Four Gold Gloves, two All-Star Game selections, two World Series championships and votes for league MVP make outfielder Shane Victorino Hawaii’s most decorated Major League Baseball player.
Postseason heroics, including two grand slams and 42 RBI, make him the most clutch, too.
But those achievements are only part of why he has been so popular across 12 MLB seasons and a handful of teams and why, on the occasion of the Aug. 3 retirement in Philadelphia first reported by KHON’s Rob DeMello and confirmed by the Phillies on Twitter, Victorino will be so widely saluted.
Never mind that he last appeared in a Phillies uniform in 2012. Or, that his most recent participation in a MLB game came in 2015, the 37-year old Victorino remains revered well beyond his native Maui.
No small feat in such a transitory occupation or in Philadelphia, a city where sports fans famously booed Santa Claus.
But in addition to playing the game with a lot of heart, Victorino also gave generously from it to a wide array of community causes in several states.
In a distressed area of North Philadelphia his name is across the front of the “Shane Victorino Nicetown Boys and Girls Club,” where he and his wife, Melissa, through their foundation have contributed about $1 million and elbow grease.
“It wasn’t like, ‘Here’s some money, put my name on the building,’ they were involved from Day 1” with hard hats and paint brushes, as Jerry Houck, a vice president of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Philadelphia, has described it.
“He and Melissa are just genuine, authentic people, they care about the community,” Houck said in a 2012 Star-Advertiser interview.
Here, at home, Victorino has shared the cachet of his name and the proceeds of his career with the Boys and Girls Club of Maui, the Hawaii Children’s Cancer Foundation, Waipio Little League, St. Anthony High (his alma mater), the Hawaii High School Athletic Association and others.
Victorino’s largess earned him MLB’s Gehrig Memorial Award in 2008 as the player who “best exemplifies the spirit and character” of Gehrig both on and off the field. A plaque listing the winners is exhibited in the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.
In 2011, Victorino received the Branch Rickey Award, which “honors individuals in baseball who contribute to their communities and are strong role models for young people.”
In 2016 he was honored by the Jamie Moyer Foundation for children.
Perhaps even more telling was the day the Phillies announced their 2012 trade of Victorino to the Dodgers, ending an eight-year stay in Philadelphia. Houck said an elderly lady on the steps of the Boys and Girls Club told him, “I just heard the news and I’m so sad about Shane being traded; he’s done so much for this club and this community.”
Youngsters who attended the club that week felt likewise. Houck said, “I thought, ‘Wow, this is just like a death in the family. A passing.’ That’s what it felt like.”
Come Victorino’s “day” at the ballpark next month, there will be an opportunity to say a more joyous and well-deserved goodbye to someone who has been a champion on and off the field.
Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@staradvertiser.com or 529-4820.
