To make the end of the baseball season a little less painful, we will try to offer a baseball bridge of postings now and again this month.

This one features Willie McCovey, who passed away last week ate age 80. You can read a column with some more McCovey in it by checking out the No. 2 hole on today’s DesignatedWriters.com home page.

Former Shreveport super scribe noted to me last week that on April 2, 1969, McCovey and the San Francisco Giants (Willie Mays, Bobby Bonds, Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry, etc.) played the Cleveland Indians (managed by the Giants’ former manager — from Louisiana — Al Dark) in an exhibition in SPAR Stadium in Shreveport. McCovey hit TWO home runs—one a grand slam—that day.

Our old friend and geeze ball teammate and coach Chuck Sicard alerted DW that he was at the game at SPAR that day with friends; Chuck was a teenager then, without a license to drive.

“After the game we went on the field and I grab the lineup card from the Giants dugout,” he said. (You could do stuff like that then; it was a different world.)

“I talked my Mom into driving me to the airport and Mr. McCovey (MISTER MCCOVEY!, RESPECT!) signed it for me. I yell out ‘Willie would you sign this?’ and he did. Great ball player. If the Giants had stayed at the Polo Grounds (with its short porch and not cavernous Candlestick) he thought he’d have beaten the Babe in home runs.”

Chuck saved the lineup card of course, and it’s pictured here. You can see only the top of McCovey’s autograph (poor cropping by me), but I wanted you to see that Mays was batting leadoff. Pretty solid lineup. Also that day Chuck got the autograph of Joe Costello–you CAN easily see that one– a relief pitcher for the Giants for a few years. Sadly, he passed away in Georgia in 2007 at age 61 in a car wreck; he was a caterer and school bus driver, well-loved, his obit reads.

So was Stretch.

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