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So Nomar Garciaparra is retiring, and while others will have happier memories I'll always think of him clutching himself after tearing his groin while leaving the batters box in a 2005 game. At his best he was about as good as anyone I've ever seen, a crackling wire with maybe the quickest wrists and the greatest gift for hitting the ball squarely on straight lines you can have, but it was his injuries rather than Mark Prior's that seemed to best sum the sad futility of those Dusty Baker Cubs teams.

Two other things come to mind today. First is Garciaparra's Hall of Fame case, which is interesting just because he offers a rare live example of a theoretical construct, the peak-only player. From 1997 to 2003 he was a strong MVP candidate every single year save 2001, which he missed with an injury. In that time his play was worth forty-one WAR; the whole rest of his career was worth two.

If he'd just strung together seven decent seasons, four of them good but not special and three of them average, he'd be a nearly certain Hall of Famer. This strikes me as really quite silly, because those years wouldn't have been of Hall caliber and really would have added little to the argument for him, which would have had to do with his great peak. But there you go.

The other is the common assumption that Garciaparra fell apart because of steroid use, which I've never understood. Here's the famous SI cover that many, even at the time, took as obvious proof that he was using:

The strange thing is that while he's big here, he's not especially cut up. Here's a picture of Steve Reeve, a famous old school bodybuilder whom no one, as far as I know, thinks was a drug user:

If a clean bodybuilder can get that shredded with 1950s training techniques I don't know why anyone would assume that Garciaparra needed steroids to grow love handles. I'll buy that he was carrying too much muscle for his frame; he's about my size and if I were as big as Garciaparra was in 2001 my tendons would snap like overstretched bungee cords. But the point is that I could get that way by working out a lot and eating a lot. There were a lot of obvious users in his generation even among players who haven't been openly accused; I don't think he was one of them.