Dan Le Batard gets overwhelmed talking about Jose Fernandez
By Josh Hill
Miami sports writing legend Dan Le Batard was overwhelmed with emotion while discussing the death of Jose Fernandez on SportsCenter.
Jose Fernandez, the superstar left-hander for the Miami Marlins, is dead. His life, which as we’re all learning more and more about in the fallout from his death, has been so suddenly ended that no one really knows how to process it.
Fernandez was more than just a superstar pitcher in baseball. He was more than just a star leading the next generation of talent in his sport. He was a Cuban refugee who was making his dreams come true — both in his career and in starting a family.
All of that has been whisked away, and trying to describe and put into perspective just how unfathomably devastating this is on a human level is not an easy job.
Dan Le Batard appeared on SportsCenter this morning and was overwhelmed with emotion when speaking about the death of Fernandez. As has been the case so many times over the years, no one more poignantly put this stunning news into perspective than Le Batard did.
“It’s not just that this was the sudden finality of young life lost,” Le Batard told Hannah Storm as he was clearly fighting back his emotions. “It’s that this kid has so much life.”
“Young life lost is always crushing,” Le Batard later continued. “But beyond that, this is a guy in Miami who was a symbol for Cuban-Americans because he came over to this country as a young man. He fled Cuba and started a life for himself that was really special.”
Le Batard was referring to not what Fernandez meant on the field as a player but the energy, vibrancy and importance that he brought to the game. Not only that, but the way that Fernandez touched so many close to the Marlins, whether that be the fans who bought into his rise and took pride in him as being one of their own or the writers who got to know him on a personal level.
It’s just incredibly hard to contextualize how special Fernandez was. Le Batard did perhaps the best job of getting across that this isn’t merely the death of a baseball player. This is the death of an icon who meant so much to so many — both those who shared his nationality and those who just shared in his raw energy.