The Brief (But Impactful) Life of Oscar Taveras

It was the swing that stayed with you. That long, swirling, roundhouse kick of a swing that seemed to start in St. Louis and finish in Santo Domingo. That kind of swing, that kind of bat speed, doesn’t come around too often. Strawberry had it. Ken Griffey Jr., Will Clark, Josh Hamilton, too. Rare stuff. But there was something singular about Oscar Taveras’ left-handed stroke. When he belted that pinch-hit home run off Giants reliever Jean Machi in Game 2 of the NLCS, the ball tucking just inside the taxi cab-yellow foul pole in right field to knot the game at 3-all, you knew his was special. There was a reason for all that hype.

Like his countryman Vladimir Guerrero, with whom he was so often compared, the Cardinals outfielder’s swing—one that Mike Matheny & Co. attempted to rein in during his rookie campaign—started with an ambitious stride toward the pitcher, as if he were trying to reclaim some lost acreage between home plate and rubber, as if 60 feet 6 inches was simply too much real estate to concede.

Then came the violence.

Taveras would muscle the barrel of the bat through the zone with such immediacy, it seemed the resulting breeze might cool a Busch Stadium crowd on even the most stifling of Midwestern summer nights. He unwound like a taught rubber band on one of those balsa-wood planes you used to send skyward as a kid. Remember, the one whose prop you wound until it nearly snapped? It wasn’t so much a Lau-Hriniak approach, where a hitter releases his top hand upon contact. But Taveras let his left hand fall free three-quarters of the way through the rotation, following through with only his right hand on the handle of the bat. When he really got a hold of one, he’d finish with one hand raised toward the heavens, fingers spread, his other arm fully extended, leaving the bat only inches away from the catcher’s mask. It was cruelly balletic.      

Repeated YouTube viewings of that clutch homer against the Giants reveal something else.  Taveras swung so hard at Machi’s 2-1 offering, both of his feet momentarily left the ground. His swing literally sent him airborne.

Afterward, as he ascended the dugout steps, with the red-clad, towel-waving Cardinals faithful demanding a curtain call, the Dominican-born phenom was mid-sip, Gatorade cup in hand. He nonchalantly waved his helmet to the crowd, then quickly disappeared again. I was struck by how cavalier he was, as if he knew there was plenty more where that came from. For Taveras, one of the most touted baseball prospects in recent years, those dugout steps were a treadmill. Though just 22 years old, he had already been doing this for years, after all. He’d done it as a boy back in Puerto Plata, in minor-league outbacks from Johnson City to Springfield to Memphis, as well as in his debut with St. Louis, where in only his second at-bat in the majors, he launched a 404-foot shot into the seats, bringing rain and awe. Surely, there was more to come.

Little did he know, little did any of us know, that playoff home run would be his last.

When word came that Taveras and his 18-year-old girlfriend, Edilia Arvelos, had been killed in a car accident on a slick road near his hometown in the Dominican Republic, less than two weeks separating him from that epic post-season homer, the tragedy was all too obvious. Two lives cut short in their prime. Such a waste. The prevailing sentiment was that Taveras never got a chance to fulfill his Major League dreams, to live up to his obvious potential. But I look at it another way. If what they say is true, that life is made up of small moments—a sunset; a first kiss; the shuffling, in utero heartbeat of your soon-to-be-born child—then he lived a full life. Oscar Francisco Taveras took to the air when he was at his best. Like Icarus, perhaps he flew a bit too close to the sun, that souped-up red Chevy Camero his feather-and-wax wings. Brief though his life might have been, the man they called El Fenómeno made it to the top, however briefly, delivering on a promise that he had made to his father when he was only 5. Along the way, he provided the kind of thrills that some baseball fans will replay in their minds for years to come. And that’s more than most of us, who will live three or four of his lifetimes, will ever do.