I just wanted to get everyone else's perspective as to whether or not the Red Sox FO should change the rules and retire #25 where it rightfully belongs.

Before you cast your vote, here is an article that I found on RSFF that I thought might shed some light on the whole situation:

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THE CASE FOR RETIRING TONY CONIGLIARO'S #25

On the night of Friday, August 18, 1967, the Boston Red Sox were at home at Fenway against the California Angels. The Sox were in a pennant race for the first time in a generation. Kenmore Square was abuzz. Some 31,027 fans crowded into the park on a warm summer night to watch Sox pitcher Gary Bell duel California's Jack Hamilton.

The Sox were three-and-a-half games behind the Minnesota Twins in the race for the pennant. In the fourth inning of a scoreless pitchers duel, Boston right fielder Tony Conigliaro stepped up to the plate. Tony C, as he was known, had broken a 0-for-20 slump earlier in the game with a single in his first at-bat.

A smoke bomb had just been thrown onto the grass from the leftfield grandstands, and, even after the groundscrew removed it, smoke still hovered in the lights shining down on the August Fenway night. After a brief delay, Tony stepped into the batter's box. He was was crowding in, looking for something on the outside part of the plate. The six-foot, two hundred pound Hamilton threw his first pitch....

Tony Conigliaro was the local boy from East Boston and Revere-- an immediate, enormous New England crowd favorite. He had a thick Boston accent, a swagger, was tall and good-looking. The women loved him.

Besides the good looks, though, he had enormous talent. He came up at age 19. By age 22, he was the youngest major league player to hit 100 career homeruns. (Babe Ruth was 25 when he reached that milestone.) He was a righthanded, pull-hitting homerun hitter. He hit in the clutch. For Tony Conigliaro in August 1967, the sky was the limit.

In his book "Tony C: The Triumph and Tragedy of Tony Conigliaro," Boston Herald reporter David Cataneo sums up the player and his times as things stood on that August night in '67:

Baby boomers who remember Dad cracking open a Narragansett while they watched the Sox on television felt closer to Tony C than they ever did to Teddy Ballgame or Yaz. Ted was born during World War I and Yaz was born before World War II. Tony was born in 1945, and to the boomer generation, he was one of them. He wore dungarees and flipped baseball cards in the fifties. His father had a car with preposterous tail fins. He sang Elvis in the shower. He listened to the Beatles on 45s. He didn't like rules. He said exactly what was on his mind. He wanted to be number one. He could be arrogant. He had doting, indulgent parents. He cried the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. He didn't believe in waiting his turn. He nearly got married before he was old enough to vote. He collected telephone numbers during the sexual revolution. He got the dreaded draft notice. His best friend was killed in Vietnam. He was disillusioned in the late sixties. He grew funky sideburns in the early seventies. He decided it was time at last to let go of childhood dreams when he hit thirty. He went to California in the late seventies. He felt the tug to come home in the early eighties.

For the Mickey Mouse Club generation, Tony was just right. He came along at the right time. The Red Sox, led by the workmanlike Yaz, had been men in gray flannel suits. Then Tony joined the club in 1964, the year John, Paul, George, and Ringo came to America and added a dash of flamingo plumage. He was a teen dream, young, handsome, audacious. He was sure of himself. He cut a record as if he were Ricky Nelson.

One of my earliest recollections of Tony Conigliaro was from a game earlier in that year. I was eight years old. We were watching the Sox on television on a Saturday afternoon. I was just starting to gain a young consciousness about the Red Sox. My father and his buddy were in the living room watching the game. Tony C came to the plate. "He's going to hit a homerun," I predicted boldly. On the very next pitch, Conigliaro put it into the screen. Amazing. The guy just had a mystique about him.

By August 18th, like the rest of New England, I was completely captured in the Red Sox spell, following every pitch of every game. I had been to my first game at Fenway Park some three weeks earlier. My brother Tom was a fan of Yaz. I was a fan of Tony. In sibling rivalry, I would rub it in when Tony would do better than Yaz, and Tom would reciprocate on the nights that Yaz prevailed.

My mother was sitting in the living room with my two brothers and I on that Friday night, listening on the battery-powered transistor radio to the Bell-Hamilton pitchers duel in the fourth inning. My father was working the second shift at the mill. I can't remember whether it was Ned Martin or Ken Coleman doing the play-by-play that night. (Didn't they used to switch off between radio and TV back in those days?)

Jack Hamilton threw a first-pitch fast ball. Ninety miles per hour. It was high and tight. But it was a pitch that got away-- tailing violently, in a millisecond, towards the head of Tony Conigliaro.

I don't recall exactly how the announcer described it. I don't recall the words that were said. But I remember that moment like it was yesterday evening. Whatever Ned-- or Ken-- said, it resonated. I remember crying, almost immediately. I remember listening to the announcer describing the silence in the ballpark. As though in a nightmare, I pictured the scene as they carried Tony off on a stretcher.

Unfortunately, it was not a mere bad dream. It was all too real. I was absolutely crushed.

In his book, Cataneo provides some of the player-eye-witness accounts:

"As soon as it crunched into me, it felt as if the ball would go in my head and come out the other side," Tony recalled.

Buck Rogers, the Angels catcher, was crouched a foot away when the ball hit. "It sounded like a pumpkin, like taking a bat to a pumpkin," he says.

Bobby Knoop was playing second base for the Angels and heard "a very sick sound."

George Scott was in the Red Sox dugout and recalls, "It sounded like a shot. Like a popgun."

Mike Ryan was also on the Sox bench and was startled by "a whack, a sickening sound. I'd seen guys get hit in the neck, between the eyes, but this was different. The ball hit and it was almost like it stuck there."

Carl Yastrzemski was on the top step of the dugout, caught up in the scoreless game, rooting for a hit. "It was a deafening sound, a sickening sound," he says.

Red Sox pitcher Dave Morehead was stretched out on the steps on the far end of the dugout, keeping a pitching chart, as part of his duties as the next day's starter. "I used to love to watch him hit. There was always a chance he could hit one. Then there was thud," he says.

George Thomas was warming up a pitcher in the Red Sox bullpen and heard the players on the bullpen bench exhale a horrified moan, as if they had witnessed something devastating. "We all stood up to look over the fence to see if Tony was moving his head," he remembers.

On-deck hitter Rico Petrocelli was the first to reach him. Rico knelt near him and tried to soothe him. "Take it easy, Tony, you're going to be alright," Petrocelli told him, as he watched Tony's eye swell on the spot, "like you would blow up a balloon."

It was horrific. Tony C represented a much more innocent time in sports. To many of us, he was an inspiration. Larger than life. I had his autograph. I followed his every action, wanted to be like him. To a skinny kid with coke-bottle glasses, he was a hero. He represented excellence, and achievement, and everything that was good and innocent about the sport of baseball.

Thus, when we awoke to those ghastly pictures of Tony in the morning newspapers that weekend-- propped up in his hospital bed-- chest-bared, necklace of his patron saint dangling from his neck-- with the bulging, swollen, badly-blackened, puss-filled left eye-- the broken cheekbone-- the shattered eye socket-- the broken jaw-- the blood and fluids seeping from his eyes, ears, nose, and mouth-- our childhoods, in many ways, were changed forever.

And the Boston Red Sox were in our blood, our sweat, our tears.... Forever.

In the horror of that moment, we were initiated.

For the rest of our lives, from the moment Tony C went down, no matter how good or how bad it got as a Sox fan, there was never going to be anything like that night in 1967... ever, again.

It was the second-worst beaning in the history of Major League Baseball-- second only to the beaning death of Ray Chapman in 1920. We followed his attempted comeback over the years. His vision impaired in his left eye, he valiantly attempted two comebacks. He pursued his singing career.

I stood within a few feet of him a couple years later, near the players parking lot. Soon, a whole new generation of Sox players-- led by Fisk, Lynn, and Rice-- came along. And we kind of lost track of him over the years, in the excitement of those Red Sox teams of the late seventies. And then one morning in 1982 we read in the newspapers about his debilitating heart attack-- another devastation that, this time, rendered the once-invincible Tony Conigliaro an invalid-- at age 37. He died in 1990, at the age of 45.

"He was baseball's JFK," Dick Johnson said. Cut down viciously in the prime of his life. The young man who had everything, struck down so unfairly, so cruelly, at his absolute peak. All in one violent split second.

There are some out there who actually believe that baseball is "just a game." There are some who still don't understand why we follow this team so emotionally. So urgently. Many don't understand-- will never understand-- the beauty and symmetry of the sport-- the metaphors and lessons of life to be found between the foul lines-- the lessons we can use in our daily lives.

In our youth-- with one violent pitch-- we learned some very ugly lessons about life, the night Tony C went down.

Baseball in New England changed forever the night Tony Conigliaro lay bleeding, near death, in the dirt at homeplate in Fenway Park. In life, Tony C got a raw deal. But he is anspiration, to this day, to young and old alike. His memory, for many, lives on. For whatever reason-- for the better part of a century-- Red Sox owners have established a policy of retiring the numbers of only those Sox players who are voted into the Major League Hall of Fame. This is a close-minded, arbitrary, stubborn policy that should be exempted by the new owners in the case of Tony Conigliaro.

It should have been done a long time ago. He meant that much to us.

It is time to retire Tony Conigliaro's Number 25.

Year Ag Tm Lg G AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI SB CS BB SO BA OBP SLG TB SH SF IBB HBP GDP

8 Seasons 876 3221 464 849 139 23 166 516 20 23 287 629 .264 .327 .476 1532 19 31 28 33 63

To me that doesn't seem like he is worth doing it for

Tony C. was something speacial, he was destined to be one of the greats, but his career was cut short by that ball. All the years he played afterwards were mediocre and nothing that he could have done if he had never been hit.