Читать книгу One Season in the Sun онлайн

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The players who were not yet the stars (and who might never be stars) were shown on cards with numbers you couldn’t divide by ten. Bakenhaster was on card 479. Another player appears on card 561. Dave Bennett’s major league career was even shorter than Bakenhaster’s—one inning. Steve Hertz, who had no hits in the five times he batted in the major leagues, was on card 544.

These were the players who fascinated me. The stars—Mays, Mantle, Koufax—all seemed beyond human, blessed by a divine miracle. The others, who never made an All Star team, who seemed to spend more time sitting on a bench during games than on the field, who lasted in the major leagues for only days or weeks—they seemed more like ordinary men whose bit of luck earned them a major league uniform.

They were, I thought as I looked at their cards, more akin to me. As much as I loved baseball, as much as I spent hours memorizing the information on the backs of baseball cards and reading the statistics that the Sunday newspaper published in the sports section, as much as I learned the history of the game, I couldn’t play it. I was heavy, slow, and myopic.