JUPITER, Fla. • When passing peanuts to a fan at a long-gone St. Louis ballpark 100 years ago this summer, Bill DeWitt Jr.’s father, 14 at the time, took his family’s first step into baseball.
For the next several decades, William Orville DeWitt Sr. devoted and enriched a career in Major League Baseball, rising from vendor to general manager to owner. Then, some 60 years after that first peanut sale, he did something that left a lasting impression on his son.
He walked away.
The absence of baseball revealed the value of being a presence in it.