Frank Thomas
Maybe it was because I grew up a Jose Canseco fan, but I never came close to understanding why Frank Thomas was so reviled.
I guess when you grow up with your favorite player racking up Madonna rumors, domestic abuse cases, assault charges, steroid boosts, and “Surreal Life” appearances, many of those happening before you even know what they mean, a little bit of surliness isn’t all that bad.
With Canseco, I managed to still greatly admire his plate presence and pity everything else about him. So perhaps I’m preconditioned to judge a ballplayer in two completely separate lights.
It’s just that in Frank’s case, I couldn’t see what there was to loathe about him in the first place.
He hit the ball better than any right-handed hitter of his generation. He helped his team win far more games than they would have without him. In some cases, he’s made his teammates better, which is harder to do in baseball than in any other team sport since events are so isolated.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that when he made his debut in 1990, the Sox had the lowest payroll in the league, and when his 16-year term with the team ended, the Sox had the fourth highest.
People inside and outside of the organization have been all-too-quick to point out that the Sox won the World Series only when (and some say because) Frank couldn’t play. Nobody realizes that without Frank, there is no World Series – and not just because the team went 29-14 when he was off the DL. Without Frank, this would be a completely different team to begin with.
When he arrived on the scene, the organization was almost entirely dependent on him. If he doesn’t hit and hit right away, the team doesn’t get off the ground. The Sox don’t make the playoffs in 1993. Maybe they don’t even survive the strike.
That year, 1994, Frank was having his greatest season. He played in all 113 games, hit .353, was on pace for 54 homers, 150 walks, 145 RBI and less than 100 strikeouts. But thanks to an effort led in part by Jerry Reinsdorf, the season came to a premature end. It might’ve been the year he got to carry a team to the World Series, but he never got the chance.
After the strike, Sox attendance dropped from fifth in the league to ninth as fans became disenchanted with ownership. Pitchers’ arms fell apart. Frank was still hitting, but he had no help.
Slowly afterwards, his warts became evident. Because he wasn’t a vocal, happy fellow, it was easy to paint him as somebody only concerned about his own stats. After all, he was the one hitting .300 with 40 homers while the team struggled to reach .500. After an ugly divorce and the death of his close friend and agent left him mired in personal issues, he didn’t do much to fight the haters. And when you’re grumpy and increasingly less productive, you become increasingly expendable.
Then came Jerry Manuel, who only had a backbone when dealing with Frank through the media. And Sammy Sosa, the slugger on the North Side who was like a kid out there! And then came Kenny Williams, who never liked him. And then came Ozzie, who blasted him on the day he got the job. Combine those with only one classic Frank season among several injury-riddled ones, and most forgot what he brought to the franchise to begin with.
It’s easy to understand why Frank wasn’t beloved. Sports fans have short memories in general, and Chicago in particular rallies around the scrappy, happy guy more than ones for whom the game comes too easy.
But I don’t get why he was loathed, and why so many were ready to dance on his grave, especially when none of his teammates sounded off to anybody about him. He had a positive impact on many of them, in fact, when it came to sharing his knowledge about hitting.
Now there are so many things that Frank won’t get credit for, or things that he’ll be unfairly discredited for, and it’ll be impossible to debunk them because public sentiment is so strong. Along with the aforementioned carrying of the franchise flag, there is:
*Frank being “just a DH.” It seems that some people are surprised that he played more games at first during his Sox career than DH. And when Manuel (and later the press) ripped him for not playing first in 2001, he bowed to his manager’s wishes – and then tore his triceps diving for a grounder. All his late-career injuries came from playing the field, save the most recent ankle re-aggravation.
*Frank being a whiner for not wanting to leave Chicago. Only Frank could get crapped on for wanting to play in one place his whole career. Yes, he sounded very much like a jilted teenage girl, and shouldn’t have ripped Thome in the press. And yes, he shouldn’t complain about Kenny not calling him when Kenny called (and left a message). But the underlying fact is that he wanted to stay in Chicago and finish his career where he started, and I won’t fault a player for wanting to stay.
*Frank being clean. It’s odd that in an environment that is now so vigilantly anti-steroids that Frank won’t get any credit for trying to force the union into tougher steroid tests before they were ready to. He tried to lead a charge against Don Fehr and the union to have the players who were selected to take a urine test refuse them, which would automatically count as “positive” and force the MLB to test every single player. But nobody talks about this. I hope people will eventually start as more comes to the forefront. (And no, I’m not completely throwing out the idea that Frank wasn’t clean, but why would he want steroids to be found out if he used them?)
There were a lot of good things to recognize about Frank, and the aforementioned are definitely more important than his rubbing mediocre managers or gasbag reporters the wrong way.
Bill James likes to say, “"It's a characteristic of bad front offices to obsess about the secondary characteristics of their best players.” It’s not the most behooving characteristic of fans, either.
He isn’t a criminal. He isn’t a misogynist. He isn’t a juicer. Instead, he’s shunned for not talking nicely enough to people who we will likely never talk to – and somehow thousands of fans take that personally. It amazes me that rewriting the Sox recordbooks (he’s the only player to have twice as many homers as the runner-up in any franchise’s history) and making South Side baseball worth paying attention to won’t overshadow that.
The truth is the White Sox and their fans owe an awful lot to Frank Thomas, because they wouldn't be where they are now without him. Maybe when he’s inducted to the Hall of Fame as a White Sox -- and there hasn't been one of those since Nellie Fox -- they’ll start paying him back.