My friend Craig Simpson recently loaned me his copy of Connie Mack’s autobiography My 66 Years in the Big Leagues (click here). It was a great account of the history of baseball, its organization, early managers and players as well as a look at the overall evolution as our National past time. I enjoyed reading it; thank you Craig.
Nicknamed Connie Mack, Cornelius McGillicuddy managed the Philadelphia Athletics for 50 years before he retired at the age of 87. Wikipedia does a nice job of describing his life and many accomplishments and is worth checking out whether you are a baseball fan or not (click here.)
In addition to his on-the-field accomplishments as a manager, Connie also came up with a Code of Conduct for his players to follow. Today being Sunday, I thought to pass this along as a quasi-Ten Commandments for not only baseball but life itself.
One caveat to the above however, with regards to “Never take an unfair advantage in order to win” Connie wasn’t above just a little cheating. In his book he had this to say about his playing days as a catcher when he would use his glove to interfere with a batter’s swing:
Speaking of a code of conduct/living, the Stones’ song Ventilator Blues contains the lyric “your code of living is gun in hand.” I will avoid any sign-of-times’ comments that may offend my 2A friends. (Please note that I also refrained from mentioning how Connie’s Code of Conduct may or may not pertain to any of our modern day politicians.) Happy Sunday!