Swingin' for the fences

There he is, the most important baseball player of his generation.

Seriously.

Fresh off Barry Bonds setting the career home run record, Tom Glavine posting his 300th win and Ken Griffey Jr. and Sammy Sosa clouting their 600th home runs, it's good time to remind people of what really matters. And that is not being afraid to open your big fat mouth.

The most influential member of the 1964 St. Louis Cardinals was not Hall of Famer Bob Gibson. It was Curt Flood, who challenged the league's reserve clause and paved the way for free agency. The 1989 Oakland Athletics couldn't have won a World Series without Dave Stewart's 21 wins, but the game of baseball surely would remain mired in the steroid era if not for DH Jose Canseco spilling the beans.

So Bonds may have the records, but he'll never match Sheffield's impact on the Major League Baseball player in the 21st century.

Sheffield never hedged. His remarks to HBO that Hispanic players are taken advantage of by scouts was put badly, but 100 percent correct and brought a sense of relief that someone finally said it. He agreed to a trade from the Florida Marlins to the Los Angeles Dodgers (despite a blanket no-trade clause), as long as the Dodgers tore up his six-year contract and re-negotiated it in two years. After that, a no-trade clause wasn't just assurance you wouldn't be shipped out against your will; it was also assurance that if you were shipped out, you held all the cards.

Most importantly, in the era defined by the rise of Scott Boras, Leigh Steinberg and other uber-agents, Sheffield showed cojones firing his agent mid-negotiations and representing himself. Without any semblence of a college education or business background, Sheffield was not outmatched by ownership.

I don't say this out of my love of Sheffield. Newsflash: Sheffield is not universally liked by fans, media or baseball officials. Probably, those groups will make sure his legacy never gets its full due once he's gone. He's far from one of my favorite players or people, but when we're talking about professional athletes I respect, his name is near the top.

His approach at the plate is a good model for people to use in life: Swing as hard as you can three times, and if you fail, at least you gave it three monster hacks.

Give 'em hell, Shef.

(Not too sure about this, though.)