This New York Times story instantly carried me back 42 years, to my senior year in college, when my buddies and I, trapped in the nothingness of a Minnesota winter, played an entire 162-game schedule of APBA baseball.
I managed the ’65 Dodgers, against whom it was almost impossible to get a hit, let alone score a run. My roommate Bagger had the Giants. How well I remember the day that the Giants’ first baseman, my all-time favorite and future Hall of Famer, Willie McCovey, hit one of his vicious line drives between first and second. Well, this particular line drive conked the baserunner, who just happened to be Willie Mays, and in a weird conjunction of numbers on the ABPA cards, Mays was relegated to the Disabled List for the rest of the season. Bagger, who had a volcanic temperament, picked up the Willie McCovey card and started screaming at it: “You just put Willie F—ing Mays out for the season! How could you do that?” And then he did something that haunts me still: Eerily calm, he meticulously tore the Willie McCovey card into shreds and threw them into the wastebasket. We were all stunned, in total awe of the violence we had just beheld — the conking of Willie Mays and the dismemberment of Willie McCovey. In a single toss of the dice, Bagger had contrived to lose not one but two superstars — a development that did certainly not stand his high-fllying Giants in good stead for the remainder of the season and made me even leerier than I had been before about rooming with Bagger. It might have been the most calamitous play in baseball history.