The sweetheart called Pops.(Willie Stargell)(Brief Article)(Obituary)

Willie Stargell's intentions were plain when he stood alongside home plate and looked out to the man with the baseball. That man was in trouble. Stargell warned him this way: He began winding the bat clockwise, the barrel moving toward the pitcher and falling toward the dirt in a wide circle--once, twice, gaining speed, spinning as if it were an airplane propeller, the tip of the bat sometimes raising a puff of dust at the big man's feet. Fans added sound to the circlings, "Whup ... whup ... WHUP."

Then Stargell snapped the bat straight up, there by his left shoulder, fearsomely ready. When the Pirates a year ago told the Hall of Famer they wanted to put up a tall statue in his honor, he said one thing only: "I want them to show me hitting the stuffing out of the ball."

He hit 475 home runs, some perhaps still in flight, four into the upper deck at Three Rivers Stadium, seven over the roof of old Forbes Field, two out of Dodger Stadium. "In Montreal, Willie hit one so far, 535 feet, they painted the chair it hit gold," says his old manager, Chuck Tanner "On opening day this year, after Willie died, they put flowers in that seat."

On August 14, 1971, Stargell saw Bob Gibson with the baseball, the Cardinals pitcher needing one more out for a no-hitter. Gibson despised hitters; he wouldn't talk to them, ever. He wanted them to know he would bounce a pitch off their ears. That day he'd struck out Stargell three times, and now the big man came to bat again--a moment when Gibson realized an uncommon truth.

"Willie was such a congenial fellow I had allowed myself to make an exception and become friends with him," Gibson once said. "Putting that out of my mind, I got two quick strikes on Willie, then slipped a slider over the outside corner ... "A no-hitter.

For business purposes, yes, it was a good thing for Gibson to leave aside his affection for Stargell. Happily, the rest of us could at all times embrace the sweetheart known as "Pops." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist Gene Collier had it right on Stargell: "His numbers were dwarfed by his humanity."

The great man visited Vietnam and decried the American presence there. He fought drugs and sickle-cell anemia. Though he suffered what he called the "aches and pains mentally" of racism, he lived with a joyful dignity beyond reach of bitterness.