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Iván Calderon
There are many ways to gain attention as a professional baseball player, and over the course of his career, Iván Calderon got plenty of attention.
At first, it was as a five-tool prospect for the Seattle Mariners; a can’t-miss kid with tremendous power and raw talent who tore through the minor leagues. A short-time after arriving in Seattle, Calderon got pegged as a slacker who didn’t hustle or work hard. It was a reputation he didn’t deserve, based more on ethnic stereotypes than actual events on the field. In truth, he was playing hurt, having severely injured his shoulder diving for a ball. Those who played with him say Calderon was extremely dedicated to his craft. White Sox batting coach Walt Hriniak went so far as to call him one of the hardest workers he’d ever had. Calderon was known as a flamboyant and flashy player, a big man with big gold chains and big smile. He wore thousands of dollars’ worth of jewelry both on and off the field in a time when such a thing was frowned upon by much of baseball’s old-school establishment. “I’m not worried about him on the field,” his manager at Montreal Buck Rodgers said of Calderon in 1991. “I just hope he doesn’t get mugged off the field.”
Eventually, Calderon became known as one of the best left fielders of his time, a clutch hitter with gap-to-gap power and a keen eye for the strike zone. The Montreal Expos thought so highly of his ability that they traded Tim Raines, arguably the best player in franchise history, to the Chicago White Sox to get him. By the end of his career, Calderon had earned a far less desirable reputation, but one not uncommon to professional athletes. He was considered injury-prone. And unlike his previous reputation as a “lazy” player, the injury label was well-deserved. Calderon suffered several significant injuries over the course of his 10-year big league career, most notably that nagging shoulder injury from which he never fully recovered.
And Calderon will also be remembered for the grisly way in which he died. In December of 2003, at the age of 41 and nearly 10 years after retiring from baseball, Calderon was shot and killed execution-style in a bar near his home in Puerto Rico. Initial reports indicated he was killed by a man to whom he had loaned money as a bail-bondsman, but to this day, his murder remains unsolved. - SABR
Redid the facegen. I used the Montreal picture as the basis for it but remember him as a White Sox, hence the uniform chosen for the pics...
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