“Kevin Elster”
“Kevin Elster”
Kevin Elster was the starting shortstop for the New York Mets in the late '80s and early ‘90s. He had a great glove — in fact, Derek Jeter once said that "Elster's hands are as good as anyone I've ever seen.”
But Elster struggled to find consistency at the plate during his seven seasons in New York. Some of that can be attributed to injuries, as he played more than 115 games only twice in that span, but in 537 games with the Mets, he hit a total of 34 home runs, batted .224 and rarely drew a walk.
In the sixth game of the 1992 season, Elster hurt his shoulder, and he missed the rest of the year and all of the next. He played a handful of games with a few different teams in 1994 and ’95, and suddenly, it was 1996. Baseball was on a steroid-fueled trajectory toward unheard-of power numbers, and Elster hadn’t had a starting job in years. So, he signed with Texas — in part because his brother lobbied on his behalf — where he planned to compete to be the backup shortstop.
Now, in those days, the Texas Rangers clubhouse was also one of the game's steroid hubs. Ruben Sierra in the early '90s was one of the first notable and obvious users, and that carried right through to steroid godfather Jose Canseco and busted teammates like Rafael Palmeiro, Juan Gonzalez, Ivan Rodriguez, Kenny Rogers, and eventually Alex Rodriguez.
In fact, Canseco wrote in his tell-all book "Juiced" that he introduced Pudge, Gonzalez and other Rangers players to steroids between 1992 and '94.
So, back to Elster. In 1996, when young Benji Gil got hurt during spring training, Elster became the starting shortstop and had by far the best season of his career at age 31, hitting .252 with 24 homers and 99 RBI.
He parlayed that into a million-dollar free-agent deal with Pittsburgh the next offseason, and though he played parts of three more big league seasons, he never again came close to the success of that magical ’96 campaign.
One of the crazy parts about that era of baseball is that we just don't really know who did what — or what impact it had. But I know for myself, as a kid shortstop in the '90s who just loved playing baseball, that if I’d been given Elster's option to either take the same juice everyone else was taking and enjoy a few more years in the game, or take the high-road home, who’s to say what I would have done? And with all the focus on the stars who broke records and shattered fans’ innocence, would anybody even care after all these years what Elster did or didn’t do during that 1996 season?
I'm still not sure, but that's what this song is about. And it’s worth mentioning that when I wrote this song a few years back, I was absolutely, unbreakably convinced that Elster did steroids. Now, I have to admit that I’m less sure. It could be that he finally got healthy at the right time, played a full season in a good lineup, and put up some good counting stats for a team full of good hitters. Who's to say?
So, in other words, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. And whether those 99 RBIs were clean or sullied, I can see myself having made either choice.
Elster and the others on the album are, for me anyway, men of great stature — men of myth, giants of my childhood imagination. And so I present these songs humbly, as the kind of folk-tale you might hear near a campfire, or in front of a tall piano, or maybe around a dining-room table under the right circumstances.
Knowing they are not “true” in the sense of being historically accurate, I hope these songs contain some truth. In writing them, I have certainly learned some things about myself.
- Matt Halvorson