Somewhere deep in the attic of the American soul, there's a dusty reel spinning. Baseball lives there. Not as a game. Not in the clinical parsing of metrics or the calibrated geometry of modern analytics. It lives as flicker and fable--a warm blur of motion and myth. Baseball isn't something you measure so much as something you remember. And memory, like the old stadiums, is generous with its light and shadows.

This isn't a list of the best players I ever saw. If it were, I'd have to include Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, and this wouldn't feel the same. No, these are the players who live in my mind like old songs. This is the team I carry around with me, the one I hum to myself when no one's listening.

Left Field: Ted Williams

Technically, he was winding down before I tuned in. But history isn't bound by chronology. I was told I saw him hit that final home run at Yankee Stadium. I don't remember it, but the story settled into me like a family tale, passed from voice to voice until it became part of who I was. Williams was more than numbers. He stood at the plate like he was trying to carve truth out of myth. The last man to hit .400, they say. The Splendid Splinter: a nickname that sounds less like sport than Steinbeck, like something written in the margins of the American century.

Center Field: Willie Mays

Mays was movement made holy. There was joy in him, but also something unknowable, as if he were translating a higher language of grace. That catch in '54? Sure. But what came every day after that stays with me. It was how he made the act of doing seem like jazz: improvisational, dangerous, unrepeatable. Mantle had the tragedy. Mays had the wonder.

Right Field: Hank Aaron

No histrionics. No chest-thumping. Just the quiet detonation of greatness. When Aaron........

© Arkansas Online