NEW YORK -- This one is personal, so please forgive the use of the vertical pronoun in what -- thank God -- is not an obituary, but rather an appreciation. Al Jackson is alive and fighting. But the first word I received about him Wednesday suggested that he was in bad shape after suffering a stroke Tuesday night. And that information hit me harder than HoJo hit Todd Worrell.
Little Alvin Jackson, as Bob Murphy called him, is high on my list of special humans, as good a man as you could hope to meet in a half-century around the game.