In short: former Major League Baseball pitcher Thomas J. “Tommy” Hanson passes away at the age of 29, due to “catastrophic organ failure.”
Talk about something that came out of nowhere; it’s not often that I expect to hear about spontaneous deaths from people much younger than I am. And in spite of my faltering indifference to the game over the last few years, I’d like to write some words about Tommy Hanson, because if anything at all, he represents a player that was pretty prevalent during my peak of baseball fandom, and I’m genuinely sad to hear about his unfortunate and way too early departure.
Forget about the win-loss record, the ERA, and the list of teams that he had played for in his career, that one might expect to see within the final paragraphs of a professional athlete’s online eulogy and/or obituary. This isn’t to say that they weren’t pretty, quite the contrary, his overall numbers were positive and respectable, despite the obvious observation that he was declining quickly, mostly on account of shoulder troubles that plagued the tail end of his baseball career.
To me, Tommy Hanson represents the link, the gateway, into my eventual love and appreciation for minor league baseball.
When I initially came to realize just how much I liked baseball, my world was small, very tiny. The major leagues are all that mattered, and the most important statistics in the world were a hitter’s batting average and home run total and for pitchers, the win-loss record and earned-run average. These attitudes was dramatically change the more time I spent around, watching and reading about baseball, but despite the fact that not everyone will admit it, there’s a time when every baseball fan is probably just like this at some point, early on.
It was 2008, when the Braves were having pretty much their worst season in over a decade (naturally 2015 has eclipsed even that failure), and there was pretty much no hope for any good news at the major league level. By this season, Braves fans like myself had to throw the towel in on the major leaguers, and started paying more attention to the minor leagues, to see if there was absolutely any light anywhere in the various tunnels of the minor league pipeline.
Around this time, this 22-year old kid named Tommy Hanson threw a no-hitter for the Braves’ Double-A team in Mississippi. Back then, it was really, really difficult to find information much less any sort of photographs of the minor leagues, but eventually one picture emerged of the heroic pitcher, and I remember seeing this tall guy, with an explosion of red hair bursting out from the back of his ball cap.
By this point, the name Tommy Hanson was quickly learned within Braves circles, and most everyone was clamoring for him to get called up, how he needed to be promoted, to rescue the hapless Atlanta Braves. But since baseball is very much the game of human chess as well as the game of bat, ball and glove, such is not always possible, in spite of the fans’ greatest desires.
So it wasn’t until midway through 2009 did the official rumblings begin that Tommy Hanson was knocking on the door. Up until this point, he had finished demolishing Double-A, he pitched so other-worldly in the Arizona Fall League that all his peers were calling him “Jesus,” and had made a mockery of Triple-A at the start of the 2009 season.
Finally, Tommy Hanson was called up, and he captured the imagination of Braves fans everywhere, when he basically was the best pitcher on the squad for the remainder of the year. And at a time when statisticians are always looking for obscure and kind of made-up statistics to boast, amidst his reign of terror on batters in 2009, he put the team on his back and defeated both the mighty New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox in consecutive starts.
But without Tommy Hanson, my eyes probably wouldn’t have turned towards the happenings of the sleepy, small single-decker minor league ballparks in the corners of Americana that lots of people don’t even think about. Hanson did his time and moved onto the big leagues, but my love and appreciation of the minor leagues hasn’t. Such wouldn’t have been the case if weren’t for the big red mulleted kid in Mississippi who captured my imagination along with Braves fans everywhere.
To me, Tommy Hanson represents a player that I grew to appreciate and like, no matter how he performed on the field.
When it comes to fickle baseball fans, there’s a popular saying that “you’re only as good as your last performance.” This is true when it comes to fairweather fans who love a guy when he’s good, and are demanding his head on a stake after a bad outing, but that’s not me. Sure, I had no problem with dissecting statistics and tendencies of any player, even ones I liked, like Tommy Hanson, but when the day was over, I still admired him.
He always conducted himself professionally, was already nice to all the fans that went up to him, and despite the fact that he was pitching Jesus for a while, never seemed to be too busy to sign autographs and take pictures with people. When the day is over, quality as a baseball player is still secondary to quality as a human being, and I was always under the impression that Tommy Hanson was a pretty decent guy.
But my favorite Tommy Hanson story would have to be the time he (allegedly) emailed me personally. I say allegedly, because there’s no definitive way to 100% confirm or verify the authenticity of an email, but let’s just all believe I never made any mention of this disclaimer and be under the impression that it was the real-life Tommy Hanson who emailed me.
Long story short, I wrote a somewhat satirical article about how Tommy Hanson was the baseball equivalent of Doc Samson, because the quality of his pitching seemed to improve in correlation with the length of his hair. It was partially coincidentally true, and admittedly there was some cherry picking when it came to compiling his baseball statistics, but I had successfully provided a plausible argument that Tommy Hanson was a better pitcher when he had a big red mullet, compared to whenever he shaved his head midway through the season.
Like several of the things I wrote for Talking Chop, it got a decent amount of traction and views; we (the writers) all knew members of the Braves organization, several players’ wives/family members and a small number of actual players who read the site, but as far as the players were concerned, the specifics were murky. Until one day when I checked the email I used for Talking Chop, there was an email sent to me from Tommy Hanson himself:
Hey Roy (my writing pseudonym) I was forwarded your “magic mullet” article and I loved it! My buddies and I read it and thought it was great! One of the best articles I have ever read about myself lol. I just wanted to say thanks cause if just made my day! Too funny! I was actually planning on cutting my hair before spring training but after your piece I will probably reconsider. Oh and for the record it’s not a mullet it’s all the same length. Haha take care
This was the first and only time an actual major league player had reached out to me, and I never forgot it. It made me pleased, because it wasn’t something like a player taking something I’ve written personally or wanted to threaten me or anything, but instead, it was something I wrote for the purpose of entertaining, actually entertaining the person it was written about themselves, and them letting me know that it had accomplished its goal.
Tommy Hanson holds a special place in my baseball fan’s heart, and such is not an admission only because he has recently passed. He was a guy that helped expand my horizons when it came to the game itself, and his existence alone served as great writing inspiration, which people who like to write like I do, are always seeking. He was a super talented player that peaked too soon, left the game too soon, and left the living even sooner.
