Batting Fourth and Playing Catcher . . . Roy Campanella

Campy was one of the great catchers of all time, but he is best known for spending much of his life in a wheelchair. He was paralyzed during a car wreck the winter before the 1958 season. As a child, I owned a baseball card of him in that wheelchair with the heading “Symbol of Courage.” I never met my grandfather, but when I saw the card, I imagined that it was a picture of him.

Image Credit... Illustration by Melinda Josie

Batting Fifth and Playing Right Field . . . Carl Furillo

My dad threw “junk.” His favorite pitch was a knuckle-curve. He would bend his index and middle fingers so that the knuckles were pressed against the skin of the ball like claws. Then he would carefully align his other digits flat with the seams. A hand looks grotesque, misshapen in this grip, but the ball moves in a ghostly, spasmodic way when thrown correctly, as if being pulled by an invisible string.

Batting Sixth and Playing First Base . . . Gil Hodges

He didn’t throw the knuckle-curve consistently. Sometimes it would wobble or veer and land in the strike zone, but mostly it would end up in the dirt or far overhead. Sometimes I would wait six or seven pitches while balls sailed out of reach or spit up clouds of dust. When a pitch was anywhere near the plate, my father would become exasperated if I didn’t swing — even if that meant my jumping clear in the air.

Batting Seventh and Playing Third Base . . . Jackie Robinson

When I really got ahold of one, it would fly over the tops of the pines in our yard and ricochet off the street. I almost hit cars many times — the trajectory of my moonball and the speeding automobile arriving at the same coordinate. My father wasn’t worried at all about a wreck, and as I got older, more and more balls bounced high off the street. He wanted me to shatter someone’s windshield, I’m convinced.

Batting Eighth and Playing Second Base . . . Don Zimmer

He fed me balls from a five-gallon bucket, and when he reached the last one, we would search the woods near the street for balls lodged in the undergrowth or hidden in piles of decaying leaves. After we combed through our own yard, we would hop the fence, cross the street and gather balls from the neighbor’s woods, hunched over and intent as if looking for a wayward key.