They are emotional lightning strikes, as painful for their permanence as for their initial shock. Now and then, we’re reminded — in the most dreadful manner possible — that our sports heroes are all too human. When Oscar Taveras died with his girlfriend, Edilia Arvelo, in a car crash Sunday in his native Dominican Republic, the world not only lost a 22-year-old man still in what should be the dawn of his life. The world also lost the prettiest swing to grace ballparks in the St. Louis Cardinals’ farm system since Albert Pujols’s meteoric rise at the turn of the century. The ache of this tragedy is intensified because Taveras’s face had become the face of the future for an already proud baseball franchise. Oscar Taveras had not yet become what is . . . he was still what might be. And now, no more. Ever.
Memphis Flyer
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