I'm going to be honest: I was a serious pro wrestling fan before I was a serious baseball fan. I knew about kayfabe and marking out before I knew about OPS and runs created. So I'm afraid I was sadder as a fan of the Macho Man Randy Savage than of triples-hitting undrafted outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals Randy Poffo when I heard that Poffo/Savage died Friday, when he lost control of his car following a heart attack.
↵Savage was one of the strangest, most iconoclastic figures in the golden age of cartoonish, wonderful pro wrestling—never quite a heel or a face, sometimes completely incoherently hilarious and compelling on the microphone, and much more skilled on the mat than the average 80s-WWF-superstar, as evidenced in the oft-anthologized match against Ricky Steamboat.
↵He was also an outfielder who appears to have hit a lot of triples and not done much else in the Gulf Coast League. When you're an outstanding professional wrestler, your pro baseball career is a little like the story of the talking dog—that you did it at all is the most impressive thing.
↵So here's to Randy Savage—great pro wrestler, professional baseball player. He'll be missed, even though I hated those Slim Jim commercials.
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