My Take: the Evan Gattis Trade

Steve Irwin – London Daily Telegraph

Losing Oso Blanco

This is a little weird, this feeling.  It’s like we’ve lost a folk hero from our midst.  In some ways it feels like the time I heard that a crazy zoo-keeper and crocodile wrangler from Australia named Steve Irwin had been killed.  Gattis was that nutty kid next door growing up before our eyes and doing extraordinary things.  It’s like Charlie Brown growing up to be a senator.  It’s Chauncey Gardener becoming President.  It’s the skinny girl in math class becoming a United States Marine.

Someday there will be a movie.  A homeless guy wandering around America gets pulled off the street to play baseball, excels at it, and develops a cult following.  That just doesn’t happen.  Americans celebrate that kind of story and embrace it as their own… and it doesn’t even matter what uniform is being worn.  It’s a baseball story.  Heck, I’d root for Gattis if he was wearing Philly pinstripes.  Okay, that would be tough to do, but I think I still would.

But if we had to trade him anywhere, it had to be to a team from Texas.  We rescued a boy (albeit a really big boy) and are sending him back home as a man.  A bear.

I don’t know how long his career will last, but the Astros are now my favorite AL team.