Friday, June 06, 2008

MORE REASONS TO LIKE RYAN CHURCH.

A while ago, I toyed with the idea of writing up something about Ryan Church. I thought I owed it to him for continually referring to him before he arrived as “that anti-semitic scrub outfielder”. That was wrong, and massively unfair. Now, I realize that Ryan Church is not exactly sitting here reading my blog, but I think it’s time for the public apology anyway.

Last Sunday at Shea, while I’m always happy to see Ryan Church out in right field, I wasn’t happy to see him that day. I still felt it was too soon, felt the whole Mets treatment of the situation was unforgivable. He seemed to be fine but I hoped he wasn’t rushing it because he knew that the team desperately needed him.

That alone is enough of a reason to like Ryan Church, but he has given us countless other on-field and at-bat reasons to be glad he was here.

I asked my buddy Kristen, over at great Nationals blog We’ve Got Heart, what she thought:

I really miss Ryan Church.  I’ll say this - He was treated unfairly here.  The Front Office had some kind of personal distaste for Ryan and it carried over into everything.  He was yanked around the minors and even when he was a starter, he’d be the first to sit for some new outfielder experiment.  I believe that he was actually a fan favorite.  So many bloggers and fans I’d talk to wore Church jerseys and Church t-shirts.  He was a lot of people’s favorite.

I’m not surprised by his performance.  I knew he had that in him but this just wasn’t the right atmosphere for him to build success.  From up high, there was no confidence in his abilities or desire to let him be an everyday outfielder.  That’s a sad reality when you are the worst team in baseball—to pass up on a guy like that for experiments (like Wily Mo, Nook Logan, Ryan Langerhans...ugh!)

He started hot last season and cooled off a little, but he did manage to rack up a ton of doubles.

Personally, I wasn’t following the team with the Jewish controversy came about.  From my understanding, he was asking his pastor about his girlfriend that was Jewish.  I never took it to me that he was being critical of the Jewish faith, but trying to explore conflicting beliefs.  I don’t know enough to say more - except that I took his explanation to be sincere.

He comes from a military family and I’m almost certain his brother has spent a significant amount of time in Iraq.  His other brother, I believe, is a security guard at a prison.  I think his mom has joked that Ryan has it the easiest.

As far as I know, he was a good guy on the team.  First to come out to get the game started.  He’d always sit on the bench for a few minutes before running out to stretch - but he was - almost always, the first person out.  He rarely signed autographs before games. He was serious and focused it seemed.

I really do wish him the best.  Here’s a great blog about it.

Finally, for those of you who don’t live in the area (which seems to be an awful lot of you, which I continually find cool as heck), there is this story, which, while continuing to prove the unspoken point about Yankees fans, shows you a ton about Ryan Church. He just got here; he doesn’t know people; but yet he was touched by this woman’s story and wanted to help.

[For the record, TBF noted that if heaven forbid something happened to him and Joba Chamberlain wanted to give me some money, he wanted to make sure that I knew that he would want me to take it.]