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On one summer day, I was one of a few young hopefuls, loitering outside the wire-fenced lot where the Red Sox players – in their usual fierce battle for 8th place – parked their cars before the game. The other kids, maybe 20 of them, had left. Game time was getting closer. Almost all the Sox were accounted for. But Tony Conigliaro had not yet arrived. And, then, screaming up in a red Corvette, the one with TONY C on the license plate, was the man himself, no doubt having missed BP and in some kind of trouble with the manager. Outside the fence, I squeaked my pitiful, "Tony? Sign?'' He had been headed straight for the park entrance, but pivoted when he heard me, walked over to the fence and took my ball to sign, We exchanged pleasantries. (Sorry, I was too star-struck to remember the particulars.) Then, he dashed into the park, like Batman. He did not have to do any of this. I was just a kid, no one. I was in Kid Heaven. The memory was indelibly stamped on my brain. Before he took that fateful pitch from the Angels Jack Hamilton on Aug. 18, 1967, Tony Conigliaro averaged one home run for every 17.62 at bats, having hit 104 of them by the age of 22. But what happened on Aug. 18 changed Tony, the Red Sox and baseball. I heard it on the radio. The sound was sickening. The pictures in the paper the next day of him sprawled on the ground – same feeling. The close-ups of his blackened eye – grotesque. He survived, in a manner of speaking. His beaning ushered in the helmet earflap rule in baseball. His vision was severely blurred from Hamilton's pitch, but cleared up enough, miraculously, for him to come back in 1969 (after missing 1968). In 1970, he hit a career-high 36 home runs, but the Sox traded him to the Angels the following year, where his fortunes faded. The vision thing again. He tried a comeback with the Sox in 1975 only to go 7 for 57 before being sent to the minors and calling it a career. Conigliaro, who was inducted into the both the Red Sox Hall of Fame and the Italian-American Hall of Fame, was pursuing a second life as a sportscaster when he suffered a heart attack, followed by a massive stroke, in 1982. This incapacitated him so that he was only barely aware of his surroundings. He needed constant care. He lived with his family on the North Shore of Boston, and watched TV. Not long ago, writing a story about the '67 Impossible Dream Sox for the Boston Phoenix, I talked with Mike Ryan. He was one of four Red Sox catchers that year, and Conig's roommate for three years. "I might be wearing a different ring if he'd been in that lineup at the end," said Ryan, of '67. "He was that type of player, a World Series kind of player. Tools, he had it all." Ryan suggested Conigliaro's trade to the Angels happened because drill sergeant/manager Dick Williams couldn't stand Conigliaro's off-field demeanor. Dick was old-school; Tony, new. Ryan, though not sharing Conigliaro's nocturnal habits, was soon traded, too. Guilt by association. (Ryan carved out a very fine post-Sox career in Philadelphia. Not that Red Sox fans believe in post-Sox careers or care. When you're gone, you're gone. You're wearing another team's laundry.) Ryan is still one of ours though, because all is forgotten after retirement. In retirement, he's a Red Sox, through and through. He grew up in Haverhill, Mass. He lives in New Hampshire now. "I saw him once a week at his mother's house, in rehab," says Ryan. "He was just there, you couldn't tell if he knew you were there are not." Conigliaro died of kidney failure in 1990, at age 45. I heard on the TV news. It was a teary day in my household. No hyperbole there. I just sat on the couch and cried. I hadn't thought about him in years, but I instantly tripped back in time to that time when I was that 8-year-old at the fence, and he was the handsome young star, running late, but gracious enough to give this kid his time. You don't forget things like that, and I will not forget Tony C. Jim Sullivan has written about popular culture and music for more than 25 years for many national publications. You can contact him at
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