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.

-30-

It’s Week 10 of the high school football season and that always brings a degree of sadness. Sure, some teams (OK, most teams in this convoluted Louisiana playoff system) will move on to the post-season next week. But some will not.

And that means some kids will be taking off the pads for the last time this weekend.

There’s nothing quite like the cycle of a high school football season. The winter weight lifting workouts, when it’s hard to imagine any actual games might ever be played.

Then the tortuous summer, when athletes have to report for workouts and drills at ridiculous hours in the morning when most of their classmates are still in the rack. At this point, the season might be right around the corner, but it’s too hot to even think about that.

And then there’s the scrimmage … and the jamboree … and they all seem so important. Except that they’re not.

Think about all the things the happen during a season. First of all, it starts in sweat and ends in blankets. Players suffer season-ending injuries and all of the work they have done is for nothing. Every week is it own vignette, with winners and losers, heroes and goats, one play making the difference in justifying all the work that was put in that week. But next week is always there.

You get in the middle of this 10-week routine of Friday nights and you think it will never end. And then it does. Rather suddenly.

Basketball, and to some degree baseball, have become year-round sports. But there’s a special time in the calendar set aside for football.

The little kid who starting playing in the fourth grade with pants that were too long and a helmet that didn’t quite fit right is suddenly a senior who played his last game.

Whether it’s this week or next and any of those that follow, it always comes to a sudden end. And it’s a tough walk off that field for the last time.