The Best Gylene Hoyle Story Ever-5 stars.

Though eventually this is about a dead guy who shot someone

Why We Love Baseball by Joe Posnanski 3.5 stars

In 1962, a rookie pitcher on the San Francisco Giants named Gaylord Perry* was taking some swings in the batting cage. Pitchers, even professionals, don’t hit very well, but after one solid at bat, a coach turned to the team’s manager and said, ‘he’s got some power!’ The manager laughed, then said, ‘There’ll be a man on the moon before that kid ever hits a home run.”  It took seven years but Perry finally did hit a his first major league homer. Nobody noticed though because that was the day that Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon. 

*Speaking as someone who barely survived getting through elementary school with the name ‘Claude’ I can only assume Mr. and Mrs. Perry took an instant dislike to their infant son and actively wanted him to have a miserable childhood.

It’s amazing and more than a little bit wonderful how many baseball announcers struggle with…well, talking. Jerry Coleman, an announcer for the Padres, once described a misplayed ball this way: “Dave Winfield goes back to the wall..he hits his head on the wall…and it rolls off!  It’s rolling all the way to second base!  This is a terrible thing for the Padres.”One can only imagine how terrible it would have been for the Padres if, indeed, it had been Winfield’s head and not the ball that got away.

And then there was the time a woman named Gylene Hoyle won a radio contest, landing her two free tickets to an Arizona Diamondbacks game. Better still, she was asked to pick a player and an inning. If the player she picked hit a grand slam in that inning, she’d win one million dollars. Hoyle wasn’t a baseball fan so she randomly picked the 6^th inning and then chose Jay Bell as her player. The odds of Hoyle winning the money were over 300,000 to 1. Bell wound up having just 6 grand slams during his entire 17 year career.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that one of them came in the 6^th inning of that game, winning Hoyle her million bucks.

The best part?  Bell won a World Series but he still says that night was the highlight of his entire career.  So does Ms. Hoyle, I’m sure.

There’s one other story I’ll tell, but it doesn’t come from this book and it’s not about baseball. Two men fought in a duel. The first man fired his gun in the air, signaling that he didn’t wish to harm his opponent. The other man should have done the same thing, but instead, accidentally fired, killing his opponent instantly. Horrified, the second man ran to his victim and leaned over him. Though the first man was dead, a muscle in his hand spasmed and the dead man killed the man who shot him.

That story came out of a book of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not cartoons that I read about 50 years ago when I was in grade school. Why We Love Baseball may not be everyone’s idea of great literature, but, neither was that Ripley’s book and I still think about it all these decades later. I’ve read tons of great novels and I’ve forgotten most of them. Gaylord Perry’s home run on the other hand is going to stay with me like a bullet shot out of dead man’s gun.