A prayer for Ron Santo

So I had the radio on while driving to work this morning and caught a very brief newswind of Ron Santo's passing. Sad day, to be sure, but I also knew he wasn't going to live that long. He'd lost both legs to diabetes, and had had other medical issues come up in the last year or so. In a way, the fact that he lived to 70 is a miracle. I remember hearing about him over the last decade and having to think: he's only in his sixties!...because a lot of the stuff he was suffering -- and the oftenness -- made me think he was older than he actually was.

But, he's gone [“http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/santo/ct-spt-1204-ron-santo-dead-chicago-cu20101203,0,3590073,full.story”]. No more: "Ohhhh, nooooo!" or "I remember..." or any other longwinded ramblings on the radio. It would be in rather poor taste for me to nitpick his radio analysis, or to talk about his obsessive embodiment of the roller coaster that is the Chicago Cubs, so I will rather comment on what I most admired about the man: his heart. Yes, he lived and died (figuratively speaking) with the franchise, but he also loved people and was in turn easy to love. He wore his heart on his sleeve, and lived in each and every moment and memory that he took part. His seventh-inning stretches were always memorable, as was his classic click-the-heels dance move back in his heyday when he was the third baseman for the Lovable Losers.

But something that has been sticking out to me was a comment he made a few years back about if he died before the Cubs won the world series. He said he was going to "find the billy goat and kill him." I just want to say that while I appreciate the sentiment, and I want the Cubs to win the world series as much as he did, I hope he finds peace in his heart about the whole world series drought thing. It was never the goat's fault, and the man whose fault it was publicly recanted his statement years later.

Santo had a good heart, and my prayer is that the Cubs' pain no longer tortures him. No more pain, no more anger, no more emotion; just peace. Chicago -- and all of baseball -- lost a great individual today. Let's remember him for his heart and his actions.

[The picture at the top of the post is of Santo leading the seventh-inning stretch back in 2008. It's very blurry and hard to see, but he's basically immediately above the yellow sign holding his arm out. I want to say this picture was taken during the one, two, three strikes you're out line of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame".]