Glow never wore off Brooklyn Dodgers' Duke Snider, the Hall of Famer who has passed at age of 84

One of the downsides of growing up is that we learn way too much about sports and the people who play them.
But for me, at least, that never dimmed the first star, which was Number Four, playing center field and batting third for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
I don't know how Duke Snider became my favorite player. Who knows how love starts? I was 7, and from the minute I saw him on our 13-inch Magnavox, he was who I wanted to be.
In my backyard I set up Ebbets Field. The white birch was first base. I played every position for both teams, and magically it always ended up that Duke would win it with two out in the ninth by sending a towering blast over the roof of the garage.
My Duke often needed multiple swings to drive the rubber ball that far, which only sweetened the final lap around the bases. Sometimes, for punctuation, I would slide home.
Summer afternoons I would wait for the paperboy to deliver the Hartford Times, where there was this thing called box scores. I'd spread out the paper on the porch and devour the incredible amount of information coded into those four or five square inches. Mostly I calculated Duke's progress, like whether he would hit 40 home runs again, and it never concerned me that beyond the box scores and what Topps put on the back of his baseball card, I knew almost nothing about him.
I've thought about it over the years - why Duke? - and I've figured maybe that's just how your first sports heroes work. It's just the universe at its most wonderfully random.
I followed Duke Snider so closely I wanted to become a lefty. That never happened. But he did make me a Dodgers fan and a baseball fan.
Fifty-three springs ago, when I spent an hour twisting the dial on our Zenith radio in search of the Dodgers broadcast I wouldn't be hearing again, Duke was the reason I kept the faith.
Duke Snider was still a Dodger, so I was still a Dodgers fan.
Robert Moses is a different story. But I only picked up on that part of the story years later.
It was also years later when my wife bought me a Duke Snider autographed bat for Christmas and I wondered if he had declared the income to the IRS.
That's part of the too much we learn about sports when we grow up.
And it has never lessened the pleasure of that first glow.
I will miss a man I never met, who never knew how fine a run he gave me just by playing baseball.