A fter learning that Greg Halman’s seemingly happy 24-year life had ended with a horrible incident at his home in the Netherlands port city of Rotterdam, those who came to know the Mariners outfield prospect chose to remember his smile.
It was infectious and disarming, an authentic link between the child who discovered the joy of baseball and the young adult blessed to play the game at an elite level. Emphasizing that smile is a fitting way to recall Halman, whose don’t-pinch-me-because-I-don’t-wan’t-to-wake-up-and-find-out-this-is-a-dream countenance gave texture to a face already handsome enough to belong on billboards.
But it should be noted that Halman’s smile wasn’t perpetual. The last time I saw him in the Mariners’ clubhouse, on July 31, he was ambling toward his locker with the look of a pro athlete at a career crossroads. Halman didn’t appear dejected, merely drained from a different kind of day-to-day grind of the long season.
He wasn’t playing all that much, and when he got the chance to play, he wasn’t producing.
This occasion was a Sunday afternoon, four days removed from his last appearance (as a pinch runner), five days removed from his last at-bat, 12 days removed from his last hit: a three-run homer in Toronto off left-handed pitcher Brett Cecil.
The reward for making Cecil one of Halman’s two home-run victims in the big leagues was for the batter to get plunked in his next plate appearance – another indication of how ruthless baseball is.
Strikeouts are frustrating for an unproven hitter, but the consequence of taking a pitcher deep can be downright painful.
That July 19 homer was Halman’s final contribution to the big league club. On Aug. 5, to nobody’s surprise, he was sent back to Tacoma, where his 33 home runs in 2010 helped the Rainiers win the Pacific Coast League championship.
Halman’s breakout season in Triple-A figured to earn him a serious audition as the right-handed half of a platoon filling in for ailing center fielder Franklin Gutierrez. But Halman’s Cactus League work was limited to 17 at-bats, and he broke spring camp with the Rainiers.
If Halman was discouraged at returning to Tacoma, he didn’t act like it.
Upon surveying the new Cheney Stadium – lower fences, equipped with crash pads, had replaced the wooden fences that discouraged outfielders from attempting acrobatic catches against the wall – he promised: “There’s gonna be some Web Gems this season, and I want to make 10 or 15 of them.”
Halman had yet to make his first Web Gem – defensive highlights shown on television – in Tacoma when he was hit by a pitch at Sacramento, sidelining him for a month with a fractured wrist. The injury presaged a hard-knock season for Halman that combined too few hard knocks off his bat and too many strikeouts.
Like most big-league prospects in general – and Mariners’ prospects in particular – Halman took a long swing that made him susceptible to breaking pitches and change-ups. In 44 major-league games, he struck out 43 times, while managing only three walks.
But the fact he appeared in 44 games was an historic accomplishment:
Others have reached the big leagues from the Netherlands – Hall of Fame pitcher Bert Blyleven, a child when his family moved to California, is the foremost example – but Halman was the first Dutch player whose baseball skills were honed overseas.
He was 16 when he signed with the Mariners. They sent him to the Arizona Instructional League before assigning him, in 2006, to Everett in the short-season Northwest League.
Alleviating his homesickness with a dream and a purpose, Halman not only survived, he thrived, eventually earning honors as the Mariners’ minor league player of the year in 2008.
Two seasons later, as a September call-up from Tacoma, he made his Dutch countrymen proud by hitting a double off the Rangers’ C.J. Wilson.
A different sort of history was recorded Monday, when Halman joined Lyman Bostock, who starred for the Twins and the Angels in the late 1970s, on a short list of active players killed at the hand of another person.
Police are pursing the possibility of fratricide. Halman’s 22-year-old brother is a suspect in the fatal stabbing, an unfathomable event augured by the Old Testament account of Cain and Abel, the world’s original murder mystery.
We may never know what happened in Rotterdam. What we do know is that Halman, despite his injuries and trouble with strikeouts and the demotion to Triple-A, never lost his passion for a sport he loved more than it loved him back.
Fluent in four languages, charming and inquisitive, Greg Halman had a future as an international ambassador for baseball.
But his first priority was to develop the patience and discipline required to hit a hanging curveball 500 feet, enabling him to step on Safeco Field’s home plate with a smile we can only imagine.
john.mcgrath@thenewstribune.com
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