I Hardly Recognized You

A change of uniform can make a big difference.

Even Google agrees Kelly Gruber on the Angels looks wrong. I couldn’t find a single good photo of him in Anaheim, so here he is in his Blue Jays uniform, as nature intended. (Image credit: Jim Mone/AP)

We all have people who move in and out of our lives. More often than not, they are relatively casual acquaintances on the periphery— neighbors, co-workers, friends of friends. But sometimes it’s the people we’re close to, the people we care about most, and in the worst cases, we may never see them again. I’m not talking about death, which is its own thing. There are many reasons we lose track of people we care about, but if we’re lucky, our paths eventually cross again.

Those reunions can be rather strange though. People grow and evolve, and often change quite radically over time. I can only imagine how different I must seem now to someone who knew me at a previous period in my life. Hell, I barely recognize myself sometimes, and I’ve been here for the whole show.

Ten years ago, I was broke and living in a bedbug-infested apartment. I was newly sober, going through a divorce, and finishing up my degree while dealing cards and craps at a casino. Twenty years ago, I was working at a bookstore in Lawrence, KS, convinced I’d met the girl of my dreams, two years away from fatherhood, and with a clandestine drug habit that had yet to get out of hand. Thirty years ago, I couldn’t wait to get out of my parents’ house and the redneck town I grew up in, and I was certain I was going to travel the world and be the next Jack Kerouac. And that’s leaving out a whole lot in between.

To put it another way, I recently reconnected with my friend Jesse. He’s one of my oldest friends. We met in the fourth grade, and our lives have been intertwined ever since. In fact, he was my roommate the first time I moved to Lawrence, after I spent a year in the dorms, and we split an apartment in Chicago a few years later.

We don’t get to see each over very often these days, however. We both have families and jobs, and free time to hang out is at premium. I thought it might be easier after I moved to the KC area in late 2022, putting us much closer geographically, but that hasn’t turned out to be the case. Despite living only twenty minutes apart, after much conversation and many cancelled plans, we finally caught up last summer at a baseball game.

It was great seeing him, but it was definitely a shock to the system when I realized how much had changed. Jesse’s always had a bit of a wild streak to him. Back in high school, when we both worked at Walmart, he created his fair share of chaos. My work rebellions were generally the standard stuff. For the most part, I got in trouble for talking back to or ignoring supervisors I didn’t respect. Although, one time, after I got yelled at for not wearing a yellow vest while collecting carts in the parking lot, I put vests on the carts instead, reasoning that Walmart actually cared more about the carts than me. I don’t think I was wrong about that, but it didn’t go over well. Jesse, on the other hand, was a tad more unconventional.

He used to climb up on top of the bins in the back storage area where no one could see him and take naps during his shift. Once, he felt hungry when he woke up, and foraged around until he found a precooked pie crust and a jar of cherries in syrup, and he made himself a makeshift pie. Another time, while working the night shift, he crawled through a vent until he was in the ceiling over the manager’s office. Then, he lifted the panel, and pissed on the supervisor, who was working on his computer below.* Luckily, he was a friend of ours, and after he cleaned up, he found the humor in it.

*I’m sure he loves me telling these stories.

These are only some of the highlights. A few years later, he’d show up at my house and we’d get in the car to go get something to eat. Only, about half the time, he’d swing the car toward the casino instead, basically kidnapping me against my will, so he could blow way too much money at the blackjack table and curse himself later. It got to the point where I had to insist on driving.

You get the picture. And now, he’s a successful family man making a great living in the tech industry. He has a regular gig with a reggae band,* and he spends a lot of his time at his daughter’s sporting events or visiting his son at college. It’s not like I was blown away by this change when I saw him last summer. We’ve kept him in touch. Heck, we even self-published a picture book together for our kids when they were younger. But it’s still weird to reconcile the guy I used to know with who he is now. I’m sure he feels the same about me.

*He’s the most talented musician I’ve ever known. I have no doubt he could have made a living as a drummer, if he’d wanted to, though the paychecks probably wouldn’t be as reliable as his current gig. The reggae thing still throws me though. He’s got the skills to play any genre of music, but I never heard him listen to reggae before. I’m not even sure if he likes it. But it’s his creative outlet, like this newsletter is for me, so I won’t begrudge him.

Baseball can work the same way. It’s a lot less common these days, when players move from team to team so freely, but it was definitely a phenomenon when I was a kid.* Seeing a player move from one team to another after spending most of their career in one place can be a disconcerting experience.

*To be fair, it’s not completely unheard of nowadays either. Think of Jose Abreu, who had nine fantastic seasons on the south side of Chicago, a run that included an AL MVP in 2020, and how weird he looked in an Astros uniform after moving to Houston in 2023. That his career fell off a cliff after moving to Houston was unfortunate for him, but in a way, it felt oddly appropriate. How strange would it have been to see him raking for a team that wasn’t the White Sox?

I can think of a bunch of examples, and a lot of them are Royals. That’s only natural, considering they’re the team I’ve followed my whole life, and believe me, it’s still weird for me when I see highlights of players like Willie Wilson or Mark Gubicza in the uniform of a different team. But I consider myself a fan of baseball in general, and I want this newsletter to appeal to all fans, regardless of their team affiliation. So, in the interest of keeping this from becoming a Royals newsletter, I’ll shine a brief spotlight on someone from another team. I landed on Kelly Gruber.

Gruber might seem like an odd choice. He was a very good third baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays from 1984-92, but he was hardly a Hall-of-Famer. The shock of seeing him leave town and play for another team can hardly be compared to, say, what Mets fans must have felt when Tom Seaver was traded. Yet, that undersells Gruber’s impact on Toronto.

From a distance, I considered Gruber a Blue Jays’ staple. But it wasn’t until later that I realized how much he meant to that fanbase. To start with, he was hardly a slouch on the field. Gruber went to back-to-back All-Star games in 1989-90, and he also won both a Gold Glove and Silver Slugger in the latter season. And, of course, he was a member of Toronto’s first championship season in 1992.

1990 was his best individual season, and he finished fourth in the AL MVP voting. He hit .274/.330/.512 with 31 HR, 118 RBI, and 36 doubles, good for an .842 OPS and 127 OPS+. Gruber was a very good player in his prime, but those numbers were a bit of an anomaly. For his career, he batted .259/.307/.432, 117 HR, 443 RBI, 818 H, 431 R, 148 doubles, 80 SB, .739 OPS, 102 OPS+, and 16.4 bWAR. Perfectly respectable numbers, but 1990 was definitely his year.

He had plenty of highlights in other seasons though, including becoming the first Blue Jay to ever hit for the cycle in 1989. But the 1992 World Series was the stage for both his best and most bittersweet moments in Toronto. In addition to winning his first and only championship, he was millimeters away from recording just the second triple play in World Series history. If only replay had been in use then, it would have confirmed his tag on Deion Sanders in Game 3.*

*Or maybe not. It’s amazing how many calls the umps still get wrong, even with the aid of replay.

That was not even his best highlight of the game, however. In the eighth inning, after misplaying a ball that led to the Braves taking the lead in the top of the inning, Gruber blasted a game-tying home run in the bottom of the frame, bringing the crowd to its feet. The Blue Jays won the game, 3-2, and went on to win the series in six, but Gruber’s moment of elation came at a cost. He tore his rotator cuff while swinging.

Not to be denied, Gruber toughed it out and played the rest of the series, though he only recorded one more hit and probably did his recovery no favors. Perhaps sensing this, the Blue Jays made the decision to move on from Gruber that offseason in favor of Ed Sprague. They traded Gruber to the Angels, and Sprague turned out to be a serviceable replacement, producing at a similar level as his predecessor and helping Toronto repeat as champs in 1993.

What might have looked like a fairly mundane and normal personnel move to the casual observer was a bigger deal to the people of Toronto. Here was a man who had played a key role in helping the Blue Jays develop into a legit contender, and had been embraced by the fanbase in the nearly impossible-to-explain way that an understated everyman can rise to near-legendary status on a baseball diamond.* Gruber was once voted the city’s most eligible bachelor, and his departure was big enough to warrant a tribute in a Kids in the Hall sketch. That’s when you know you’ve made a difference.

*See Ben Zobrist or Whit Merrifield or even Rafael Belliard and Kurt Stillwell. That last one may just be for me, but you probably get the gist and have a similar example of your own.

Even to me, in far away Kansas, the idea of Gruber playing in an Angels uniform felt like an abomination. Thankfully, for everyone except Gruber himself, who obviously wanted to keep playing, it was short-lived. Not long after arriving in Anaheim, Gruber suffered a bulging disc in his neck, and after playing only eighteen games in 1994, he was sidelined to have surgery to repair his shoulder.

His numbers in those eighteen games were actually decent, but new manager Buck Rodgers (not the sci-fi character, although that would have been cool) agreed with the abomination part. He was livid, accusing Toronto of underselling Gruber’s health issues and swindling the Angels in the deal. Gruber was waived after the season. He attempted a brief comeback with Baltimore in 1997, but despite showing some promise in the spring, he couldn’t stay healthy enough to get on the field.

I have no idea where Kelly Gruber is now, but I’m sure he’s very different from both the Blue Jays and Angels version of himself that the public remembers. That’s to be expected. But the beauty of baseball, as opposed to real life, where we have no choice but to accept the present and the future, whether we want to or not, is that we can always go back in time on the baseball field.

All you need is a baseball card, or a highlight reel, or even just a vivid memory, and you can instantly transport yourself back to a time and place where your heroes remain exactly as you prefer.

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Thanks for reading Powder Blue Nostalgia. Why not share with a friend and lean on them to subscribe? I’m pretty sure peer pressure never did anyone harm. Okay, you don’t have to do that. But if you want to talk about a player who looked weird to you on a different team, drop their name in the comments. Or share your favorite Kelly Gruber memory. Or we can talk about our favorite Kids in the Hall sketches, if you like. The important thing is we’re socializing.