Remember This Knucklehead?

Former Twin and Yankee Chuck Knoblauch was just charged with battering his common-law wife.  According to prosecutors, he was drinking heavily and taking Xanax on Friday night, when he lost his temper and hit her in the face and choked her during a fight over his car keys.

Nice guy.

I was a fan of Knoblauch as a player when he was having those big years as a Twin in the mid-1990’s, when he was just a tremendous offensive player for a middle infielder.  However, a friend of mine who is a big Twins fan told me that Knoblauch was a total pill, and that he was glad when Knoblauch left the Twins.

In 1998 and 1999 as a Yankee, it seemed like Knoblauch tried to reinvent himself as a power hitter, instead of the Pete-Rose-with-more-walks kind of hitter he had been in Minnesota.  His homerun totals went up a little and his batting average and on-base-percentages declined a lot.

Knoblauch ended up playing his way out of the majors at the tender age of 34, young for a player who had been as good as he was in his prime.  We later found out that he was one of the many steroid abusers of the period, and this may have had something to do with the direction his career took.  If nothing else, I suspect the ‘roids did not help him on the personality front.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that if any former ballplayer were reported today to have abused his common-law wife in a drunken dispute over car keys, Knoblauch would have to be near the top of any long-time fan’s short list of likely suspects.

He’s innocent until proven guilty, of course.  However, it’s not something totally out of the blue either.