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August 18th is a special day in my household – my birthday and the anniversary of the day Red Sox rightfielder Tony Conigliaro got hit by a fastball in the face in 1967. It didn't end his career, exactly, but it set the process in motion. This story is about Tony C., but it's also about sports celebrity culture, what it used to be and what it is. So I need to rant about the modern world. One small part of it anyway. It's the autograph business. I hate adult autograph seekers, and I especially hate them when they muscle kids out of the pre-game box seat space during spring training baseball games in Florida to gain access to the players. Are they really, really big fans of the players – uber-collectors – or will they just be turning the signature around for profit? I highly suspect the latter. I find autograph shows despairing, where fat, aging athletes peddle their John Hancocks for dough to people their same age and weight. I can barely contain myself when I consider the last years of Ted Williams – innocent victim or compliant fool? – and his son John Henry. It was sickening, John Henry's relentless accumulation of Ted's scrawl. You could almost here him: C'mon dad, I know you're struggling and can barely breathe, but can you just sign 1000 more times? The people who bought Ted's scrawl would never meet the Splendid Splinter. These were people who were buying it on speculative value – when Williams dies, the value zooms. I haven't made up my mind as to whether there is such a thing as karma, but when John Henry died unexpectedly, a little more than a year after his father did ... well, I resolved to be a slightly better person, just in case.  With movie star good looks and a flashy car, Tony C. always had time to stop for an admiring kid. The one autograph I got as an adult was that of the late Dick Radatz, "The Monster," the Red Sox fireballing save-meister of the early 1960s. I felt a little silly doing so – standing in line with other aging fans at Fenway, where Radatz was at a booth – but I couldn't resist the lure. It was free, he was amiable. And he was a towering hero when I was a kid. So, as adults, we had an intelligent, albeit brief, talk about the role of the closer, something he practically invented, and we'd shared a bitch about modern save inflation. (What is it now? Come in with a 10-4 lead and if you retire six batters and win 10-9, you get one? Something like that.) The exchange with Radatz was wholly satisfying – the chat more than the autograph - and he was a great guy with a big smile. (I cleansed by autograph guilt by giving it to a friend, who is a collector of every kind of memorabilia, sports, music, pop culture.) Radatz, a member of the Red Sox Hall of Fame, died in 2005 after a fall at the age of 67. (My collector-friend reminded me Radatz's autographs was worth more, after that.) But, really, autographs, like Trix, are for kids. For those who don't know baseball as a business, who can willingly suspend disbelief. A New England kid, I was a newly minted Red Sox fan at age 6. My Maine-based family, God love 'em, thought nothing of taking three weekend road trips each summer to Fenway Park to watch the hapless Red Sox get creamed by anyone and everyone. This was the early-mid '60s, before "The Impossible Dream'' year of 1967, and before anyone really gave a hoot. The words "Red Sox Nation" had never been uttered. You could buy a ticket for a few bucks and sit near the first-base dugout. This pleased my father because first baseman Dick "Dr. Strangeglove'' Stuart was his whipping boy. He just gave Stuart his booming "Boo!'' every time a ball clunked off his mitt or Stuart couldn't be bothered to stretch for a throw. (Like Stuart, cared about being booed, either.) But this is a story about one of the good guys of those boys of summer. It was 1965, I was eight, and Tony Conigliaro – AKA Tony C., Conig - was the Sox' young, handsome rightfielder and right-handed slugger. Number 25. A kid who grew up just north of Boston and made the hometown team in a big way. He was the closest thing the Red Sox had to a rock star, and, remember the Beatles had just taken America by storm. Heck, Conig even recorded two 45s, "Why Don't They Understand" and "Poetry," and appeared on TV chat shows. That year, he would lead the American League in home runs. He would become the youngest player to reach the 100-homer mark. He was also regarded as something of a playboy, even dating a former Playboy bunny Mamie Van Doren. Maybe he was cocky, but maybe he deserved to be. He had the world in the palm of his hand.
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