The Good Old Days, when ballplayers were role models

"In 1903 (Rube) Waddell had a good season; once he finally bothered to show up in June, he won twenty-one games and led the league in strikeouts (with 302). It was a busy year in other ways, too: he also starred on vaudeville; led a marching band through Jacksonville; got engaged, married and separated; rescued a log from drowning (he thought it was a woman); accidentally shot a friend; and was bitten by a lion. Throughout his career, Waddell skipped games to go fishing and skipped debts he found annoying. Among his more respectable hobbies were chasing fires (he adored fire engines) and wrestling alligators; he once taught geese to skip rope. Hughie Jennings, manager of the Tigers, used to try to distract him from the sidelines by waving children's toys."

--Cait Murphy, describing a future Hall of Famer from a very different MLB era in her book Crazy '08: How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History.

Comments

[Sue]

And now they're just roid-inflated blow-up dolls whose bodies are falling apart when they stop juicing.

This comment left by what was probably the world's most frenetic stat-quoting Yankees fan through the 50s, 60s and some 70s and till the day the music died.