as long as the person is mentioned, his name said out loud, or picture is published somewhere, that person really lives on in our hearts and minds. Any player, from Babe Ruth to the doctor character in Field of Dreams, who had one AB in the majors, is immortal. We should remember these players who came before, regardless of whether they’re in the HOF or not. They all, minor leaguers, Negro leagues, Independent leagues, Federal Leaguers and of course the senior circuit and the junior circuit are what have created the great American nine act dramatic art form that creates its own time thread. It doesn’t follow conventional time but follows ebbs and flows of offense and defensive momentum, like a desperate battle that can turn out to be a draw, a massacre or an upset, regardless of the odds going in. It’s the ultimate individual and team sport both in that superstar individiuals can definitely impact a team’s performance but not so much as in the other stick and ball sports. A quarterback will touch the ball on every offensive play all year long (16 games or so), a pitcher will touch the ball on every offensive play maybe every 5 games for maybe 6 innings. and a position player might go an entire game and not touch it either with the bat or the glove. Dick Drott is a great example because he could have been a top tier pitcher if not for injuries. He did not become the next Babe Ruth but he got to play the same game and to me it’s just as exciting to read about his career and personal life as it is someone like Ruth or Cobb. It took them all to make this pastime the national pastime which it still is. Unlike the other action team sports, you can sit in at a field and take it all in and not have to scream and holler and get drunk and puke to have a good time. You can do those things if you want but you can also take an intellectual approach to your experience and keep score and keep calm and comment on how the baserunner stole that base on the pitcher because he takes so long to deliver the ball to the plate from his stretch. You can, in fact, see and understand every single dynamic event in the baseball game because it is linear and fits within a person’s time and space attention span. It’s the most democratic form of sport that lets everybody touch the ball in the field and, at least in the National League which still is pure and unadulterated, also lets everybody have their crack at batting the ball. Like in war, you can’t “run out the clock”; you have to actually do battle back and forth until someone has won, which theoretically, could take an infinite amount of innings. Baseball is the only sport I can, and enjoy to watch, when I have absolutely no skin in the game; that is I could care less who wins, I just want to see the beauty and art and power of the sport. In some ways that is the best way to take it in so you can just be a neutral observer watching two warring armies slug it out within very precise, time-proven parameters. What if the distances between the bases were 110 feet instead of nintey. Would the whole balance of the offense and defense be skewed? What if the ball/strike count were something ridiculous like 10 ball to walk and 2 strikes to K. The game could be a disaster like curling or olympic gymnastics hanging on the whim of biased judges but it is not. It is grounded in the same fundamental strengths that make America what it is. We play by the rational, not arbitrary rules, that we have established, not some royal family created for us that we had to adopt to be able to use their ball. We play with a broom stick and tennis ball or a plastic bat and a whiffle ball with two people or 18. And we all play the same game. So even though I didn’t play professional baseball I can completely imagine that if I had been a contemporary of Dick Drott growing up in the late 20s in the same town in southern California, we would have played together and gotten value out of each other’s participation. And I have spent enough spring, summer and fall evenings in Indiana growing up playing baseball either sandlot or organized until it was too dark to see the ball and I still remember the last organized baseball game I played as a senior in high school like it was yesterday rather than 33 years ago and because of that, feel some level of kinship with everyone else in this country who has played ball at any level. It’ like a private club that’s easy to join, but you can never leave it. Not even after you’re dead.