On Athletes Dying Young, and Old Men

In a weird confluence of the political and sports worlds, the airplane that crashed into a Manhattan highrise yesterday, rekindling 9/11 jitters in New Yorkers and plenty of others, belonged to and was transporting New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle. Just about the time that the population in general calmed down about the possibility of a terrorist threat, the news began to emerge about the identity of the victims, which caused the sports world to run with the story.

One of the plotlines was the fact that Lidle was not the first Yankees player to lose his life in a small aircraft crash. Thurmon Munson, an All-Star catcher for the Yankees during the Bronx Zoo era of the late 1970s, died in August 1979 when an airplane he was piloting crashed upon approach to an airfield.

The Munson crash resonates with me to this day. At that time, I was a couple of years into my boyhood baseball frenzy. My earliest memories of baseball are of the 1977 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees, and it seemed that one or the other of those teams was on NBC’s Game of the Week every Saturday. Those two teams had staged an epic World Series the past fall, as well.

Just down the road from my grandparents’ little farm was an elderly couple. During the summer, we would drop in on them from time to time. Mr. Still, who was probably in eighties, would gladly talk baseball with me. Considering that he was a contemporary of Babe Ruth, he had a deep-rooted love of the game, and seemed to enjoy gabbing about it with me.

In 1979, the world was not as small as it is now. News did not enter the collective conscience within seconds, as it does now thanks to the internet. News waited for the evening broadcasts, or the morning paper. And for a nine year old boy, news of the world was largely irrelevant anyway, so I missed the announcement that Munson had died. However, a few days later, I received a letter in the mail, which was an extraordinary event. It was from Mr. Still, who, in the careful yet slightly shaky handwriting of an old man, advised me of the plane crash, and commiserated with me in what he knew would be a shared mourning for a great baseball player. He was right that I was very saddened by the loss, as death was not something that I had learned much about up to that point.

More extraordinary, though, was that Mr. Still wrote to me at all. He reached across hundreds of miles and decades of life lived to connect with a fellow baseball fan. I had always thought that it was wonderful of him to remember little ol’ me. I realize now that my short, infrequent visits probably meant even more to him than they did to me. I simply saw my visits with Mr. Still as a chance to indulge in my passion for baseball, to enjoy fellowship with another fan. I think for him, living out what would be his final days in the quiet isolation of a little home in the country away from any other family of his own, he was given a chance to share a lifetime of love for the game with a kindred spirit, even one removed by two or three generations. Our conversations enabled him to slip away from the burden of his years, if only for a little while.

Baseball, with its well-known affinity for its own history, can do that. It can tie generations together. It can restore lost youth. That is why, despite the worst efforts of union heads, television executives and medically enhanced players, baseball is still America’s pastime.