Who was your favorite childhood MLB player?...

When I was in Little League, Nellie Fox was my favorite player. He was the 2nd baseman on that inspirational 1959 Go Go Sox team, which coincided with my first year in Little League. I was only 8 and couldn’t chew tobacco like Nellie; so I settled for 3 or 4 pieces of Bazooka bubble gum. If you worked in a chunk of licorice, one could color their spit to look like tobacco spit. You could see how tobacco colored spit could be intimidating back then. I used the bat with the thickest handle in the team duffle bag, because Nellie used a thick handled ‘bottle bat’. And just like Nellie I choked-up, but not too much because I was a sucker for a pitch on the outer half of the plate. The next year I went up to the majors; and played for 1st National Bank for the rest of my ‘career’. Bank was a great team with talented 11 & 12-year-olds in 1960. When I did play, it was usually at 2nd base just like Nellie. Being only 9 on a talented team, I spent a lot of time on the bench. I daydreamed about Nellie holding down 2nd base for me with the Sox, like when Lou Gehrig replaced Wally Pipp at first for the Yankees. A couple of years ago we went to Cooperstown to see the Hall of Fame. When I was looking at Nellie Fox’s plaque, I thought about that delusional 9-year-old daydreamer riding the pine at Lions Stadium…