“The decisions I made are mine to deal with, and I take full responsibility for them. They are decisions I’m not proud of, decisions that haunt me to this day, but decisions you might have made if presented with the same circumstances and pressures.”
Parque, who is a 1994 Crescenta Valley graduate, played from 1998 to 2002 with the Chicago White Sox and in 2003 with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
Ironically, the White Sox and Tampa Bay, now just the Rays, played on Thursday, with Chicago starting pitcher Mark Buehrle throwing a perfect game. Buehrle and first baseman Paul Konerko are the only current White Sox who played with Parque when he was with Chicago.
“Jim hasn’t been here in so long, he hasn’t been in the big leagues forever,” Konerko told ESPNChicago.com. “To me he was a good guy, a good teammate, a funny guy with a funny sense of humor.
“He really hasn’t been here for years. For me, this is kind of a meaningless story. To me and everyone else around here. He didn’t take the ones that make you bigger, I guess.”
The 33-year-old Parque was a 5-foot-11, 170-pound pitcher who was drafted by the White Sox in the first round of the 1997 amateur draft with the 46th overall pick.
He tallied a 31-34 record over parts of six seasons in the majors, compiling a 5.42 earned-run average.
In 2007, the Mitchell Report alleged that former New York Mets clubhouse employee Kirk Radomski made two sales of HGH to Parque. Parque, in an interview with the Sun-Times, vehemently denied the allegations.
“You have a guy that was trying to plea-bargain to save his own ass, so of course he’s going to throw as many names as possible out there,” he said.
