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""I loved the game. I loved the competition. But I never had any fun. I never enjoyed it. All hard work all the time."

From Hard Lines, By Roger Angell

Of the celebrated players up at the Hall [of Fame], only a handful…seemed to sail through entire careers untouched by defeat, and even that impression may owe more to attitude then reality. Carl Yastrzemski, by the end of his 23 Fenway summers, had the look of a mortician: the true face of baseball. Those who watched him pulled for him over that stretch know his accomplishes by heart – 452 home runs, 3419 hits; all those splendid plays and rally-destroying pegs out there in the shadow of the wall; and the sustained brilliance of late 1967, when he seemed to pick up the entire Red Sox team single-handed and carry it to the brink of a world championship – and yet each of us, I’m certain, thinks of Yaz first of all in the act of failing: fouling out in the clutch (as he did at the end of the epochal one-game playoff against the Yankees in 1978) or simply grounding out once again, with runner aboard and another game hanging in the balance, and then returning to the bench with his head down and his face a mask of weariness and disappointment. Yaz, not Ted Williams is the perfect avatar of the Red Sox: a personification of the demands and the stony heart of this obdurate sport.

A few days before he retired, a visiting reporter found a little note to himself that Yaz had pinned up in his locker at Fenway Park. "In box with left leg and all weight on it," it went. "Nothing on the front leg. WAIT. Stay back. Relax." After almost 12,000 at-bats, he was still trying to learn how to hit.

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