Hamilton Rocks The Stadium With Historic All-Star Display

There are times when I am watching a sporting event on T.V. and right in the middle of it I know I am witnessing something I will never forget.  I had one of those moments, as we all did tonight, when Josh Hamilton stepped up to the plate in the first round of the home run hitting contest.  I had just turned to my friend and said something to the effect that I remembered when the home run hitting contest was fun.  When super stars like Ken Griffey Jr., Frank Thomas, Albert Belle, and Juan Gonzales hit balls to places you never thought possible.  The real true super star sluggers just didn’t seem to be out there this year.  Sure Chase Utley is a great player, but come on, Frank Thomas could bench press the guy.  Lance Berkman, ok, but he is no future hall of famer.  To me the contest had lost its swagger.  Enter Josh Hamilton.  Now countless sports writers are smashing their typewriters right this very minute writing stories about how this story transcends sports, and about how Hamilton is a true example of a man beating his own demons and he is a hero and an inspiration and all that.  Enough cannot be said about his story.  But for me the story tonight was baseball, it was the way he smacked around the baseball in the house that Ruth built. How he surely woke the ghosts of Mantle, Maris, Ruth, and Gehrig with every booming majestic blast.  How he made Reggie Jackson, Mr. October himself shake his head in disbelief.  How he had 50 some odd major league all-stars, well, for lack of a better word, star struck.  With each seemingly effortless stroke Hamilton distanced himself from the field in the competition.  He seemed for those brief moments to distance himself from mortal men.  It was raw power on display in the New York night, it was barely believable.  I had to keep reminding myself that ESPN was not showing replays that he was actually still hitting bomb after bomb to places that few Yankees, great or small have ever hit he ball.  Sure when you consider the human side to the story it becomes even better, but for me, it was pure ability.  It was pure electricity rocketing off the bat of Josh Hamilton.  In this last year of Yankee Stadium, Hamilton has tattooed, pardon the pun, his name all over the walls, concourses, and facades, of perhaps baseball’s most sacred shrine.  Move over Mantle, move over Babe, and move over Gehrig, for a night anyway this yard belongs to Josh Hamilton.  After crushing his record 28 home runs in the first round, the players and media surrounded him like the event was over.  And yes Justin Morneau beat him out in the final round to take the paper title, but don't kid yourselves.  Like a pickup basketball that ends early after a backboard breaking jam, I thought this contest was over.  It should have ended with Hamilton’s 28 bombs. In the name of all that's holy they should have turned the lights out on Yankee Stadium right then and there.  You want an all-star memory?  You got one for the ages.  Josh Hamilton, are you kidding me?