Sweet Lou

Everyone has a favorite athlete, a childhood hero. Mine was Lou Whitaker, number 1, second baseman for the Detroit Tigers for the first nineteen years of my life. I had a collection of Lou baseball cards, in their own special book, I had the Starting Lineup Action Figure (doll), I would have been Lou for Halloween once but it didn't fit on the back of my little imitation jersey on my little juvenile back, so my mom sewed Chet Lemon's name on instead. Lou was a good fielder and an above-average hitter, but his best trait was that he sustained his production for a very, very long time, and all with one team, my team. He got a little big towards the end of his career, and after retirement he dropped out of the public eye to hang out with his younguns in a small town somewhere in the South. His career came up in the news every now and then -- when someone passed some record that he and Alan Trammell set, when his Hall of Fame candidacy ended in his first year of eligibility -- but there weren't ever any stories about his present, so I without any information, I'd idly picture him getting bigger and bigger on a front porch somewhere. He's surfaced, though, the latest in the Tigers' attempt to stave off historic levels of failure by bringing back local stars from the 1980s as coaches. Lou will be an instructor for now, and I'm warmed to see him back on the diamond, which is the only place your childhood heroes belong. Haven't seen him yet, but I'd still wager that he's had enough front porch time to render his old uniform useless.