Dave Parker Trots Home
by John Saward
Six-foot-five, 245 pounds, a slugger from the age of behemoths and big-swingers, the real-deal furniture movers and bouncer-shaped designated hitters, the plodding old oafs running out of breath on stand-up doubles. But Dave Parker could move, was the thing; he could hit it all over, he could be pesky and patient and he could demolish you too, and all of this together was the great bounty that he gave to baseball. When he passed away last weekend he was 74 years old.
He wore white tape around his fingers, white tape on his cleats, a two-carat diamond earring in the World Series, straw fedoras and gold necklaces. His left knee was wrecked from a high school football injury, and then those thousands and thousands of heavy steps pounding around on the Tartan Turf of Three Rivers Stadium. “Just give me a shot and drain the motherfucker,” he told a Pirates trainer once about his knee. Pirates manager Chuck Tanner remembered him once stretching a single into a double, “and he comes back to the bench and the thumb is broken, and dangling so bad it almost made me sick to my stomach.’’
Keep us breathing fire!
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