Ken Griffey Jr: Hall of Fame inductee, avatar of 1990s kids, coolest baseball player ever

His 630 home runs are the sixth most ever. In the ’90s alone, he averaged 38 homers per season with 109 RBIs, 15 stolen bases and a .302 batting average. He won a gold glove ever year of the decade and was the American League MVP in 1997. And he always looked cooler than everyone else on the field.

AP Photo/John Froschauer, File)

Seeing Ken Griffey Jr as an old man is very disorienting. The fact that he aged at all and didn’t stay “The Kid” forever is proof that time is a total jerk that marches on with or without our approval. Griffey was never supposed to be old, at least not like the rest of us.

He is going into the Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday, the inevitable conclusion everyone predicted in 1989, when as a 19-year-old rookie he debuted in the Seattle Mariners' outfield playing alongside his veteran, World Series champion father, Ken Griffey Sr.

Junior was immediately one of the best players in the sport – a baby-faced wonder with the glove of Willie Mays, the speed of Mickey Mantle, the bat of Hank Aaron and the baseball savvy of a major leaguer’s son. He wasn’t just baseball perfection on the field, though. Off of it, he was the first and maybe last “cool” baseball player, at times more ubiquitous and mainstream than any athlete not named Michael Jordan. For a baseball player – the sport filled with the not-unearned stereotype of tobacco-chewing, unkempt non-athletes – to be cool, he had to be pretty special.

And yo, Griffey was special.

His 630 home runs are the sixth most ever. In the '90s alone, he averaged 38 home runs per season with 109 RBIs, 15 stolen bases and a .302 batting average. He won a golden glove ever year of the decade and was the American League MVP in 1997. And he always looked cooler than everyone else on the field.

His production waned considerably after he moved to Cincinnati in 2000, but by that point he was already a no-doubt Hall of Famer. He could’ve challenged Aaron’s 756 home run record (later broken by drug cheat Barry Bonds), but age caught up to him pretty quickly, the way it tends to do.

If anything, the decline actually highlighted how pure and amazing an athlete he was at his peak. In a baseball era proven to have been distorted with performance-enhancing drugs, when Bonds and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa swelled to inhuman sizes and kept knocking dingers out at historic rates well past their prime ages, Griffey was the one superstar beyond reproach. There was never the faintest whisper he doped. Our childhood adoration wasn’t all for naught. We had at least one good guy.

If you were a kid growing up in America in the 1990s, you couldn't escape the colour teal. Teal meant Charlotte Hornets Starter jackets, the "Saved By The Bell" opening credits and Trapper Keepers. The cool kids in school all had Trapper Keepers.

Teal was cool because Griffey made it cool. The Mariners changed their colours to teal and navy blue in 1993, and they immediately became the hottest uniforms in sports. I was an Atlanta Braves fan, but when I went shopping with my mom I always wanted the Mariners gear.

Like Madonna, Prince or Cher, he was a one-named icon. He was Junior, and Junior was an athlete who crossed media platforms in a way only Jordan had previously. After its 1994 release, "Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball" for the Super Nintendo kept many kids off the baseball diamond and glued to their TVs. The music from that game is still stuck in my head. Griffey was the only real-life major league player licensed to be in the game, so of course everyone played as the Mariners. To this day, Nintendo is a part of the Mariners' team ownership. He was Baseball Mario.

A Nike-sponsored athlete – like Jordan – Griffey had the only baseball shoes worth having. I could never afford them, and the other kids in my little league who could were the subject of much envy.

He had the most iconic batting stance ever – left-handed with his back swaying yet straight, swirling it around weightlessly behind his head, waiting to send the pitch through to the Kingdome's roof. His sweet, textbook swing belongs in a museum.

He always smiled and made baseball look fun. He wore his hat backwards sometimes, just like us.

To me, the coolest thing about Griffey was the fact he got to play Major League Baseball with his dad. From our dads is how we learned baseball, too. He was just like us. Or maybe he was our big brother, the one our parents wished we could be more like, the one we wished we could be more like.

Eventually – and quicker than any of us wanted, given the mediocre post-millennium stretch of his career – “The Kid” grew up. Just like us. He’s no longer the future Hall of Famer we were once fortunate enough to see in the present tense. The now-Hall of Famer version with the old face? I guess that’s still Junior. At least the smile looks the same.

For any American sports fans who grew up in the 90s, Griffey and a certain time in history are inextricably linked. With his Cooperstown enshrinement, that time is now, deservedly, immortal.

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