Was close to perfect

Paul Sullivan of the Chicago Tribune wrote the following in an article published on July 15 in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: “Bouton [in his book Ball Four] made us realize the idea of the perfect baseball player was a myth.”

I would like to challenge that statement.

I’d like to counter by citing George Kell, the great third baseman from Swifton who played for the Detroit Tigers. George worked other places, but his home was always Swifton. When we moved to Swifton in 1958, he was on the school board there, though he had a job as the Tigers’ sports announcer.

To keep expenses down, George and his wife Charlene had a set time on specific nights when he would call her. She had lived in Detroit with him until their children were school-age, at which time Charlene and the kids settled back in Swifton, with George coming home whenever he could.

I loved to hear George’s stories about his time as a baseball player. He wasn’t a carouser and didn’t go out with the boys when they were on the road. I thought one of his stories was particularly poignant. He told of buying a new pair of pants while the team was on the road and taking out the old hem and hemming up the legs himself in order to have something to do.

In the small town of Swifton where he had grown up, I heard no stories going around that might in any way reflect badly on George. At Swifton Methodist Church, George had been a lay leader, a member of the choir, and a Sunday School teacher, just as his father had before him. George might not have been perfect (he did collect several speeding tickets on his way home to Swifton and his family), but he was as close to it as anyone else I have ever known.

MARETTE STIRITZ Conway