Two hundred thirty years ago 83-year-old Benjamin Franklin confided in a letter to his friend Jean-Baptiste Leroy, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Today as in 1789 death is a part of life, albeit the last part. Last year saw the departures of, among others, George and Barbara Bush, Senator John McCain, Stephen Hawking, and Aretha Franklin.

But while these luminaries and untold legions of others made significant impacts with their earthly deeds, no demise impacted me personally more than one which occurred in Springfield, Missouri on the second day of 2019.

Jerry Buchek spent 10 years playing professional baseball, including parts of seven seasons in the major leagues with the St. Louis Cardinals and the New York Mets. His career statistics were, to be kind, pedestrian; the infielder compiled a lifetime batting average of just .220. He was a member of the National League pennant-winning 1964 Cardinals, but even that came with an asterisk; he made just 33 plate appearances while participating, however briefly, in just 35 of his team’s 162 games that season. He earned immortality, sort of, by compiling (and later retiring with) a World Series batting average of 1.000. His one-out single in the bottom of the 9^th inning of the sixth game knocked New York Yankees pitcher Jim Bouton out of the box, although its effect was minimal, since a double play two batters later finished off an 8-3 Yankees victory. That extended the series to a winner-take-all finale the next day, a contest Buchek witnessed from his familiar seat on the bench.

But nearly three years after that 7^th game, a Cardinal victory that gave the team its first championship in 18 years, Buchek did something that was, to at least four young fans, far more important than anything he had done (or as it turned out, would do) in his entire athletic career.

On Sept. 23, 1967 my father and my uncle took my 9-year-old brother, our cousins (ages 10 and 11), and 10-year-old me to our first-ever major league baseball game. Going to Shea Stadium, then a three-year-old palace located a mere 75-minute drive from our home in southern Connecticut, was our holy grail; who cared if the game that Saturday night featured the National League’s two worst teams, the last-place Mets and their slightly-less-incompetent guests, the 9^th-place Houston Astros?

The playing surface was the greenest I’d ever seen, which in retrospect made perfect sense, as every game I’d witnessed previously had been televised in glorious black and white.

Neither Dad nor Uncle Eddie was particularly enthralled by baseball, but each recognized his sons’ passion for it, which justified spending a combined $15 for six tickets. Numerous 25-cent hot dogs, 50-cent hamburgers, and 15-cent sodas made it a fairly pricey night on the town, but to my youthful peers and I, it was simply Heaven. We were seeing an entire major league baseball game, live, from start to finish.

Or maybe not. A rookie Met pitcher named Tom Seaver was mowing down the Astros with seeming ease, but his Houston mound opponents were doing the same to the home team. With the game still scoreless in the top of the 8^th inning, our chaperones began murmuring about “beating the traffic.” Looking back, that excuse was laughable. The modest official attendance count (just over 11,000) was probably double the number of actual fans present that night. We boys unanimously wanted to stay for the finish, but after a brief conference the adults decreed we would be going home at the conclusion of the ninth inning, regardless of whether the game was over or not.

Neither team managed even a baserunner in the 8^th inning, and when the Astros went down in order in the top of the 9^th it was clear: if the Mets didn’t score in the bottom of the inning our first-ever trip to a major league baseball game would be an incomplete one.

But lo and behold: a leadoff double, an intentional walk, and a bunt single loaded the bases with no one out.

That brought up New York’s shortstop, who had been hitless in his first three trips to the plate that night. But with the game on the line, Jerry Buchek belted a ball over the left fielder’s head that sent everyone home happy.

Thanks to Buchek’s timely hit I slept soundly the whole way home. Which, in retrospect, seems far preferable to enduring the decades of psychological therapy a premature exit from an uncompleted game would undoubtedly have necessitated.

I don’t wish to downplay the value of anyone else’s life, but Jerry Buchek’s passing was more challenging for me to process than were the departures of any past president, first lady, U.S. Senator, theoretical physicist, or Queen of Soul.

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