Retirements--Impacts

Frank Thomas hung it up Friday after not playing last season and Tom Glavine joined onto the Braves front office last week as well.

A younger player, Mark Mulder, also has been rumored to have retired, according to an mlb.com story earlier today. (NOTE: His agent refuted the opposite later in the day.)

Jeff Kent announced his retirement from baseball not too long ago.

Greg Maddux already left baseball earlier last offseason.

There is a class of baseball players on the way out right now, and there are some names that are at the top of the game, but they seemed to hang around too long.

Glavine and Maddux both kept trying to play, but injuries and not the same successes as they previously experienced led to the end of their careers. Nothing is lost or tarnished from their careers, as both were exceptional pitchers, but the tail end seemed unnecessary.

Barry Bonds went out most in a most unglamorous fashion--no one would sign him. At least he accepted that fact though. He had no choice.

It seems players like John Smoltz--still a free agent and looking for a place to pitch--are looking to stick around the game, but the reality is, in many cases the players should call it a job well done and depart. No one will think any less of them for it.

This era of players set records like no other era has before, but the controversy caused along the way was greater than Pete Rose's gambling and the 1919 White Sox combined. The damage has been done, but the greatness has been recorded and remembered.

I grew up watching those names. Those are the names that I will think back on. Glavine, Maddux, and Smoltz with the Braves, Bonds and Kent with the Giants, and so on and so forth. These players changed the face of the game, in good and bad ways.

Sometimes, it is best to just savor the good and let that be that. The players who have recently left the game will never really leave it in their hearts or in the hearts of fans. That should be enough at the end of the day to break off the playing days that have occupied their lives for anywhere from ten to twenty seasons.

They are baseball. They are a generation. They should not be forgotten as they leave.