| Honus Wagner may be the most underappreciated player in the history of baseball. |
| Unlike contemporaries such as Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, the man who came to be known as the Flying Dutchman did not promote himself. A reticent man who kept to himself on and off the field, Wagner simply played the game without the fanfare that Cobb and Wagner generated throughout their careers. He let his accomplishments speak for him: eight National League batting titles, a 17-year stretch in which he hit better than .300 every season, a .329 career batting average. All of that and more earned him charter membership in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936 as well as consensus acclaim as the greatest shortstop to ever play the game. |
| To have known him, though, as I did for six of my seasons as a player with the Pirates while he was a coach, was not to know him or any of what he accomplished at all. A loner, he rarely socialized with any of the players, his fellow coaches, or the manager, preferring his own company after hours when he would sometimes walk into a tavern, plunk a silver dollar down on the bar, drink a beer, then move on to another tavern, where he'd do the same thing. |
| At times on the overnight train trips that we took between cities in those days, he might adjourn to a washroom or vestibule with several players or coaches and tell storieshe was a terrific storyteller. Never, though, would he do so in a more public place, because that would call attention to himself and that was not him. |
| Few, though, saw the humorous side of Wagner. Those who saw him playwhich I didn'tremembered a ham-handed, bowlegged man far unlike the mold from which shortstops come these days. Unlike Cobb, though, he never slid into a base with his spikes high, nor did he taunt an opponent. Calling his shot, as legend has |
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