Former major league outfielder Gus Zernial passed away on Thursday at the age of 87. A World War II veteran, he didn’t debut in the majors until he was nearly 26, but he enjoyed an 11-year career with the White Sox, A’s and Tigers, earning All-Star honors once and leading the AL in homers and [...]
Archive of posts filed under the passings category.
Bluster and Luster: George Steinbrenner (1930-2010)
Death comes a-callin’ again at 161st St. I just posted this at Baseball Prospectus:
A titan has fallen, and an era has ended. Just two days after legendary Yankee Stadium public address announcer Bob Sheppard’s death, and nine days after celebrating his own 80th birthday, principal Yankees owner George Steinbrenner passed away Tuesday morning due to [...]
Bob Sheppard (1910-2010), RIP
Like virtually anyone who set foot in any iteration of Yankee Stadium over the past 60 years — Yankees fan or tourist — I’m greatly saddened to learn of the passing of public address announcer Bob Sheppard. The New York Times obituary’s first sentence says it all:
Bob Sheppard, whose elegant intonation as the public-address [...]
Whatchootalkingbout? Gary Coleman (1968-2010)
Sad news regarding the passing of Gary Coleman due to a brain hemorrhage, and in my home state of Utah no less. Diff’rent Strokes was hands-down my favorite TV show when it first went on the air in late 1978, when I was just about to turn nine. While the premise of the show — [...]
Lima Time Has Passed
Sad news out of Los Angeles: Jose Lima died of a heart attack on Sunday morning at the age of 37. An erratic pitcher for parts of 13 major league seasons, Lima was almost always either awfully entertaining or entertainingly awful. He had just appeared at Dodger Stadium two nights earlier, as the Dodgers, the [...]
Ernie Harwell (1918-2010)
Since he retired in 2002, I’m not sure I ever heard Ernie Harwell call a full game, as his career preceded the bountiful period in which fans in any market can see or hear virtually any game. But as a fan steeped in baseball history and old enough to remember, say, the Tigers’ 1984 World [...]
The Swindle Continues: Malcolm McLaren (1946-2010)
Malcolm McClaren, the Svengali behind the Sex Pistols, passed away on Thursday at the age of 64. McLaren’s audacious promotion helped turn the Pistols into Public Enemy Number One in England during 1976, and he certainly bears a good deal of responsibility for popularizing punk as a fashion statement via his London boutique, SEX.
But [...]
Lift a Finger
Jim Marshall, one of the great rock and roll photographers, passed away on Wednesday at the age of 74. Marshall photographed the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and others. His work was recently featured at a Brooklyn Museum exhibit called “Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to [...]
Children By the Millions Sing for Alex Chilton (1950-2010)
When I first arrived in New York City back in 1995, I moved in with a friend of my downstairs neighbor in Providence, a guy who worked in film and video who had been flopping on friends’ couches in Hoboken for awhile and needed to solidify his situation with, like, a mailing address. A guy [...]
Willie Davis (1940-2010)
Willie Davis was before my time. He spent 18 seasons in the major leagues, from 1960 through 1976, with a brief comeback in 1979, so unless he made a cameo appearance in an Angels game I was watching in that latter year — he wasn’t in this Nolan Ryan near no-hitter — I never actually saw him [...]
