Jackson: The Yorkville Kid goes west
From SABR member Frank Jackson at The Hardball Times on April 22, 2019:
Being a city boy doesn’t preclude one from becoming a cowboy. As Exhibit A, I offer William Bonney, a.k.a Billy the Kid, who was born in New York City but became a folk hero in New Mexico.
Billy the Kid, at least, was born at the right time (1859) to be an active participant in the Wild West. Subsequent city boys have had to content themselves with playing cowboys. Consider the case of Billy Crystal (rhymes with pistol).
Billy Crystal starred in City Slickers, a 1991 movie about city boys at a dude ranch.
Billy Crystal directed ’61, a 2001 HBO movie about Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle pursuing Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record.
Babe Ruth was a longtime teammate of Lou Gehrig.
Gehrig starred in Rawhide, a 1938 movie about a city boy who goes west to live on a ranch.
So we only needed three degrees of separation to connect Billy Crystal (who was born in 1948) to Lou Gehrig (who died in 1941). Both were New Yorkers who starred in movies, more than half a century apart, about city boys who cowboyed up. And that brings me to the subject of this article.
Read the full article here: https://tht.fangraphs.com/the-yorkville-kid-goes-west/
Originally published: April 25, 2019. Last Updated: April 25, 2019.