When I was a kid, the one “organized” sport I really played a lot of was baseball. From Little League to “senior league” to the sandlot with friend who were happy to hop a fence, no matter how high, I most certainly was up for getting my baseball on. Through what, to me and a lot of my friends, was a “great” time for being a baseball fan – the 80’s – it was a blast. Between the stacks and stacks of baseball cards, the playing of “fantasy” baseball where four or five of us would manually, circa 1988-1991 or so, take the newspaper box scores and score our teams, and picking uniform numbers based on your favorite players, it was a good time. I even had a cool place to hang out through 7th-8th grade, and most of high school, in a baseball card store around the corner from my house, where a bunch of us from school would hang out and talk baseball and other sports stuff with the owner, Vinnie, who was a staunch Mets fan. A lot of us were Yankees fans, which always made for good rivalry fun, and it was interesting hearing about some fun baseball times in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s from an “adult” point of view.
One of my good friends at the time, Rob P., was one person whose teams I ended up on quite a bit, and we used to play game after game of catch in the yard. He was into the Minnesota Twins, and his dad was a Yankees fan, which was fun – considering the Yankees were pretty much sucking it up during the Don Mattingly years, and the Twins did fairly well for themselves in parts of the 80’s and 90’s. In any case, Rob’s dad had told us the story of Lyman Bostock, who had been absolutely stellar on the Minnesota Twins, and had moved on to the California Angels for the 1978 season after spurning offers from the Mets and Yankees. Rob was familiar with him having been a fan of the team, and it was probably one of the earliest “tragic” things I’d really heard about with regard to sports. While I’d been around for the deaths of a number of other players in the late 70’s, it wasn’t something I was “aware” of. Other than that, Len Bias’ tragic death was the other thing that struck a chord.
In any case, Lyman Bostock has always been a name that rings a bell whenever it comes up, and definitely starts a conversation when I’m around fellow baseball fans. So earlier today, when I caught this link on the front page of ESPN.com, I just had to click through and read it all. Jeff Pearlman most certainly fills in a lot of the blanks that I hadn’t really heard about before, and includes some comments and insights that made the story a little more “real” than what I’d heard before. I still find it pretty rare (thankfully we don’t have a ton of these happenings to look back on) to find something that captures experience the way that this story has – from fans of baseball at the time who remember where they were, or liked seeing the player play the game – and as we’re all hammered with story after story about this, that, and every other thing, it’s definitely rare that I have the time, or better yet, take the time, to read something all the way through, and then put together a post like this, to share with others.
In any case, enough of my rambles. Just thought it was a great piece that I’d share with fans of baseball, and so forth, and give Jeff Pearlman some kudos on striking a chord with the piece.