In 1954, when The Sporting News polled writers about the players they covered, Carl Erskine stood out. Among his fellow Brooklyn Dodgers, Erskine was cited for several attributes, including “Best Marriage,” “Best Parent,” “Most Intellectual” and “Best Conversationalist.”
Erskine, 96, has outlived all of his teammates from that 1954 team. Yet when I visited him last month at his home in Anderson, Ind., he still showed the same traits those writers cited nearly seven decades ago. He and his wife, Betty, have been married for 75 years. The youngest of their four children, Jimmy, was born with Down syndrome in 1961, and Carl’s work with the Special Olympics and other organizations helped earn him the Hall of Fame’s Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award this year.
Erskine no longer travels, so family and friends will represent him at the ceremony on Saturday in Cooperstown, N.Y. But he remains an intellectual conversationalist, and his insights extend well beyond the column I wrote from my visit. Here are a few of those tidbits:
Facing Stan Musial
“He almost never missed a swing. He always hit the ball somewhere. Sometimes they’re a line shot, sometimes they’re a bloop. But he always made contact. You didn’t really have an out pitch for him; he just hit…
