"The Smell of the Wood Burning"

Bob Costas was right: The best thing about baseball is the conversation that surrounds it. And the best baseball conversation I ever read was the one recorded by Peter Gammons twenty years ago this month, in the baseball preview issue of Sports Illustrated. Three outstanding lefthanded hitters--Ted Williams, Wade Boggs, and Don Mattingly--met in Florida to discuss hitting, with Gammons along to record the encounter.

I remember everything about the article, right down to the circumstances involved in purchasing it. I was a junior at USC, and was headed home from the apartment rented by that month's Love of My Life. I cut through University Village and read the article's first few paragraphs at the magazine rack of the 32 Market. It was a Thursday, and I had a story due to my creative writing professor the next day, but I could not wait; I simply HAD to read the entire article that night. So I read it, then stayed up all night to finish my story, then went to class, then slept until the early evening, then took the bus to the Beverly Center Friday night, where I saw Alan Rudolph's "Trouble in Mind."

But really, the article. The only sad part, in retrospect, was that Don Mattingly, coming off an MVP season and touted as the second coming of Teddy Ballgame at the time, would have two more MVP-caliber seasons in 1986 and 1987, two tolerably good seasons in 1988 and 1989, then be laid low with chronic back pain, and finally retire in 1995, with but one playoff appearance--just missing, by one year, on the Yankee team that would win the World Series, then win three more in four years, and generally terrorize the American League for the next decade.

But the article. This is the article that contained the wood-burning question Williams would ask Tony Gwynn thirteen years later, when he made what was essentially his farewell, at the 1999 All-Star Game at Fenway Park. In all its glory, here you go.