my favourite of them all. He had a cool moustache and his nickname came from the Oh Henry! chocolate bar, which is about all you can ask for in a personal hero when you’re 8 years old. You know what else kids love? Dingers. Round-trippers. Fuckin’ HOMERS, son. Kids are attuned to the larger-than-life nature of ridiculous feats of strength, and few have the elemental pull of the home run. So in 1996, when the first wind of my interest in baseball was at its peak, I was drawn to Oh Henry, the man who was my team’s slugger, a god among mortals. Fans at Olympic Stadium would chuck the namesake chocolate bar onto the field when Rodriguez went yard. I understood this. This was a language of fandom I instinctively got. I was so personally invested in Rodriguez as a player that when I read in a fantasy sports magazine that they felt his defence was sub-par, I took it as a personal affront. “But, but… the dingers!,” I thought. “And they shower him with chocolate in celebration! He’s an honest-to-God All-Star, too!” To 1996 Derek, Henry Rodriguez was basically Babe Ruth, Wayne Gretzky and God rolled into one.
But the pundits were right, technically. Henry Rodriguez was a wholly unremarkable baseball player. Over 11 seasons, he had perfectly average offensive output (career .259/.321/.481) and defensive prowess (.985 career fielding percentage, mostly as an outfielder). He never got within spitting distance of a championship ring (in fact, he only made the playoffs once, with the Chicago Cubs in 1998), and bounced around between a few teams during his tenure in the pros, including cups of coffee with the New York Yankees and Florida Marlins. His career-high single-season home run total, the one that made this man my baseball idol, was a modest 36. For comparison, that year’s NL home run leader hit 47. That man was Andres Galarraga of the Colorado Rockies, who himself was part of the Great Expos Exodus of the early 90s.
Being an Expos fan was to be eternally frustrated. After making the playoffs for the first time in 1981 only to lose in the NLCS in a heartbreaking Game 5 against the Los Angeles Dodgers, on a day still known among the faithful as Blue Monday, they spent the rest of the 80s almost contending, underachieving, suffering bad beats here and there because the universe is cruel and unjust. But their farm system was robust, and the 90s were looking up; in manager Felipe Alou, the Expos had one of the great nurturers of talent of the era, and they had a strong nucleus of young players to build around. But a weak dollar and a deepening post-strike financial hole forced the team to sell off its powerful young core. By the end of 1995, their winning percentage dropped 191 points and they finished dead last in the NL East. These are the circumstances under which Henry Rodriguez was brought into the fold.
Rodriguez (1996 WAR: 1.6) wasn’t even among the top three most valuable position players on the 1996 Expos, a team composed of a couple of aces and a bunch glorified utility players that reads like the Justice League of my childhood. There was FP Santangelo (3.3), a switch-hitter who would be slotted pretty much anywhere on the field depending on who was out of commission; Mark Grudzielanek (2.3), a single-hitting shortstop whose last name I was obsessed with; and Rondell White (1.6), a guy who played 88 games all season and was mostly replaced by the aforementioned Santangelo. In a way, it’s fitting that Santangelo was the Expos’ most valuable position player that season. They were a team of perfectly okay players running on grit and chemistry, supported by a solid pitching staff that included an older pitcher having his least great run in Jeff Fassero, a future Hall of Famer entering his prime in Pedro Martinez, and a rock-solid reliever in Mel Rojas. Most baseball fans and analysts have forgotten about this ragtag crew of perfectly deece positions players. Somehow I have not.
Facts are stubborn things, but so are feelings. Fandom isn’t really about whether or not something is any good. It’s about losing yourself in the nooks and crannies of a universe that isn’t your own. Sports are just as alien and fantastical as any fiction, its narratives spanning centuries and continents. And baseball reigns supreme over all other North American sports in terms of lore. Baseball’s history is America’s, its trivia its own flavour of folk tale. There are tales of giants, sure, of Bonds and Griffey and Clemens. But the tale of Henry Rodriguez is the one I was drawn to. The story of one guy, for one season, a middling ballplayer becoming a kid’s hero, because heroism is strange and nebulous, and because you don’t get to choose the tales you’re drawn to.
