Andy Skinner must have felt strangely helpless when, on June 11, 1976, the body of Jim Konstanty arrived at his Worcester, N.Y., funeral home.
In the past, this small-town undertaker had always been there for his bespectacled friend. Now there was no advice to be offered, no lesson to be learned, nothing to be done but ready his corpse for a Sunday afternoon funeral.
Skinner thought back to the winter of 1947, when he and Konstanty, then a 30-year-old minor-leaguer going nowhere, first talked about pitching during a long car ride.
The funeral director had never played baseball, but he was an avid bowler and pool-shooter and knew a lot about spin.