Which used to be code for “it must be true.”
This is why you have to read until the end of the article.
“Trump Has Lost Touch with Reality,” a “conversation” between Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens in an opinion piece in today’s print edition of The New York Times, concludes with a tribute to the late Bill Mazeroski:
[E]ven though I’m not a sports guy, I was moved by David Margolick’s magnificent obituary for Bill Mazeroski, the Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman who, in the bottom of the ninth in the seventh game of the 1960 World Series against the Yankees, hit a winning home run off a fastball from Ralph Terry and then more or less danced his way around the bases. The entire obit is great, but it’s Margolick’s kicker that really got me by the throat:
A 14-year-old schoolboy named Andy Jerpe, who had left the game early to help his mother prepare dinner but had lingered outside the fence, retrieved Mazeroski’s home run ball. When he presented it to Mazeroski in the dressing room, the Pirates second baseman signed it, then gave it back.
“You keep it, son,” he told him. “The memory is good enough for me.”
One sunny day the following spring, the boy lost the ball in the weeds during a pickup game. Estimates are it would have fetched up to $1 million today.
For all any of us know, that ball is still in the weeds. Someone should go find it.