Todd Helton has been on my mind.
That’s due, in part, because the Rockies’ former star first baseman is back in baseball. He recently joined his alma mater, the University of Tennessee, as a director of player development for the baseball team.
But mostly, I miss him.
I leave for spring training in a week and I’ll soon be roaming the Rockies clubhouse in search of stories, quotes and personalities. And nobody I’ve covered in baseball had a bigger, more complex, more maddening personality than No. 17.
Fans and TV viewers would look at Helton and see an all-American athlete – albeit a smart alec one – who on camera could be calculatingly boring. But behind the scenes, Helton was something else again. He was smart, incredibly candid (at least off the record), fun-loving, and sometimes very, very grouchy.
I once wrote that Helton was “as irascible as an old grizzly.” That afternoon, he came up to me and said, “What the (heck) does irascible mean? What kind of word is that for a sportswriter?” He knew darn well what it meant, but he just wanted to bust my chops.
Helton loved to make people uncomfortable, just to see how they would react. I would approach him in the clubhouse and he’d be sitting there wearing only a towel. He’d stand up and say, “Come on, give me a big hug.” I’d turn red, the rest of the players would laugh and Helton’s face would break into his good ol’ boy Tennessee grin.
I distinctly remember my first spring training in Tucson in 2006. I was just getting to know Helton and was trying to pin him down for an interview. I walked clear across the outfield at Hi Corbett Field trying to get something of use from him. He toyed with me. I got nothing. I walked back across the field, dejected. Jay Alves, then the Rockies head of media relations, saw me, laughed and said, “You look like the loneliest man in the world.”
But over the years, Helton more than made it up to me. Once during spring training, I brought my wife, Nancy, down to the field to watch batting practice. She met Matt Holliday and posed for a photo with Troy Tulowitzki. Both of them were nice and thoughtful, but Helton was, well, Helton.
“You’re married to him?” he asked Nancy, looking at me with incredulity. “Come here, you need a hug.”
After taking a turn in the batting cage, Helton came back, looked at me again, then asked Nancy: “You have to go home with him? Come here, you need another hug.”
Nancy loved it. Helton made her feel special.
My critics, of which I have more than a few, say I don’t utilize sabermetrics often enough in my writing. I should, they say, sprinkle a few more terms such as BABIP, ERA+, WHIP and WAR into my writing. They may be right, although many of my readers would get bored and glassy-eyed if I did so.
Besides, I got into sports writing to write about people more than statistics.
So, as I head to sunny Scottsdale, Ariz. next week, I’ll be hunting for more than raw numbers. I’ll be searching for stories and personalities, and missing No. 17.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
