Sad news about Sparky

November 3, 2010

From ESPN.com:

Former Detroit Tigers and Cincinnati Reds manager Sparky Anderson has been placed in hospice care at his Thousands Oaks, Calif., home for complications resulting from dementia.

Anderson, 76, was one of the first baseball personalities I ever interviewed. It occurred shortly after his book They Call Me Sparky came out in the late 1990s. The interview was for Nine, a scholarly journal about baseball.  Anderson was incredibly generous with his time, knowing full well I was a “nobody” (heck, this wasn’t even a paying gig). At one point he told me how he had always tried to treat everyone with respect, the small town media the same as the network guys or the reporters from the national press.

Frederick C. Klein leads off his 2009 collection of poems, For the Love of the Tigers: An A-to-Z Primer for Tigers Fans of All Ages, with a stanza about the Hall of Fame manager.

A is for Anderson,
Who gave his teams spark.
In his years in the dugout
He left a huge mark.

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