I grew up in Pittsburgh and my all time baseball hero was #21 Roberto Clemente, who like Willie was a regular user of the basket catch. He also featured a cannon for an arm which he displayed many a game with strikes thrown to the plate from deep in right field at Forbes Field (which was as deep as just about any field in the country). If memory serves me right he had a lifetime BA of .317 and a dozen gold gloves. Hit a lot of long line drives, which if he had played at Three Rivers Stadium rather than Forbes Field, would have been in the stands. Truly a joy to get to watch throughout my youth. His life was tragically cut short as the small plane he was on delivering humanitarian aid to Nicaragua went down in a storm. His body was never found - even as his close friend and teammate Manny Sanguillen spent weeks diving in search of it.
Possibly due to my age 66, baseball was the only sport I cared about as a kid. So many truly great players and rivalries in that era. IMO not the same game today. They lost me after the strike and then with so many star players moving from team to team. Probably after Clemente's death my interests wained in baseball and I became a Los Angles Lakers fan, from Jerry West's time through Kobe's. I spent a brief 4-5 year stint cheering on the Orangemen of Syracuse due to very close friends there ( so many a game in the Dome). But beginning in the late 90's into the early 2000's my attention was more and more focused on our Uconn Husky women. I was hopelessly hooked by Maya's time and haven't looked, back or sideways since. Uconn wcbb is my sports passion, although i do love to follow many of are alumni in their pro careers.
