Robin Ventura was a three time All-American at Oklahoma State, a winner of the Golden Spikes award for the nation's top collegiate baseball player and an inductee into the College Baseball Hall of Fame. A highly touted amateur prospect, the Chicago White Sox made Ventura the tenth overall pick in the 1988 draft.
Ventura's first full Major League season came in 1990, a season in which he would commit 25 errors and log an abysmal two week long 0-41 slump. Ventura's fielding would eventually come around, he became a six time Gold Glove winner at third base, but his production at the plate would never reach the expectations that accompanied him into the league. Ventura batted a plebeian .267 lifetime, and hit 294 home runs throughout his sixteen year career with the White Sox, Mets, Yankees and Dodgers.
The apex of Ventura's career came in 1999, when he hit .301 with 120 RBI and 32 home runs in his first season with the New York Mets. It was in this year that Ventura beat the Atlanta Braves in game three of the NLCS with a walk off, bases loaded, over the fence single that would famously come to be called the "Grand Slam Single."
Ventura came to the plate with three men on in the bottom of the 15th inning with the game tied 3-3. He parked a Kevin McGlinchy offering and appeared to have hit a Grand Slam. However, his Mets teammates mobbed him before he could complete his trip around the bases, and the hit would be offically scored a one RBI single. The Braves eventually prevailed in the series, but Ventura's hit would go down as a truly unique moment in baseball history.
Ventura's respectable Major League career will unfortunately forever be trivialized in many sports fans' minds by the ass-kicking he took from a 46 year old Nolan Ryan in 1993.
Ventura was unfortunate enough to be caught by a quid pro quo retaliatory 96 mile-an-hour bean ball from Ryan, a response to White Sox pitcher Alex Fernandez's earlier plunking of the Rangers' Juan Gonzalez. Instead of accepting the HBP as an unavoidable swing in the game's pendulum of justice, Ventura charged the silver-haired flame thrower, only to be promptly subdued in a headlock and clobbered six times in the face before his teammates could come to his rescue.
Although he was 20 years Ventura's senior that night in Arlington, the Ryan Express handed the promising youth an embarrassing whooping that possibly stunted Ventura's development as a ballplayer and perhaps prevented him from fully realizing his widely-accepted potential.
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