"Sunlight For A Moonlight Man."

My ambivalence about sports is deeply rooted. There's love and hate in fairly equal measure, and yet this long read by Tom Dinard produced tears over coffee this morning, perhaps because the story reaffirms life itself, with or without baseball.

The Baylor family has its own one-game Yankee pitching appearance story much like Stefan Weyer's, but more closely resembling the fictional Moonlight Graham's. According to legend, my father's uncle supposedly hurled a major league inning or two for the Yankees in the late 1920's. That he was a minor leaguer loosely attached to the Yankees in spring training at the time is probable, albeit not beyond dispute. Unfortunately, a half-century of diligent baseball research on the part of statistics fanatics has failed to yield any evidence that his moment came in a genuine regular season game.

Dinard's piece is worth the time: Sunlight For A Moonlight Man.