What Dick Young Had to Say

Dick Young certainly spent much of his career embodying everything that was evil and loathsome about the old-time sportswriter.   He often carried water for awful owners, ran Tom Seaver out of town, denounced Pele, and generally acted like an idiot (something we can all relate to).

If you've never read Warren Leight and Charlie Rubin's satirical Village Voice columns on Dick Young in Hell, well then, ya gotta.

https://thestacks.deadspin.com/heaven-aint-what-it-used-to-be-dick-young-goes-to-hel-883432847

They are absolutely hilarious, a key part of the neglected Golden Age of Funny Sportswriting, along with those guys whose names I forget who turned Phil Rizzuto's broadcasts into poetry, Tom Peyer and whatshisface:

https://www.syracuse.com/newstracker/2007/08/the_poetry_of_phil_rizzuto.html

But ol' Dick, bless his heart, got it right occasionally, as when he saw through Walter O'Malley for the fraud he was, and called out the Baseball Writers of America for not voting Willie Mays into the Hall unanimously:

"If Jesus Christ were to show up with His old baseball glove, some guys wouldn't vote for Him. He dropped the cross three times, didn't He?"

Mays, inexplicably, got only 94 percent of the vote.  O-kay.

My Uncle Bruce took me to see Willie Mays play on August 4, 1967, against the Mets, shortly before we moved into the New England Captivity.  Seaver was pitching and he didn't have a great night:  0-5, with 2 strikeouts, but everyone's eyes followed him everywhere he went.

My uncle—an old New York Baseball Giants fan—has been gone for over three years now, and I miss him more everyday.  Toward the very end, at age 85, his mind failing, one of the things my uncle kept saying was how glad he was that he got to see Willie Mays play.

Me, too—thanks to him.  And I got to see Derek Jeter play for 20 years, which was pretty good, too.

For all my complaints it's not a bad pastime, this baseball.