Carlos Quentin Retires; Short Personal Note

Carlos Quentin by Keith Allison

The news today is that Carlos Quentin is hanging up his spikes.  It's an unceremonious end to what was at times an excellent career, but also one marked by injuries that held him back from achieving what perhaps he could have.

Carlos Quentin will always be kind of special to me, because he was kind of enough to hit a home run in his major league debut, which also happened to my daughter's first baseball game.  She was just barely two months old.  We were in Arizona at the time (hence J-in-AZ), and my wife got an extra ticket to a baseball game at Chase Field.  I wrote about it here.  Pretty neat; I don't even remember Brandon Webb pitching that night, nor that Stephen Drew was also just breaking into the big leagues.  I've always liked those guys too.  Might be why.

In any case, I've followed Carlos Quentin's career with some interest, and was thrilled when he turned his career around after Arizona seemingly gave up on him after a bad 2007.  Yeah, he lost a lot of time due to injuries.  But when he was on the field, he was consistently one of the better hitters for most of his career.

Here's my little blurb on him from 2006:

Carlos Quentin, another of the Diamondbacks' fantastic looking prospects, celebrated his major league debut tonight by hitting a line-drive 2-run home run to left field. He also hit a line drive right at the left fielder in the 8th. Also darn near made an amazing catch in left field that turned into the Russell Martin double I mentioned above. Not a bad first night. If Quentin goes on to become the star that a lot of people think he will over the next decade, it will be pretty cool to be able to tell my daughter that her first baseball game was also the day of Quentin's major league debut, and his first home run.