Remembering the tragic passing of a young pitcher reminded of the fragility of the game of the frequency of MLB tragedy
By now, the 32nd anniversary of his birthday on Tuesday, Tommy Hanson should have been a star, not another MLB tragedy.
Hanson came up to the Atlanta Braves in 2009 with that kind of potential. He went 11-4 as a rookie, and over the next four seasons ran up a 49-35 career mark.
That included 13 starts in 2013 for the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, to whom he had been traded following the 2012 season. That season was marred, however, by the death of a stepbrother who had been close to Hanson. He took a bereavement leave during the season, and later took a second leave — this time three weeks — to cope with additional emotional issues stemming from the death.
Shoulder troubles followed. At season’s end, the Angels released Hanson, who over the next two seasons signed successively with the Rangers, then the White Sox, and finally the Giants, never seeing the mound in a big league game for any of them. San Francisco released him from his minor league deal with the Sacramento River Cats following 11 starts in which he went 3-5 with a 5.6 ERA.
That winter, Hanson died suddenly of what was later determined to have been organ failure caused by a cocaine overdose. Instead of a star, he had become just one more in an ever-growing list of potential Major League stars whose careers were cut tragically short, often by their own personal failings.
That list has been expanding for more than a century. In January of 1900, Boston Beaneaters catcher Marty Bergen took an axe to his entire family and then slashed his own throat in an apparent schizophrenic fit. In 1903, star outfielder Ed Delahanty fell off a railroad bridge into the Niagara River near the falls. On an off day during the 1979 season, Yankees catcher Thurman Munson died learning how to pilot a plane. During spring training in 1994, Cleveland Indians pitchers Tim Crews and Steve Olin died in a boating accident.
Let’s look back at the lost potential of some of those tragic losses, starting with certainly the best-remembered.