RIP Mike Greenwell — a Good Ball Player and a Good Man

I’m a bit late with this. But word only recently reached me of the premature death of Mike Greenwell, former all-star left fielder for the Boston Red Sox and a member of the Lee County, Florida (Ft. Myers) County Commission. He died October 10 in Boston where he was undergoing experimental treatment for medullary thyroid cancer. He was 62.

Greenwell followed his successful baseball career with equally successful business and political careers back in Southwest Florida where he lived most of his life. He was also a solid family man, making his time on Earth a life in full.

Greenwell spent his entire 1985 through 1996 Major League Baseball career with the Red Sox, playing a solid left field and posting a more-than-respectable lifetime batting average of .303. He was chosen to play for the American League in the All-Star Game of 1988, which was his best season. He batted .325 that year with 39 doubles and 22 home runs. He was runner-up in the AL MVP voting that year. More .300+ seasons followed as well as another trip to the All-Star Game. He was inducted into the Red Sox Hall of Fame in 2008.

As good a player as he was for the Sawks, Greenwell suffered from what I call the Larry Holmes syndrome. Longtime fans of the sweet science (this includes me) know that Holmes was a good heavyweight champion. He was Smokin’ Joe Frazier tough and had one of the best jabs ever. He could snap a heavyweight’s head back with it. But he had the misfortune of following the supremely talented but otherwise odious Muhammed Ali. The very definition of a tough act to follow.

Like the luckless Larry, Greenwell was obliged to strut his considerable baseball stuff in the shadow, not just of Fenway Park’s Green Monster, but in the shadow of three Baseball Hall of Famers. Three very tough acts to follow.  From 1939 through 1987, when Greenwell took it over as a regular, left field in Fenway Park had been patrolled by, in order: Ted Williams, Carl Yastremsky, and Jim Rice.

Williams is a baseball deity. He often said his goal was to be the greatest hitter who ever lived. It’s a tough case to make that he didn’t achieve this. The powerful Rice was a monster slugger, finishing his career with 382 home runs. Yaz, who finished his long career with more than 3,000 base hits, was the best defender of the three. Fenway’s left field, with the 37 foot high Green Monster of a fence and only about a foot of foul territory, creates some of the most eccentric caroms in the bigs. Yaz played these as well as Itzhak Perlman plays the fiddle. He — Yaz, not Perlman — turned extra base hits into singles. These are the talents Greenwell had to follow. But what a quartet. No shame in being number four in this succession. Left field in Fenway was in more than just good hands for more than a half century.

We shouldn’t leave the subject of Fenway Park, the oldest ball yard in the bigs, opened in 1912, without pointing out that it’s not just left field that’s eccentric there. Fenway was built, like all big league ball yards early last century, to fit into densely populated urban neighborhoods in the Northeast and Midwest. Ball yards had to fit the neighborhood. Not the other way around. The era of charmless suburban sports palaces, named after soulless corporations and surrounded by parking lots bigger than the Dutton Ranch in Montana, was many decades away when Fenway Park was shoe-horned into and named after the Fenway neighborhood of  Boston.

As a result, Fenway’s entire outfield is eccentric. It tracks from the Pesky Pole just 309 feet from home plate in far right field, deepening quickly in front of the visiting team and Sawks bullpens, to that bizarre little triangular cut-out in deep, strait-away center, then to the Green Monster in left. The entire outfield line follows roughly the path one might run if being chased by a lunatic with a Weed-Whacker.

This eccentric and charming ball yard was Greenwell’s office for a dozen years. I have long-time friends in New Hampshire and Vermont. When I visit in summer a trip to Fenway is always included. So I’ve been privileged to see Greenwell, and other Sawks worthies, at work in their natural habitat. I’m the better for it. If Annie Savoy was right, and there is a Church of Baseball, Fenway Park would be its Canterbury Cathedral. (Yankees fans’ objections are noted.)

Many professional athletes in all sports have trouble after the cheering stops finding productive ways to fill their days, as police blotters and bankruptcy courts across the nation can attest. Greenwell had no such problem. He returned home to Southwest Florida and in short order became a successful businessman. He operated Big League Builders, a general construction company, and developed housing and commercial properties. One of his developments was Mike Greenwell’s Bat-A-Ball & Family Fun Park, a baseball-themed park in Cape Coral containing batting cages, bumper cars, and midway rides. His field of dreams was a large produce farm near Ft. Myers. While operating these businesses he still found time to coach Little League baseball.

Thanks to his business acumen, his personal popularity, and his standing in the community, Greenwell entered into an unexpected political career in 2022 when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed him to complete the unexpired term of a Lee County commissioner who died in office. He easily won a four-year term on his own in 2024. A term he was unable to complete.

Greenwell leaves behind his wife of 45 years, Tracy, and two sons, Bo and Garrett. They have every reason to be proud of their husband and father. Lee County, Florida is the better for what Greenwell did there and for the kind of man he was.

RIP Mike Greenwell, a .300 hitter in baseball, and a .300 hitter in life.

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By mfnnews