Everyone I talked to about the story told me the same thing. "You ought to talk to Tot," they all said.

"Tot" was Tot Pressnell, and he turned out to be a walking compendium of baseball knowledge.

I'd never met a real major leaguer before, but Tot Pressnell turned out to be a nice man and a great help. He was 74 when I met him, and although he'd probably told the same stories half a million times in his life, he didn't mind telling them one more time to help out a novice computer programmer - turned - writer.

Tot was a knuckleball pitcher who toiled in the American Association for the Milwaukee Brewers for several years before he finally got to the majors. He was 32 when he began his major league career with the 1938 Brooklyn Dodgers. He won 11 games and lost 14 for a bad team that year, which was the year that Babe Ruth served as a coach for the Dodgers. Tot told me that at the end of the season Babe gave his hat to one player, his shoes to another, his bats to others. Babe gave Tot his glove, and for the rest of his life Tot kept Babe Ruth's glove as one of his most treasured possessions.

Tot Pressnell also took part in one of baseball's most historic games. On June 15, 1938, Cincinnati's Johnny Vander Meer pitched against the Dodgers only four days after he threw a no-hitter against the Braves. Vander Meer tossed another one against the Dodgers that day, and became the only major leaguer to throw two no-hitters in a row. Tot pitched four innings in that game as a reliever.

He kept throwing the knuckler for the Dodgers in 1939 and 1940, which were Leo Durocher's first two years as a manager. Tot was one of the older guys on the club (he and Durocher were the same age), and Durocher wanted to fill the roster with younger players, so Tot left. The Dodgers sold him to the Cardinals in November 1940, the Cards sold him to the Reds in December 1940, and the Reds sold him to the Cubs in February 1941. It must have been nerve-racking for him in the winter of 1940-41, bouncing from club to club, wondering where he'd end up.

Tot had a pretty good year for the Cubs in 1941. Two baseball statisticians named John Thorn and Pete Palmer, authors of Total Baseball, crunched the numbers for the 1941 season and decided, years after the fact, that Tot was the most effective relief pitcher in the National League that year. However, by the end of 1942 Tot Pressnell had had enough. He was 36 years old and ready to call it quits and come back to Findlay, which he did.

It seems to me that if Tot Pressnell was a young man today, he's have a 15-year career in the majors. Back in the 1930s, there were only 16 major league teams, so there were only about half as many spots available for players in the big time as there are today. Also, starting pitchers were expected to throw nine innings, not six or seven, because the relief specialist was not yet a part of the game. With such keen competition for pitching slots in the major leagues, a guy like Tot, who didn't throw hard, would spend ten years in the minor leagues before he could catch a break.

By the time I met him, Tot Pressnell was one of those local celebrities that everyone likes and respects, and people in Findlay counted him as a friend even if they didn't know him very well. He would come up to the Ohio Baseball Hall of Fame in Toledo every now and then, although he was getting on in years, and talk to people and answer questions, including my own.

He was inducted into the Ohio Baseball Hall of Fame in 1984, and I bought one of the cards (see the left side of this page) and sent it to him for an autograph. When Tot died last month at the age of 94, I described this card to someone at work. "You should put it up for sale on eBay," the guy said. "You could get some money for it."