Tusa: Remembering Tony Conigliaro
From SABR member Alfonso Tusa at The Hardball Times on July 3, 2017:
The pounding of my heart like stabs from a mobster. That old issue of Street and Smith magazine from the early 90’s. On the cover, an article on the “Impossible Dream” team of 1967. I asked the man in the newsstand for just a couple of minutes to read it. I was so excited, my fingers trembled. I almost dropped the magazine. There it was, the facts and the heroics of those cardiac kids. One of the paragraphs recreated a game from June 15th, 1967. Gary Waslewski started for the Red Sox, Bruce Howard for the White Sox. Waslewski allowed 6 hits in the first 9 innings. Howard 7 hits in 7 innings. Hoyt Wilhelm relieved Howard and kept the Red Sox shutout through the ninth. Extra-innings.
I couldn’t believe I had in my hands a testimony of the picture I imagined as a little kid in 1967. I remember feeling the passion of my brothers when they talked about the Red Sox team that was upsetting everybody in the American League and everyday, every week, every month the experts were expecting them to drop back to their customary depths. We began to root secretly for them. We even started talking to the radio, asking the announcers to start believing in the Red Sox, because they were for real.
Read the full article here: http://www.hardballtimes.com/remembering-tony-conigliaro/
- Related link: SABR members, get your free e-book copy of Overcoming Adversity: Baseball’s Tony Conigliaro Award
Originally published: July 7, 2017. Last Updated: July 7, 2017.