Dammit. Another baseball legend passes. Joe Morgan of the "Big Red Machine"
Link to tweet
Although I knew him best as one half of the ESPN Sunday Night Baseball combo along with Jon Miller back in its heyday.
So this year that makes Al Kaline, Don Larsen, Whitey Ford, Bob Gibson, Lou Brock and now Joe Morgan.
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RIP Joe. 
I'll also add Tom Seaver to the list of HOF'ers who have gone on to Glory this year...
kept an AM transistor radio under my pillow so my parents couldn't hear it
A writer from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette wrote this YESTERDAY!
Sadly, the roster was just expanded........
Gene Collier: Heaven keeps adding to its baseball All-Star team
GENE COLLIER
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
[email protected]
Most of three months remain on this terrible 2020 calendar, a year when hope seems evanescent on too many levels, so here’s a small prayer that heaven stops drafting a veritable All-Star team of baseball players.
It doesn’t seem like too much to ask.
Being humans, ballplayers get old and die, 100 or so a year, pandemics or not. But with the death Friday of six-time World Series champion Whitey Ford, and last week’s passing of Bob Gibson, whose implacable visage beneath his red Cardinals cap defined the very notion of competitive intimidation from 60 feet, six inches away, I was hoping the afterlife roster for 2020 was pretty much full.
The starting rotation looks set, with Gibson joining Ford, Mets icon Tom Seaver, Giants lefty Mike McCormick, and Yankees legend Don Larsen, all gone this year. That’s a combined seven Cy Young Awards plus the guy who threw the only perfect game in World Series history.
The bullpen, like you’d need one, recently added Ron Perranoski, who reliably put out whatever fires escaped people like Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale for the great Dodgers teams of the 1960s.
For its infield, heaven drafted Bob Watson in 2020 as well as second baseman Glenn Beckert, who would have turned 80 on Monday, out of Pittsburgh’s Perry High School, Toronto’s Tony Fernandez for shortstop and can make do with the uber versatile Tony Taylor at third.
For the Kingdom’s 2020 outfield, I’ve got Al Kaline in right, Lou Brock in center and Jim Wynn, the Toy Cannon, in left. No, no, it’s still not legal to say Jim Wynn without “the Toy Cannon.” As mortals, those three played in 24 All-Star games.
That’s basically a lineup the heavenly father can just write on his card every day and kick back, but he still needs a catcher, which brings us to the late Biff Pocoroba. When the great beyond makes its draft picks, the stars, as usual, command the great majority of the attention, but the loss we are left with can’t be fully felt without appreciating some of the great characters that went with them, the baseball personalities who filled out or memories and our feelings for the game. Everyone who survives them feels pretty much the same about players like Gibson and Seaver and Kaline and Brock, but you can’t appreciate the full canvas without the figures in whose presence and by whose standards the greats became great. You can’t appreciate the 2020 heaven draft without Biff Pocoroba.
At least I can’t.
Pocoroba, a backup catcher for the Atlanta Braves, died in Georgia in May. He was only 66. He played 10 big league seasons and did not approach some immense potential due to a shoulder injury.
It so happened that Pocoroba was a Braves contemporary with team mascot Chief Noc-A-Homa. It would evidently take that franchise some 20 years of sensitivity training before deciding it should do without Chief Noc-A-Homa (that and the fact that he didn’t always show up) and the tipi where he resided beyond the left field fence. But one night in 1975, as my brother and I watched on TV, Chief Noc-A-Homa was in residence, Pocoroba was catching and Phillies broadcaster Byrum Saam was about to invent a new player.
Some forgotten Phillie hit a little nubber in front of the plate that Pocoroba tried to barehand, maybe twice, but couldn’t pick it up. Saam’s play-by-play thus went, “he swings and there’s a little nubber in front of the plate, and ... Nocabora! ... he can’t make the play!”
Me to my brother: “Did he say Nocabora?”
My brother: “I think so. Or Poke-A-Homa.”
RIP, Biff.
Gone at the very start of 2020 was Hal Smith, 89, taken from us Jan. 9 in Columbus, Texas. Smith played 10 seasons including two with the Pirates, 1960 and 1961. That painting of Bill Mazeroski ending the 1960 World Series with one sweet swing wouldn’t be there in your family room were it not for Smith, whose three-run homer blow-torched a five-run Pirates eighth that overturned a 7-4 Yankees lead in Game 7.
Of course, it wouldn’t be there if New York hadn’t scored twice in top of the ninth to tie it either, but had that not happened, Hal Smith’s homer might be hanging in your family room as the hit that shut down the town.
In addition to Seaver, COVID-19 took outfielder Jay Johnstone, a prankster of the first order who, if you didn’t know, was the right-handed batter in “The Naked Gun” while Leslie Nielsen cavorted so outrageously as the home plate umpire trying to foil a plot to kill Queen Elizabeth. In real life, Johnstone was a left-handed hitting outfielder who worked for eight teams over 20 seasons. His homer in the 1981 World Series helped the Dodgers topple the Yankees.
But whether it’s a Hall of Famer like Gibson or a utility infielder like Ramon Aviles, who played parts of four seasons with the Red Sox and Phillies and was as nice a fella as you could meet in baseball, we’ll miss them all. Too many to name went to their reward in 2020, including Matt Keough, Jim Owens, Lou Johnson, Horace Clarke, Ed Farmer, Damaso Garcia, Eddie Kasko, Mike Ryan, Ed Sprague, Claudell Washington, and Southwestern Pennsylvania’s Bobby Locke.
It’s always a terrible year when heaven does so well.
So I remember him, too... 
