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.
