If you are a true baseball fan, and let’s face it, you probably wouldn’t be reading this if you were not, and regardless of who your favorite – or most-hated – team is, it is impossible, absolutely positively 100% impossible, not to respect the brilliant 12-year career of San Francisco Giants catcher Buster Posey, who officially retired from the game on Thursday morning.

“I kind of went into this last season feeling like it might be my last,” Posey told reporters. “I just gave myself some space in my mind to be OK with deciding otherwise if I wanted to keep playing. I just never really wavered. I think it really allowed me to really, really empty the tank this year like I never have before.”

That tank emptied with an remarkable 2021 slash line of .304 / .390 / .499 / .889, with 18 home runs and 56 RBI, to punch his ticket to baseball immortality at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, with his brilliant career slash line of .302 / .372 / .460 / .831 with 158 career home runs and 729 career RBI.

“The reason I’m retiring is I want to be able to do more stuff from February to November with my family,” Posey added. “Physically, it’s much harder now, and to be honest, it’s hard to enjoy it as much when there’s physical pain that you’re dealing with on a daily basis.”

The Hate part of that ‘Love/Hate Relationship’ is, of course, due to the fact that the 34-year-old Leesburg, GA native, who was selected by the Giants (the only team he ever played for) in the first round (fifth overall) of the 2008 MLB First-Year Player Draft out of Florida State University, was an absolute Dodger Killer.

In the 176 games and 701 plate appearances against the Dodgers, Posey slashed .293 / .368 / .430 / .798 with 19 home runs and 75 RBI. He also hit 29 doubles against them, while striking out 103 times with 70 walks. And though he scored a total of 59 times against the Dodgers, he did not have a stolen base against the Dodgers … so there’s that.

As for that “physical pain” thing and as every baseball fan on the planet knows, Posey was involved in a horrific collision at the plate on May 25, 2011 with (then) Florida Marlins pinch-hitter/outfielder Scott Cousins, the result of which (in addition to being lost for the season for a fractured fibula and torn ligaments in his left ankle) brought about MLB Rule 7.13 – commonly referred to as “The Posey Rule,” albeit three years later.

Although it is probably true that Cousins didn’t try to intentionally hurt Posey, he absolutely positively tried to prevent him from catching the ball and/or knock it out of his glove, which he most certainly did. However, and to be brutally honest, what Cousins did was reminiscent of the Pete Rose/Ray Fosse home plate collision years earlier and was within the rules at the time.

Not anymore:

Although Dodger fans are grateful that their beloved team will no longer have to face one of their biggest and most dangerous nemesis (see Game-1 of the 2021 NLDS), true baseball fans will also no longer get to see one of the best to have ever played the game in Hall-of-Fame-bound Buster Posey.

Play Ball!

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