[Author's Note: Some while back I wrote a post about unfulfilled promise on the baseball diamond and the tragic story of Tony Conigliaro.  With Rick Ankiel's remarkable rise from the ashes in recent weeks, I thought it might be appropriate to re-visit that Tony C post if only to remember the courage it takes to step back onto a baseball diamond after fate forces someone off of it.]

He was ready to take his place among the pantheon of great Boston sports heroes.  Williams.  Russell.  Cousy.  Yaz.  They were all going to have to move a little closer together to make room for a young slugger who was bunching up home runs with impressive density at Fenway Park.  His name was already written in pencil on the pages of legend, waiting only for his inevitable accomplishments to fill those letters in with permanent ink. But in one instant on one perfectly placid summer afternoon in 1967, it ended.  In the time it takes to blink, his name simply vanished from the pages of history.

On one pitch in one game of the long baseball season, Tony Conigliaro's magical run with the Boston Red Sox ended.  California's Jack Hamilton threw a fastball that sailed high and tight, and Conigliaro never had a chance.  The ball struck him nearly flush on the left eye, scrambling his flawless eyesight like a beaten egg.  Though he would eventually recover from the beaning, his eyesight would never be the same and his chances at baseball immortality went with it. 

Meanwhile, the Sox reluctantly went on without him.  They even made an improbable run to capture the AL Pennant in 1967, referring to their unexpected success that year as "The Impossible Dream."   But they did so without one of their brightest young stars.  That Tony Conigliaro was not around to enjoy and contribute to the wild ride that was the AL stretch run in 1967 surely took some of the edge off the team's "Dream."

And so it was.  Tony C, the local kid from Revere, Massachusetts who made good.  The right-handed hitting phenom who hit 24 homers in 1964 at the age of 19.  The All-Star rightfielder who was supposed to bookend with Carl Yastrzemski for the next decade and give the Sox the most feared lefty-righty punch in the league was essentially done before his 23rd birthday.

He did make it back to the big leagues in 1969 and hit 20 homers.  He followed that up with 36 more the following season, a true triumph considering the toll it must have taken on his psyche to step back into the batter's box and face his greatest demon - the pitched ball.  However, the baseball gods simply wouldn't give him a break, his eyesight, which had cleared enough to allow him back into the big leagues, went for good in 1971.  Another comeback in 1975 (ironically, another pennant winning season for Boston) ended disastrously, and at 30 years old, the game had dispatched Tony C for good.

He would go on to sports broadcasting, if only to remain connected to the world he was never fully able to realize.  However, as with his playing days, fate was undeniably cruel to him.  At 37, he suffered a major heart attack that left him in a coma for over a month.  Although he survived, and "survive" is the operative word here, what was left of his shattered life lingered on for eight painful years.  In 1990, Tony Conigliaro, the youngest player in AL history to reach 100 career home runs, passed away.  He was 45 years old.

Somewhere, I think there's a place in the very heart of New England that still feels the pain of Tony C's lost career, his one chance to fulfill the promise of being the Next Big Thing in Red Sox history.  And there must also surely be a place among baseball fans in general that not only feels bad about the numbers that never appeared on the back of Tony Conigliaro's baseball card but also that his name must be referred to in the past tense, decades before that ever should have been the case.

Stats:

http://www.baseball-reference.com/c/conigto01.shtml

Other Sources:

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/recbooks/rb_hr6.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Conigliaro