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75 Chapter 15. Ken Griffey Charles F. Faber Baseball lore is rich with stories of fathers and sons playing catch in the backyard, of fathers and sons bonding at a baseball park. Ken Griffey’s father never played catch with him, never bonded with him at a baseball park, or anywhere else for that matter. Nevertheless, the youngster grew up to be a key member of Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine and the father of a future member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. George Kenneth Griffey was born on April 10, 1950, in Donora, Pennsylvania, one of five children of Ruth and Joseph “Buddy” Griffey. In his youth Buddy was an outstanding athlete, a left-handed third baseman who played on an All-Star team with Stan Musial. A halfback, he won a football scholarship to Kentucky State University, met Ruth, then returned to Donora. Located on the Monongahela River in Washington County, about twenty miles south of Pittsburgh, Donora is the birthplace of three famous athletes—Musial, Griffey, and Ken Griffey Jr. Environmentalists recognize it as the site of one of the worst air-pollution disasters in American history. In late October 1948 a temperature inversion combined with toxic emissions from U.S. Steel’s smelting plants to create a death-dealing smog. Twenty residents died; thousands were sickened by the calamity . Buddy Griffey was an employee of American Steel and Wire, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, but his family escaped the ravages of the smog. However , the company closed the plant in 1952 and transferred Buddy to Cleveland. When Ruth refused to join him in Ohio, the couple divorced. Ruth and the children lived on welfare for fifteen years. In high school Griffey became a star in four sports—baseball, basketball, football, and track. In baseball he was a hard-hitting, base-stealing, fine-fielding center fielder. In basketball he was outstanding , once scoring forty points and collecting twenty-seven rebounds in a game against Charleroi Area High School. It was in football, though, that he received his greatest acclaim. He played alternately at end and halfback and specialized in long runs after catching passes thrown by the quarterback, his younger brother Fred. The two set many passing records for the Donora High School Dragons, who had two consecutive undefeated seasons. Although the baseball and track seasons overlapped, Griffey was able to compete in both sports. He parage g ab r h 2b 3b hr tb rbi bb so bav obp slg sb gdp hbp 25 132 463 95 141 15 9 4 186 46 67 67 .305 .391 .402 16 10 1 On a team filled with speedy players, no man on the Reds was as fast as Ken Griffey. 76 charles f. faber ticipated in the 220-yard dash, the low hurdles, and the high jump. In May 1969 he set a Washington County record in the high jump at 6 feet, ¾ inch. He was named the Donora community’s Athlete of the Year in 1969. After graduating from Donora High School that spring, Griffey briefly joined an American Legion team in nearby Charleroi. In the June 1969 amateur baseball draft, Griffey was selected by the Cincinnati Reds in the twenty-ninth round. Of the prospects drafted by the Reds that year, two—Don Gullett and Rawly Eastwick—would eventually join Griffey on the Reds. According to the writer Joe Posnanski , Griffey was drafted solely because of his speed. Scout Elmer Gray had taken a stopwatch to one of the Donora High School games and was amazed at how quickly Griffey could get down the first-base line. On Gray’s recommendation, the Reds drafted Griffey. They would need speed when they moved into the new Riverfront Stadium with its artificial turf. Posnanski wrote that the Reds gave Griffey a red jacket and five pairs of socks in lieu of a signing bonus.1 Although he had offers of college scholarships to play football, Griffey signed with the Reds. He needed the $500 a month they offered him. Griffey was sent to Bradenton, Florida, to play for the Reds of the Gulf Coast Rookie League. The nineteen-year-old outfielder appeared in forty-nine games in his first professional season and hit a respectable .281. In 1970 he was promoted to the low Single-A Northern League’s Sioux Falls (South Dakota ) Packers and the next year to the Tampa Tarpons in the Florida State League. He caught fire with...

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