Joe Posnanski writes a love letter to Raul Ibanez as the player returns to Kansas City. The following paragraphs come in the context of Allard Baird telling Joe Ibanez was going to hit despite little success at age 29, and the Joe recounting the feats Ibanez accomplished since the age of 30.

None of these stats seemed even slightly possible when I sat in that dugout with Allard Baird — 29-year-old career backups with no pedigree hitting .150 do not have golden career like Ibañez has had. It just doesn’t happen. But Ibañez made it happen. He made it happen through sheer will, determination and conviction. I have never met a ballplayer quite like him. Raúl is this unusual blend of modesty and conviction — he will almost never say anything good about himself and yet he leaves no doubt that he believes in himself as a player. That’s a hard combination.

He speaks English and Spanish without accent — his parents escaped Cuba just two years before he was born — and this automatically puts him in a clubhouse leadership role wherever he goes. He also picks up things naturally; Raul is that guy in the clubhouse who just knows what’s going on. Teammates have told me about times when they were down about something or angry about something and Raúl, out of nowhere, just came up to them and quietly said something that changed their whole viewpoint.

He takes the perception on to the field, of course. He’s grown famous for the effort he exerts — the way he runs out even hopeless double player grounders, the all-out way he sprints after fly balls in the outfield. Ibañez can’t run — he never really could — and certainly on the whole the stats show him to have been a well-below average outfielder. But he was always a better outfielder than he should have been. Twice he led left fielders in fielding percentage. Three times he finished second in range factor. He got after it, best he could. And if he got there, he made the play.

Ibanez’s career screams PEDs, but that subject is taboo. Yet, when Joe tries to get Raul to talk about how he improved:

“Did you think you would have a career like this?” I asked him the last time I saw him.

“Yes,” he said. “I thought I could.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Tell me about your daughters.”

It’s very obvious that the people who know and worked with Raul like him and respect him. There are so many of those people that I tend to believe that Raul is clean, and just did not get the right break in his career until he was nearly past his prime. That means we chalk up the deflection to modesty.