Off Topic: What is Jason Giambi’s Legacy?

Jason Giambi announced his retirement from baseball this week. It wasn’t much of a surprise for the West Covina native and Long Beach State product; as a 43-year old in his 20th Major League season in 2014, Giambi hit .130/.257/.267 in 70 at-bats for the Indians. In fact, his last three years – two in Cleveland, one in Colorado – were very bad (but hey, he was 41, 42, and 43 years old!).

For his career, Giambi will walk away with 440 home runs, 1,441 RBIs, a .277/.399/.516 slash line, and 1,366 walks in 8,908 plate appearances. The home run total stands out, as does his 2000 MVP award and 5 All Star games, but what really set Giambi apart was his .399 career on-base percentage. Aside from Barry Bonds, how many true sluggers got on base as much as Giambi while posting just a 17.6% strikeout rate?

Giambi was a strong hitter (um… more on that in a minute), and he was a tough out in the prime of his career, but he was also a smart hitter. Aside from his ridiculous video game numbers between 1997 and 2003, Giambi kept playing into his 40s because he was smart enough to resurrect himself as a pinch hitter while mentoring teammates in Colorado and Cleveland.

And, oh yeah, the steroids. There’s no justification for Giambi using performance enhancing drugs any more or less than any other player who did it. If you fall into the baseball players have always cheated, PEDs weren’t as big of a deal as the media made them out to be camp, Giambi’s just a guy trying to get ahead. And if you fall into the steroids are the biggest scandal that’s rocked baseball since the 1919 Black Sox group, there’s no denying Giambi is in the thick of it.

But regardless of where you come down on PED use, Giambi did something few other steroid users did at the time: he apologized. Rafael Palmeiro denied, denied, denied (and lied!) in testimony, Roger Clemens kicked and screamed until his reputation was irreparably tarnished, and Bonds… well, Bonds is just an asshole.

Unlike those three (and others), Giambi owned up. He met with reporters in 2005 and apologized in the toughest media market in the country.

“I feel I let down the fans, I feel I let down the media, I feel I let down the Yankees, and not only the Yankees, but my teammates,” Giambi said at the time. “I accept full responsibility for that, and I’m sorry.”

He later told USA TODAY, “I was wrong for doing that stuff… What we should have done a long time ago was stand up — players, ownership, everybody — and said: ‘We made a mistake.’ We should have apologized back then and made sure we had a rule in place and gone forward. … Steroids and all of that was a part of history. But it was a topic that everybody wanted to avoid. Nobody wanted to talk about it.”

Giambi messed up by using PEDs, but at least he had the sense to stand in front of the media and own it. It couldn’t have been easy. He made $114 million from the Yankees alone; he didn’t have to apologize publicly and he certainly didn’t need the money while playing in Colorado and Cleveland. He could’ve hid out in a mansion for the rest of his life, avoiding the media and pleading the fifth. But he stood up and owned it.

Where most PED users’ careers ended immediately, or soon after, in disgrace, that apology served as the beginning of Giambi’s resurrection. Rather than give up on the game by 2008 as a 38-year old who couldn’t get an everyday job anymore, Giambi re-invented himself, and in doing so, squeezed out six more seasons in Colorado and Cleveland.

Giambi has always been well liked, but he was so respected in Colorado, the Rockies interviewed him while he was still an active player for their managerial opening in 2013. There was even (very brief) talk of him being a player-manager, something unheard of in this day and age. And jokes about the Rockies aside, that possibility speaks to Giambi’s role as more than just a guy who plays baseball. Most PED users, besides now-Dodgers coach Mark McGwire, have been completely shunned (or isolate themselves) and here’s an admitted steroid guy being considered to manage a Major League club? Quite a turnaround from 2005.

Jason Giambi is a great guy, but look, he’s no Ernie Banks, or Stan Musial, or Jackie Robinson. He legacy will never be as a legendary, magnanimous baseball good-guy just because he apologized to the media about PED use. And his legacy on the field, while unbelievably good, likens him more to Fred McGriff than Babe Ruth.

But Giambi, always a good teammate, became a better person later in his career. He could’ve went fishing for the rest of his life while sitting on his tens of millions of dollars, living a life of isolation or denial over his mistake. He could’ve become combative like other PED users, lashing out at the media or the league. But he chose humility and responsibility, to keep playing baseball, to help younger players, and in doing so, he ended his career on his terms.

The steroid era is, and always will be, a black eye for baseball. The league would just as soon forget Bonds, Clemens, Palmeiro, and the others, and it appears the Hall of Fame may forget them, too. But Jason Giambi stuck around long enough, and did and said the right things, that he made it impossible for the league to brush him aside. And because of that, he’s now maybe the only former PED-user who ought to be remembered fondly as a teammate and mentor.

Enjoy retirement, Jason.

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