Looking back at the so-called “dead ball era,” when ballplayers were idiosyncratic to a fault instead of cookie-cutter products of their agents’ marketing imaginations, we summon up one of the greatest pure hitters, most elegant fielders and dazzling baserunners of all time, George Sisler of the St. Louis Browns (eventually to become the Baltimore Orioles after two generations of incompetent ownership made the team terminally unprofitable).
Sisler’s low profile among the usual suspects of his age was due mainly to how idiosyncratic he was in his own special way: a well educated engineering graduate of the University of Michigan when the newly incorporated Ann Arbor was no more than a couple of square miles of rudimentary campus surrounded by reality, owner of a successful printing company, a soft spoken, practically teetotaling gentleman and dedicated family man, peacemaker among clubhouse antagonists to rival Henry Clay, whose career was interrupted and ultimately degraded by an injury as unspectacular as his personal life: a sinus infection.