People (like me) lazily toss around adjectives like “incomparable” or “singular.” But there has never been a person so professionally atypical as Rickey Henderson. He made Steve Jobs and Henry Ford seem kind of average. He had more in common with Hermes or Spiderman than with Vince Coleman or Mookie Wilson. And, for twenty five seasons, he broke major league baseball. He wanted to play forever. He was certain that he could. But, in 2005, he was a San Diego Surf Dawg of the Golden Baseball League — where young men who will never make the Big Show went for a summer of fun and where former pros were put out to pasture.

Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker played nearly two thousand major league games together, turning over a thousand double plays between shortstop and second base. Trammell is in the Hall of Fame and Whitaker — based both on the data and Trammell’s impassioned case — should probably be there as well. They bunked together in the Minors, arrived to a suffering franchise in 1978 and, eventually, delivered the Tigers a World Series title in 1984. They are each other’s indisputable, number one fans. Forty years after they first played catch, the Keystone Kids have come to signify that elusive, romantic thing that men of a certain age rarely discuss but constantly long for: friendship.

Bob Horner never had career angst. He was born to use his hands and arms to strike objects with tremendous force. I suppose he could have been a great boxer, though that risks personal injury. Had he been born abroad, maybe he would be known today as the greatest cricket player of his generation. I guess he could have been the MVP of a building demolition outfit. Those were all possibilities. But when you’re born in Kansas in the late 1950s, and you look like the love child of Babe Ruth and Kenny Powers, there’s really only one job for you. It was unthinkable that he would do anything else with his life other than hit home runs and make terrible hair decisions.

At spring training in 2006, the greatest player in Kansas City Royals history told two minor league journeymen about the time he pooped his pants at the Bellagio, underneath the world’s largest installation of Dale Chihuly blown glass. The story is well known among Youtube diggers, Brett enthusiasts and, perhaps, baseball-inclined gastroenterologists. The mystery of this great story is not what plagues the Hall of Famer’s colon or how it relates to his Pine Tar Homer or whether it is even true, but rather why George Brett was so proudly insistent on the matter of his incontinence.

To this day, it still bums me out. It’s been twenty five years, longer than Eddie’s playing career. I’ve had plenty of time to let things go. But not this. I can’t quit it. At least twice a year, I have dreams where he’s still playing. I see him on TV up at the plate, no batting gloves, adjusting his belt, glaring at the pitcher. They called him “Steady Eddie” because he was exactly that. He wasn’t the most prodigious power hitter or the slickest fielder or fastest runner. But for the first half of his career, he was the most complete hitter in the game. But then, in 1997, at the age of forty-one, he was demoted to the minors before finishing out his great career with a whimper. I am certain that he’s moved past the indignity. But, I have not.

Steve Balboni’s body so exquisitely matches his surname that one would expect a rough Italian translation for Balboni to be “husky designated hitter.” Perhaps there is a village—maybe a small timber community in Northern Italy — where prosperous, mustachioed Balbonis have swung felled trees since time immemorial. Plus, to a seven-year-old in 1985, the name sounded a lot like a combination of Baloney and Bambino — which, frankly, just made sense. As a child, it was unspeakably obvious what “Balboni” signified. Today, as a grown man, it is almost frighteningly unclear.