Look closely at Marquis Grissom from 1995 and try to figure out what is unusual about the image?
Look at the difference in the size of the baseballs, the one on the right a regulation size ball.
“I brought those small balls over from when I played at Montreal,’’ said Grissom. “In fact, I was just going through some of my memorabilia and I found one of them. They are pretty cool.’’
The smaller balls were used by Grissom and other players as a training tool for hitting.
“The feeling was if you could hit the smaller ball it would be a lot easier when you got into a game with the regular size ones,’’ he said. “I actually started off using a broom handle-type bat to hit those balls but then went to a regular size bats. They worked.’’
Grissom used the smaller balls in what is call soft toss where a coach sits on a knee and throws up the ball and the player hits it into a net.’’
He did point out, “We didn’t use them in batting practice. A pitcher could have killed someone with those little things.”
Grissom, 48, now lives south of Atlanta in Fayette County. He played 17 years in the National League including two for the Braves and caught the final out in the 1995 World Championship season. He was a two-time All-Star, his best overall season coming in 1996 for Atlanta when he hit .308 with 23 homers, 74 RBIs and 28 stolen bases including 23 hits in the 16 postseason games against the Dodgers, Cardinals and Yankees. He played in 2,165 major league games, 52 in the postseason and was the MVP of the American League Championship Series in 1997 for the Cleveland Indians.
Today, he runs the Marquis Grissom Baseball Association, founded back in 2006 to provide underserved communities the opportunity to compete in a competitive baseball league.
On Sunday he was in Cleveland with some of his former teammates signing autographs and said, “I think they (Indians) are going to offer me a job, but I don’t really think I want to work.’’
