Literary birthday greetings: Zim, et al

January 17, 2011

Don “Popeye” Zimmer turns 80 today. If I had my time to live over again, I would want to be a baseball lifer. He published two memoirs within two years: Zim: A Baseball Life in 2002, and The Zen of Zim : Baseballs, Beanballs, and Bosses in 2004, after he’d left the Yankees and felt no need to pull punches about his ill treatment at the hands of George Steinbrenner.

Don’t blink, or you’ll miss him (I wonder how much Zimmer got paid for this? Probably a year’s supply of blades).

Darrell Porter turns 58. A solid catcher for the Brewers, Royals, Cardinals, and Rangers for 17 seasons during the 1970s and 80s, he published Snap Me Perfect!: The Darrell Porter Storyin 1984, in which he discussed his drinking problems. Not sure how many other autobios of the time opened up like this; it might have been one of the first.

UPDATE: Perhaps it was subconscious — that I didn’t want to believe it — but an alert reader points out that Porter died in 2002 at the age of 50 as the result of a heart attack that may have been drug abuse-induced.

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Tagged as: Darrell Porter, Don Zimmer

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