I just want to thank pravata for his excellent
season-ending game recap, especially all the stuff about Craig Biggio. prav managed to say, briefly and succinctly and without being maudlin about it, exactly everything I would want to say to anyone if I was trying to explain Craig Biggio, the sort of person he seemed to be, the sort of player he was, what he meant to his team and its city. Just excellent.
Like some other people, I suppose, I spent a long time not being able to get an exact "fix" on Craig Biggio. He was a rare bird, in the sense that - as pravata pointed out - he spoke in bromides and cliches, and professed to believe in them. And then he went out and absolutely lived them. That is the part that threw people off. In a sense, Biggio was the anti-Steve Garvey. Garvey, you'll remember, was the Dodgers 1B and all-American hero who spoke in bromides, too. He was married to a ditz named Cindy who was in a way the distaff image of him - a bleach blonde from Cali with aspirations to an acting career (Is Patty Biggio the anti-Cindy Garvey? Perhaps. Cindy Garvey looked like every West Coast blonde model you ever saw in a magazine or print ad - air brush perfect. The last time I saw Patty Biggio, I think the night Craig passed 3,000, she kind of reminded me of Holly Hunter in her new show on TNT - beautiful but real, flawed, perhaps, but very compelling. Hell yes, that's it.) Of course, it turns out Garvey was apparently entirely cynical about the public image he had carefully constructed for himself, as he spent a good deal of his off time fathering children by various women not his wife. Meanwhile Biggio has gone on about his business, helping raise his children (with and by one woman), going regularly to Mass, giving much more than lip service to the charity (for kids, of course) he champions. And, of course, playing his ass off, every inning of every game of every season of his career. I can't speak for anyone else, but I think the reason I never could quite "get" Biggio is because I was just a liitle bit too jaundiced myself to buy into a guy like that being entirely real. It wasn't Biggio's fault I found him a little hard to believe. It was all mine.
It really wasn't until sometime last year that I finally began to see Craig Biggio clearly. I read an article about Adam LaRoche, then of the ATL, and his challenge to baseball's anti-drug policies. It seems LaRoche had been prescribed Adderall as a part of his treatment for attention deficit disorder, but it blew up his MLB drug test (Adderall is basically just crank - pure amphetemine salts.) The article went on to mention that among several other major leaguers offering support to LaRoche was Craig Biggio, who "battles ADD" and took Adderall himself. "That's it!" I thought. "No wonder. Why didn't I figure it out before?"
Most people take in all the information and stuff coming at them every day and then filter out the useful from the useless and go on from there. A person with ADD will often see all that stuff coming at them as overwhelming, almost impossible to keep up with. The natural reaction to this (a reaction intensified by Adderall, by the way) is to latch onto one thing, to the detriment of almost all the others, and do that one thing really, really well. Artists are like this sometimes. The stereotype is of the artist, exceedingly brilliant in his field, who can barely manage anything else in his life. That fits the profile of the ADD afflicted, to a "T". In Biggio's case, he has managed (with a lot of help from his wife I am sure) to focus on a much broader idea, that of living his life (and playing his game) "the right way." And that last is the key - the simple, basic life philosophy, followed with relentless determination. That is a symptom of Biggio's affliction, yes; but at the same time it is the seed of his greatness, as a player and as a human being.
I was kind of moved when I found out Craig Biggio was really a glorified ADD kid. The knowledge caused me to admire him in a way I had not before, and to realize he was a whole lot more like someone else I knew than I had ever suspected before.
As pravata said, " . . .no one knows what will happen tomorrow, but what that meant to Biggio is that you play today as hard as you can and enjoy what you do while you’re doing it." That is it exactly. That is the way I will always think of him. And I will think of him, at least from time to time, I think probably always.
