I was over at the local Barnes and Noble and my eyes fell on The Obits: The New York Times Annual 2012
Being the morbid and curious fellow I am, I flipped through the book (the title is a bit odd, since obviously none of the obits are actually from 2012; they actually span Aug. 2010- July 2011).
In the introduction to The Obits, William McDonald, who serves as the Times‘ editor for that department, writes how newspaper resources are such that tough decisions have to be made as to which late figure gets the treatment. “[R]oughly 155,000 people die between any one issue of the paper and the next…. The Times will publish obits about three of them.”
So it was with a special sense of reverence to note the handful of baseball people considered worthy of such an “honor,” including Bobby Thomson, Sparky Anderson, Bob Feller, Ron Santo, Chuck Tanner, Harmon Killebrew, Randy Savage (who briefly played minor league ball), Dick Williams, Duke Snider, and Wally Yonamine (sometimes called “the Jackie Robinson of Japanese baseball”), as well as Wilfred Sheed, who wrote My Life as a Fan and Baseball and Lesser Sports, among other things.
It’s interesting to note that the majority of the obits were written by Richard Goldstein, himself the author of a few baseball titles including Spartan Seasons: How Baseball Survived the Second World War and An American Journey: My Life on the Field, in the Air, and on the Air, Jerry Coleman’s autobiography. A few others were done by Bruce Weber, author of As They See ‘Em: A Fan’s Travels in the Land of Umpires . The Sheed obit was penned by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt who wrote Me and DiMaggio: A Baseball fan Goes in Search of His Gods back in 1992.
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