One of my favorite sports quotes of all-time was written by former Major League pitcher turned author Jim Bouton: “You spend a good deal of your life gripping a baseball, and it turns out it was the other way around all along.”
He also wrote: “Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field?”
Bouton, maybe more than any other person, moved and influenced an entire generation as to how it perceived professional baseball and, really, every other pro sport. My generation.
He died at the age of 80 on Wednesday, transitioning to the great clubhouse in the sky, to whatever comes next.