Word: pitcher
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Their longest-suffering fan, a hearty, hatchet-faced former tire dealer named Harry Grossman, 91, pushed the electric button. "Let there be light," he proclaimed in a biblical voice. The Cubs' holiest relics, Ernie Banks and Billy Williams, threw out first balls. Chicago's most sentimental pitcher, Rick Sutcliffe, took the mound. "It's like sunshine and Wrigley are saying goodbye to each other," he thought, though only eight night games are scheduled this season and just 18 a year for the calculable future. Looking hard at the Phillies' leadoff man, Phil Bradley, and straight into a light show...
Then there's Rocket Roger Clemens, the most dominant pitcher in baseball. Joe Morgan, what have you done...
These are the boys of late autumn, the last leaves on the tree of my youth. Not too many innings ago, there were others: Reggie Jackson; the knuckle-ball brothers, Phil and Joe Niekro; the great lefthanded pitcher Steve Carlton; and journeyman Outfielder Tom Paciorek, kept around last year by a manager who was an old teammate. A few like Paciorek glided gracefully and gratefully into a broadcasting booth. But most went out cursing the darkening of the light. At 43, Carlton, dropped by five different teams in the past two years, defiantly repeats the old ballplayer's mantra...
...life magnified beyond mortal dimension. Who in his or her daily existence has an experience to equal the champagne-drenched euphoria of a championship team? How can the workaday world match that moment when the last out is recorded and the players embrace in bacchanalian frenzy out near the pitcher's mound, pummeling and tumbling, shouting and shrieking, reveling in the totality of triumph...
...L.B.J., until he got irritated and stormed that he would not do the Kennedy family's bidding. He declared that the vice presidency was a worthless job compared with being Senate leader, related the sad tenure of "Cactus Jack" Garner, who had called the office nothing more than a "pitcher of warm spit," and said Speaker Sam Rayburn had told him to stay far away from it. If he could not be President, he would stay in the Senate, Johnson had told me with such rage and finality -- his nose an inch from mine -- that I chalked...