Gaylord Perry

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Man, I spent a lot of time playing with my baseball cards as a young boy.

We had boxes and boxes of cards because my older cousins handed them down to us…

…I’m talking thousands of cards from the mid-1960’s to the late 1970’s.

The valuable Mickey Mantle card?

We had some!

Henry Aaron when he was on the verge of breaking Babe’s record?

I wore those cards out.

We also had a whole bunch of Gaylord Perry cards and we would tease each other because back then Gaylord was a word we threw around. We thought he had a funny, goofy name.

But we also knew a lot about him because he pitched for more than 20 years and he was good!

Plus he supposedly threw a spitball.

Every kid that played little league back then tried to cheat like Gaylord.

We put Vaseline on our uniforms and thought it would help us with the break on our curveball.

Only problem was that I couldn’t throw a curveball then (couldn’t throw one now, for that matter), but we thought we were gaining an advantage.

(I did pitch in little league. I did put Vaseline on my shirt and tried to rub up the ball).

I also threw my fastball - which was so slow that it fooled some hitters. 

What got my attention about Gaylord Perry’s death was that he was 84 years old!

Guys that I watched pitch - for years - are dying of old age!

“The circle of life,” a buddy of mine said when I mentioned that Perry being 84 shocked me.

And the day before Christine McVie from Fleetwood Mac…

…she was 79!

Our heroes are old!

“Dude, you’re pushing 60,” my buddy said.

Yeah.

That’s shocking too!

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