When Gary Hughes walked into the intensive care unit and saw Whitey Lockman bathed in ice, doctors desperately trying to reduce his 104-degree fever, he knew that time was short.
He leaned over the bed and whispered, “Pat Daugherty said you’ve got to be in Starkville, Miss., tomorrow.”
The oxygen mask could not conceal Lockman’s smile at this private joke between old baseball men, men who had spent large chunks of their lives going to places like Starkville and Abilene, San Mateo and Sumter, Huntsville and Walla Walla in a never-ending search for the next generation of big-league ballplayers.
It had become a running joke for Whitey and Gary and Pat and Bill Stoneman, back when they all worked for the Montreal Expos, the kind of story that got passed around the dinner table when the old friends got together here in the desert just three weeks ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment