Harley Lewin grew up in 1950s New York City and Long Island, where baseball was stitched into the fabric of his childhood. He liked the Dodgers, loved the Yankees and idolized New York’s collective roster of mid-century heroes: Jackie Robinson, Carl Furillo, Yogi Berra. His love for the sport is such that, even now—his well-trimmed beard long ago gone white—his eyes brighten as he extols the power of Aaron Judge, and his voice sours on the subject of how those “idiots,” the Dodgers, “knifed New York in its heart” by decamping west.
But Byron McLaughlin? No, that name Lewin didn’t know until, oh, 1989, by which point McLaughlin was a half-decade removed from a brief, forgettable career in the majors, where he’d pitched for the Mariners and the Angels.