So Chan and I are walking through the park, me with video camera, as I needed to get some stuff on tape for a future project which may or may not come to fruition. Who goes right by us on his Sunday fitness stroll, but Le Gran Orange himself, baseball legend Rusty Staub. I immediately tell Chan, who proves clueless. I had my camera, so I sprang into action. I walked/jogged back to a point ahead of Staub, sat on a bench, held up my camera and pretended I was filming, well, trees. Secretly I was zooming in on Rusty, who was none the wiser. He was focused, like Joe DiMaggio at Dinky Donuts.

The things I'll do to capture the likenesses of minor celebrities.

The coolest thing about Rusty Staub, to me, was that when I was little, I'd turn over his baseball cards and look at his stats to see "Colt .45s." By the nineteen-eighties, there weren't really any other players left who could say they played for the .45s. And there weren't any players left from any other teams who'd changed names or were defunct. So, on your 80s baseball cards, you'd see the names of the 26 existing major league teams, and on that one card, the Colt .45s. I also got to know Rusty from going to Mets games at Shea during the years he was on the Mets. Lookin' good, Rusty.

Note: Before I published this, I took a peek at the rosters of those Colt .45 teams ('62-'64, before they became the Astros) and saw there was another one who made it to the 80s: Joe Morgan. But, hey, whose card are you gonna turn over first, the guy whose name is Rusty and looks like a clown or anyone else's? There were also some Senators who made it to the 80s: The palindromic Toby Harrah and the two "I"s in successioned Larry Biitner to name two. The point is, Staub played for a team with a number and a decimal point in their name. How often do dudes like that walk past you and Chan?