Mugwump's Fish World

..so long Willie...RIP.....80 years old..

  I walked past Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, and Juan Marichal in the LAX back in the day.....said 'Hi'....they all turned and said 'Hi' back.....made my day.....the 1st baseman was really a big man..
My Dad and I went to many a Dodger/Giant game in the LA Colosseum, before 'Chavez Ravine' was built.....good times 

Willie was a fantastic  player.
The golden  age of baseball,to me anyway.
I loved the allstar games back then,the amount of talent was staggering.
OVERALL  I don't think it could be matched by any  other era.

Del Stanley
1 hour ago
I can't remember the exact year, it was mid to late 1950s. My father took me to see the local minor league team. Even the team's name is a blur, it was either the Dallas Rangers, or the Dallas Fort Worth Rangers. It was the first time I had ever seen a professional baseball team. There were no major league teams in the south during that era. This guy comes to the plate and BAM! I was shocked. I didn't know a baseball could do what dat thang had done that night! The ball took off into the dark night like a bullet, like someone was real angry with that ball. In 1950s Dallas before there was major development and civic expansion between Dallas and Fort Worth there was very little light pollution in the night skies. So when that little white ball took off from that bat and flew deep into the night, it looked like something out of a Greek mythology tale where some thing, or some person became fixed in the stars and heavens. I can almost swear that with my little kid's eyes on, the ball I saw that night went all the way into deep space and became part of some new constellation! That ball that night could not have been measured in mere feet, you needed light years!


Although I could tell you almost every player on the Yankees then, I didn't know any minor league players' names, so when I asked my father who hit that ball he told me Willie McCovey. I remembered that name henceforth now and forevermore. The next time we went to see him play again he was already gone and into the majors.


Years later whenever I saw a baseball hit really hard I would say the batter "knocked the McCovey off the ball." I extended it to whenever a basketball player blocked a shot really hard.


I was saddened to hear of his passing on my birthday---Halloween. He provided the first homerun I had ever seen by a professional (albeit minor league) player and what a whopper it was. RIP.