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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1835363, member: 289"] KEN CAMINITI became the poster child for what can go wrong if you use drugs to medicate or improve yourself. On the surface he was a poster boy for a successful life: He grew up in the San Joachim Valley in California as one of three siblings. He played football as well as baseball in high school and at San Jose State. He came up with the Astros in 1987, going 2 for 3 with a home run in his first game. He was not a star for them but had a productive career, despite dealing with injuries and hitting in the pitcher-friendly Astrodome. In 8 years, he hit .260 with 13 homers per 162 games. He was 32 years old when he was traded to San Diego, usually the point at which a player’s prime is ending. Liberated from the Astrodome, he had the finest season of his career, to that point, hitting .302 with 26 home runs and 94RBIs. The next year he crushed that by hitting .326 with 40 homers 130 RBIs and 109 runs scored. He was named National league MVP. His hitting also got his fielding at third base noticed, (as often happens), and he won three straight Gold Gloves. He was unable to sustain that level of performance, (Bill James ranked it the 9th biggest ‘fluke season’ of all time), but was still a very productive hitter until injuries started piling up from 1999 onward. First it was a shoulder injury, a hamstring, strained quadriceps, then a strained calf muscle, then a wrist injury. Many of them seemed to involve muscles, which can be a red flag for people looking for steroid users. His career finally petered out in 2001 after being with two more teams, the Astros again and then the Braves. He’d made over $37 million playing baseball and was married with three kids of his own, all daughters. That should make anyone happy but in most pictures, especially late in his career, he doesn’t look very happy: Early: [URL]http://img.bleacherreport.net/img/article/media_slots/photos/001/759/956/hi-res-eb3e82211df42bc899eef094d7ab1c75_crop_exact.jpg?w=340&h=226&q=85[/URL] Late: [URL]http://cbsnews3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2004/11/01/cf2e539d-a642-11e2-a3f0-029118418759/thumbnail/620x350/434bdae366ca495ff2feb6e992dba9c8/image652736x.jpg[/URL] Ken had publically acknowledged he was an alcoholic in 1994. He went into rehab but didn’t stop there. He became a cocaine user. He acknowledged after his career that he was also a steroid user and was using them when he had his great years in San Diego. One wonders if the two were related: if you can break society’s rules, why not break baseball’s rules? If you can break baseball’s rules: why not break society’s rules? Ken was divorced in 2002. He was arrested for cocaine possession in 2001 and put on probation. He violated that in 2003 and was put in a court-ordered treatment program. It didn’t work. Wikipedia: “In the early afternoon of October 10, 2004, Caminiti was in the apartment of his friend in The Bronx, New York City, after being in the bathroom to have a speedball of cocaine and heroin, Caminiti came out and collapsed on the floor.[10] At 3:36pm a 911 call was made while Caminiti was going into cardiac arrest. Caminiti died at Lincoln Hospital in The Bronx at 6:45pm. Preliminary news reports indicated he died of a heart attack, but the autopsy results stated that "acute intoxication due to the combined effects of cocaine and opiates" caused his death, with coronary artery disease and cardiac hypertrophy (an enlarged heart) as contributing factors.” [IMG]http://img.bleacherreport.net/img/images/photos/003/108/457/6df6eeee6a652c61d13e5442555be3e8_crop_north.png?w=630&h=420&q=75[/IMG] [/QUOTE]

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