John Olerud had a swing so sweet it brought tears to the eyes of former Blue Jays general manager Pat Gillick.
He had the demeanor of a choir boy. So, of course, he got the nickname, Big Rude.
He was so polite, when he flirted with becoming the first .400 hitter since Ted Williams in 1993, the Blue Jays public relations staff had to throw roadblocks in front of an slavering media and say: “no” because Olerud himself never discovered the meaning of the word.
He won an American League batting title in ‘93 and five years later, he hit .354 with the Mets and only Larry Walker kept him from being a batting champ in two leagues.
He earned contracts worth about $70 million in a career that started in 1989 when he debuted with the Blue Jays without ever having his shadow darken a minor league clubhouse.
It was as close to a fairy tale story as baseball can offer. But even fairy tales are not without an occasional tear or fear. “Sometimes you wonder why things like this happen, but she really is the most amazing (daughter),” says Olerud.
He is speaking of Jordan, now eight. While her older brother, Garrett, and four-year-old Jessica are normal everyday children, Jordan was born with an extra second chromosome and is missing part of her fifth chromosome, a condition that left multiple birth defects. “She is non-verbal,” says Olerud. She eats through a tube because it is impossible to swallow and breathe at the same time.
There have been more than a dozen operations.
The first few years were the most difficult with his wife, Kelly, once telling the Boston Globe neither she nor John ever got more than two or three hours sleep a night. When he wasn’t trying to give comfort to his daughter, Olerud was struggling to maintain his baseball career.
He was cut in 2004 by his hometown Seattle Mariners while batting just .245.
For the first time he was not going to the ballpark on a summer night. Retirement loomed.
“It hasn’t been super easy right from that whole thing of trying to figure out where you fit in. Then, we’re building a new house right now. You talk about a couple of marriage killers,” he said, laughing.
“There have been some bumps in the road. Even in Toronto, when I signed the big contract ($22 million in 1994) and then had trouble living up to it.”
Retirement came hard, too. “There’s a rythmn that develops when you’re playing baseball. There’s a routine. It’s busy but everyone knows what their status is ... that all changes when suddenly there’s no baseball. I know I had expectations of what it would be like; I know my wife had expectations and they weren’t always the same.”
Then there was Jordan. The love of father to daughter is evident as he speaks of a shared hug, or a smile given. Besides Olerud has never yet hit a bump big enough to stop him - not since getting beaned by a pitch that nearly killed him. He just put on helmet whenever he left a clubhouse and kept on swinging.
“It’s still tough,” he says of Jordan. “But fortunately from baseball we’ve had the financial resources to get her special care. It also got us thinking what would we do if we didn’t have the money. We wanted to help people who couldn’t afford to help for their own children.”
Kelly and John have started the Jordan Fund to provide support to special needs children and their families. John Olerud has always known how to squeeze the most from life - now he’s just learning to pass on the tradition to his daughter.
