Jason Giambi and How Far a Bat Can Carry You

"'Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough."--Noah Cross in Chinatown

1992 was a fair-to-middling year for the Long Beach State (baseball) Dirtbags, who won a Big West conference title and a #2 seed in an NCAA regional. But their junior third baseman, born and raised 30 miles up the 605 in West Covina, wasn't impressing scouts. The player did "not display ease in playing the game," was "slightly pigeon toed," and "somewhat bow legged [sic]" with a "borderline arm." A "Mike Pagliarulo type of player" was the nicest thing any pro bird-dog had to say; "future 3A journeyman" the worst.

Even in the flower of his youth, Jason Giambi wasn't much with his glove, or his legs, or really anything involving full-body athleticism. He had a little power, a solid swing, and a good eye. And that was it. As one scout put it, Giambi "will go as far as his bat will carry him."

Despite unremarkable stats as a Dirtbag, Giambi's power potential and on-base skill were enough for the A's to draft him in the second round. Twenty-two years and 440 home runs later, Giambi's bat officially stopped carrying him on Monday with the 44-year-old's retirement. Realistically, Giambi's bat had been limited to in-town drives for years—he last topped 200 ABs in 2008, and had been little more than a pinch-hitter since 2012.

But before that long, slow victory lap, somewhere on the road between a "future 3A journeyman" prognosis and winning the AL MVP in 2000, the bat of Giambi showed inexplicable improvements in gas mileage. Fuel additives are a hell of a drug. Mistakes were made, and those mistakes made the difference between a jobber and a career that would see Giambi named "the new face of baseball."

But consult that list again. Not mentioned are "steroid era sluggers." And so Giambi's accomplishments have not traditionally been held in high esteem. He's not alone in bearing the juice taint. Baseball has memory-holed a generation of tainted mashers. But even with enhanced counting stats, Giambi has a par-5 Hall of Fame case at best. He sits between Edgar Renteria and Jason Kendall on the Bill James-devised "Hall of Fame Monitor" index, not exactly in the same breath as Mantle and Mays.

Formal Cooperstown-branded immortality will escape Giambi, as with Bonds, Bagwell, and Palmeiro. But Giambi—simply by lingering like the last Wario LARPer at ComicCon—has achieved a measure of absolution. It helped that Giambi apologized, unlike most of baseball's anabolic Fausts. It helped more that he re-issued a director's cut of that apology years later, actually specifying what he was sorry for. But getting to forgiveness with fans was a function of time more than anything else.

Our heroes—baseball players, film stars, politicians, pets—are living clocks. Pot bellies blossom, muzzles go gray, skin droops in weird ways. Inane fact: time leaves its cleat marks on all our faces, even the sunny faces of our professional game-players. This fact is inane; dying is inane. But a career as protracted as Giambi's achieves a kind of parallax, a shift possible only with perspective. As we got further and further away from the sins of the steroid years, we saw a slightly different Jason Giambi.

Of course, we saw plenty of different Giambis over the years. The first Giambi was a skinny college kid, and the second was a proto-Fieri superstar whose arrival was announced by a grungetastic SI cover. His clean-cut Yankees years gave way to a Snake Plissken look in Colorado, which in turn morphed to the biker-grandpa vibe Indians fans enjoyed in 2013-14. (Baseball players have never been particularly stylish as a demographic; let's check back on the health-goth swag of Bryce Harper in 20 years)

Giambi's grooming evolved, and the game evolved too, moving away from the Viking longball of the steroid years. Giambi cycled through professional roles amidst the change. The exceptionally patient slugger was an early avatar of Moneyball, then a poster boy for big-budget clubs dominating free agency, and finally, in his least glamorous and most acclaimed role, a clubhouse guy of rare pedigree, a surrogate cool uncle for young players in Colorado and Cleveland. And as the years and incarnations of Giambi flopped past, we finally saw the real Jason Giambi, defined sharply against the background of change.

Giambi will always carry a PED albatross, and he won't be alone in that. He made a choice. A fringey, pigeon-toed college third baseman had already hammered himself into a new shape to excel at baseball, but that wasn't enough. Doping was a question of ambition—how much more did Jason Giambi want success? That much more, was the answer.

In the end, Giambi turned out alright. He never won a ring, and not many grandchildren will be subjected to Giambi folklore. But in his last incarnation, as a baseball lifer whose value to a team derived not from OPS but from his experience and attitude, Giambi finally proved the scouts from 1992 wrong. At the very end, he went further than his bat could carry him.