They found Ken Caminiti 10 years ago this week, found him in a boarded-up, rat-infested hellhole in the decayed Hunts Point section of the Bronx, found him dead at 41, found him dead from a drug overdose, found him after he got busted by Houston cops a month earlier in Houston, found a legend finally put to God-awful rest by his demons.
I think about the former Padres third baseman every once in a while. Because I really liked him. Among all the athletes I’ve dealt with in my 43 years in this newspaper dodge, Cammy, much like the late Chuck Muncie, who fought similar malignant spirits, was among my favorites.
For guys like me, and those who loved him, he is missed.
Maybe because he was straight-up. There was something mischievous beneath that twinkle in his blue eyes. He was a matinee idol, a motorcycle mechanic by avocation, who parked his bike in the clubhouse. A father.
Ken had admitted he was an alcoholic, and heaven knows what else, long before his death, a mysterious demise only because of where it took place. There is an eternal unexplained reason as to what the hell he was doing in that New York cesspool on Oct. 10, 2004.
The where was the problem, not the why. He left Houston for New York to do what he did. Some details are sketchy, some not. Like Muncie, Cammy was a good guy who got himself hooked, the difference being Chuck cleaned himself up after time in stir. Ken never did.
New York, we guess, is as good a place as any to load up.
But before that, he was a Padre, and an all-time Padre. He was here but for four seasons – 1995-98, the franchise’s greatest heyday – but ’96 was the memorable one, his unanimous National League MVP season, when he had the greatest second half I’ve seen, placing the team on its shoulders and carrying it to the NL West title.
He was magnificent in the field and at the plate. In the 73 games following the All-Star break, he batted .360, with 28 home runs and 81 RBI. He virtually played the entire season with a torn rotator cuff in his left shoulder.
“I don’t know how I did it,” he would say.
Well, we have a pretty good idea how he did it. Cammy was a remarkable athlete, but this was dead in the middle of the steroid era, remember. We can’t even begin to imagine the crap he put into his body, some of it to play on.
“He worked his ass off,” says Trevor Hoffman, the great closer and Ken’s teammate for four years. “But he obviously had help. His pain threshold was higher than most. He had things that probably would have crippled a lot of people.”
And that was the year of Monterrey, Mexico, where the Padres played a three-game, in-season series with the Mets. Cammy came down with food poisoning before a game and was totally out of it, sprawled on the floor. Severely dehydrated, he took an IV in each arm – after, he said, doctors put 25 holes in him trying to find veins. He ate a Snickers bar. He was going to play, no matter what, even though he had trouble jogging out on the field.
First at-bat. Home run.
Second at-bat. Three-run homer.
“What we saw,” the late Tony Gwynn would say, “was not normal. It was a superhuman effort. That game said a lot about the person.”
But we also can recall the Ken Caminiti of 1998, when the Padres played the Yankees in the World Series, when he was a mess, swinging and falling down at the plate. That’s the Cammy we’d like to forget.
Kevin Towers, who as Padres GM brought Ken here and still was on the job when Ken passed away, all but blamed himself, saying he knew about Cammy’s addictions but was too selfish to do anything about it.
John Moores, who owned the team at the time, said then: “In many ways, Ken was my hero. God, what a warrior.”
On Towers’ remorse, Moores added: “I told Kevin, “You’re hopelessly naïve if you thought you could do anything to save Ken’s life.”
Now out of baseball and still a part time San Diego resident, Moores’ position on Caminiti hasn’t changed. He loved the guy. And he has to know that, as much as anyone, Cammy got Petco Park built.
“I’m a huge fan, an enormous fan,” Moores says today. “He was such an interesting guy, a decent guy, but so flawed. I couldn’t figure out how he got through life, so incredibly disciplined on the field and so incredibly undisciplined off of it. Really a nice man. A sweet man. I still have a picture of him in my condo. I got a picture of him with Brooks Robinson. He walked up to Brooks and said, “Hello, idol.” I got choked up.
“But demons I didn’t see went to work. It’s so easy to reduce folks to stereotypes. Ken has issues with drugs and got arrested, da, da, da, da, da. But this was an incredible talent and a sweet guy.
“He periodically lapsed. Nobody knows what happened in New York that particular day, but he was up to no good, believe me.”
Mark Sweeney, now a member of the Padres’ Fox broadcast team, also was a Caminiti teammate, and has conflicting thoughts.
“I loved the guy. We were a family in the dugout and the clubhouse,” Sweeney said. “We knew he had demons but we were there for him. We joked with him. I think he felt safe being around us.
“He had that edge, that toughness. So many of us have thought of Nancy (Caminiti’s wife) and the girls. At the tribute for him, his youngest girl was shaking. Those girls needed a father. He left behind three girls. No one’s perfect.”
Ken Caminiti was not that. Famously not that.
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