But you couldn’t hate the guy for it. As much as you wanted to kill him sometimes, he’d always say something funny and disarming, or, even worse, he’d put his arm around you and sing in your ear. “You know you love me, Alex,” he used to say. “You’ve got the hots for me. You dream about me all night long. That’s why I drive you crazy.”

A whole busload of guys in their twenties, most of them from farms or little towns around the Midwest, all of them dirt-tough or at least trying to act like it. And I got Randy Wilkins for a roommate.

So now almost thirty years have passed, and out of nowhere he’s sitting in the Glasgow Inn on a late Tuesday night in April. It’s taken him exactly twenty minutes to feel comfortable. Hell, in twenty minutes, he owns the place. Even a crusty old goat like Jackie is treating him like royalty. I kept waiting for him to tell me why he had come so far to see me, after all these years, but he kept talking about baseball, the games we had played in, old teammates I had all but forgotten.

“So tell me, Randy,” Jackie said at one point. “Did you ever make it up to the big leagues?”

There it was. I knew it would come up eventually. I certainly wasn’t going to mention it myself.

“Why, yes,” Randy said. “As a matter of fact, I did make it up to the big leagues. I pitched in one game.” By this time, Jackie had pulled a couple of the tables over by the fireplace, and at least twelve men were sitting there listening to him. “You want to tell this story, Alex?”

“I wasn’t there,” I said. And that’s all I said, because I didn’t want to touch it. I had never even heard him tell it before, because after that September call-up, I never saw him again. Until tonight.

“September 1971,” he said. “You guys know how they expand the major-league rosters from twenty-five to forty in September, right? The minor-league seasons are over by then, and most of the clubs like to bring up some of the players to the big club, let them see some action. You know, maybe think about them for the next year. Well, I got called up to Detroit in 1971. Alex should have been brought up, too. But they blew that one.”