It should not have come as surprise, I guess, that September day in 1993 in Yankee Stadium when Jim Abbott pitched a no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians. Certainly, covering a man with one hand pitching a no-hitter wasn’t any more out of the ordinary than covering a man with no legs hitting a game-winning home run off a Hall of Fame pitcher, changing the entire course of a World Series.

Technically, on that October night in 1988, Kirk Gibson had two legs, not none. It was just that neither of them worked, which is something of handicap when it comes to playing baseball.

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You had to be there.

There really isn’t much else you can say about the World Series of 1972, a Fall Classic that was among the best ever in baseball terms and perhaps the most meaningful ever in terms of the world that was revolving around it at the time.

It was more than a baseball season that passed into yesterday last weekend, a lot more, as Joe Torre’s managerial career came to an apparent end.

He finished it in Dodger blue, but when they put the plaque up in Cooperstown he’ll be wearing pinstripes and the familiar interlocked NY on his cap. One can only hope that Hall of Fame president Jeff Idelson, himself a former Yankees public relations director, can find a way to position Torre next to Casey Stengel.

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It is difficult to imagine today, but once upon a time there was life without the Internet.

The world, at that time, was not brought to your doorstep, and this was perhaps harder on the baseball fan than on anyone else in the country, for the coverage of the sport was what you found in your local newspaper.

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Perhaps the happiest moments of a long baseball-writing career came in its infancy, days when you would be attending a World Series and gathering at the host hotel, sitting around the lobby talking baseball with men who were legends of the business.

There was one of those days sitting around in Baltimore, when there were, among others, Dick Young, Red Smith, and Jimmy Cannon discussing baseball’s Hall of Fame. While to this day I am not sure which mouth the words came from, the question from that young baseball writer was what these gentlemen thought qualified a player for the Hall of Fame.

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On Saturday night, given special dispensation by Commissioner Pope Bud I, the Cincinnati Reds honored their hometown hero, Peter Edward Rose, on the 25^th anniversary of his 4,192^nd career base hit, which made him Major League Baseball's all-time hits leader.

To honor Rose, who had been disgraced by his own actions and then by Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, the only commissioner who was in and of himself the answer to a multiple choice test, was nothing really that significant.

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As you fly through life on the sweet bird of youth, the wind blowing through your hair until you have no more, you tend to notice things that transpired that you may not have appreciated at the time. This life was one tied closely to the game of baseball, from the first moment of being overtaken by the smell of freshly roasted peanuts in the Polo Grounds, through the daydreams that come with playing in Little League, high school, and college all the way through being professionally involved as media.

The older you get, the more you begin to think back to those young days, time when baseball was king. It was, in your youth, a game played professionally only east of the Mississippi River, mostly north of the Mason-Dixon Line. It was played by white men without exception and so much as the thought of a Japanese player, so close to the end of World War II, seemed impossible. Baseball was a game bathed in history and you were taught that there were some records that would never be broken, records attached to names that seemed magical from the past.

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On July 3, 1966, in San Francisco, history was made as a member of the Atlanta Braves hit not one, but two grand slam home runs in the same game.

That, of course, by itself would have made it something of a memorable afternoon, considering only 13 players in the history of the game have hit two grand slams in the same game. But this was not Henry Aaron, Joe Torre, or Rico Carty --sluggers all-- who hit them. It wasn’t even Felipe Alou, who actually went hitless in this 17-3 game, perhaps thinking about the birth of son, Moises, that memorable day.

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What is it like to be the greatest pitcher on the face of the planet? Steve Carlton knew in 1972, but he wasn’t talking.

It is difficult to imagine today just how good Carlton was that season. Even the numbers do not do it justice, and they are rather impressive, to say the least. He went 27-10 with a 1.97 ERA, pitched 30 complete games out of 41 starts and worked 346 1/3 innings with 310 strikeouts and 87 walks in his first year with the Philadelphia Phillies.

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Today I’m going to tell you about my favorite baseball character and a few of his cohorts. None of them ever wore a major-league uniform, but they’ve all washed a lot of them.

They are the custodians of the major-league clubhouses, and once upon a time they were among the most carefree and careless of people in the world. That was when the clubhouses were small, not the luxury palaces all the modern stadia have brought to the major leagues, and when the "clubbies," as they're known, were as flaky as the cereal they’d have available before day games.

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The universe wasn’t really very big then, pretty much a triangle from the Polo Grounds to Yankee Stadium to Ebbets Field. The year was 1950. Or was it 1955 or 1956? Didn’t matter really; it was New York and this was the true Golden Age of baseball in the city.

Never has there been anything like it, never will there be. One city, three teams. Heaven on earth when you were 10 or 12 or 15 as I was growing up across the river from New York City in New Jersey.

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Let us play pretend for a moment. It is October 3, 1951, and Bobby Thomson just hit The Shot Heard 'Round the World. You go to bed that night with the kind of glow that only a baseball game like that can give you, but strange things happen overnight. Rip Van Winkle and you awake nearly 60 years later.

You notice immediately that much has changed, from the TV you watch the game on to the automobile in which you ride. Oh, you can still get a Coke, sailors still get tattoos, but you quickly notice that so, too, do college coeds in places you didn't know they had places when you went to bed.

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