Please allow me the self indulgence to eulogize the passing of one of my childhood icons. Lew Burdette passed away in Winter Garden, Florida on Tuesday, of lung cancer, age 80.

When I first started playing kids' baseball and wanted to be a pitcher like my father had been, Lew Burdette was my very first pitching idol --- because he had beaten the Yankees three times (including the seventh game) in the 1957 World Series, the first fall classic to which I ever paid close attention. This led to some brief, but palpable tension between my father and me, because he was disappointed, in the spring of 1958, when he offered to buy me my very first "official" team cap and I opted for that of Burdette's Milwaukee Braves (blue crown, with red visor and white, block, seraphed "M" as the logo) instead of the cap of my dad's beloved Cardinals. I still had that cap in high school, buried somewhere in my closet, long after the felt "M" had fallen off of it.

Burdette was originally a Yankee property, pitching one and one-third innings with no wins or losses for the Bronx Bombers in 1950. But he was traded to the Braves, then still in Boston, on 30 August 1951 --- which no doubt made those three World Series wins in 1957 all the more sweet to him (alas, he was just 1-2 versus the Yanks in the 1958 series rematch, losing the decisive contest, 6-2, to a combination of Don Larsen and Bob Turley). The 1950 trade was a straight-up deal (along with $50,000 cash) for 33-year-old Johnny Sain, who had won 20 or more games for the Braves in four of the previous five seasons and was the second half of Boston's fabled "Spahn, Sain and Pray for Rain" pitching rotation --- apparently indicative of just how much the two teams respected Burdette's potential.

Sain went 38-33 over the next four years with the Yanks, playing the last two seasons of his career with New York and Kansas City as a situational relief man. Burdette had a rocky start with the Braves, going just 6-11 in 1951-52. But he was 15-5 in 1953, and during his 12-plus years with Boston-Milwaukee compiled a record of 179-120, for a .599 winning percentage, including two all-star game appearances (1957 and 1959) and two seasons with 20 or more wins (1958-59, in the latter topping the NL with 21 victories).

After that, Burdette was traded to my Cardinals, where he went just 10-13 during parts of 1963-64 (my father had died in 1962, so he didn't get a chance to welcome Lew into the Cardinals' fold). In mid June, 1964, Lew was shipped to the Cubs in a straight-up swap for pitcher Glen Hobbie, so Burdette wasn't around to share the Cardinals' 1964 World Series victory --- something that would've moved him up another notch in my personal baseball pantheon.

After brief stints with the Cubs and Phillies, Burdette ended his career with a combined 9-2 record for the Angels in 1966-67. Overall, Burdette compiled a record of 203-144, for a .585 winning percentage, and led the NL once each in games won, winning percentage, games started, complete games, shutouts, innings pitched and ERA --- a record good enough to earn him a spot in my Hall of Fame of personal favorites, if not the official one in Cooperstown. Apparently a tribute to how difficult it was to matriculate to the Yankees of the early 1950s, all but Lew's first six victories in the majors were won after he was 26 years old.

Aside from those three victories against the Yanks in '57, two other things endeared Burdette to me very early in my awareness of him and baseball in general. In the very first baseball card I ever got of him (card number 440 in the Topps set of 1959), the right-handed Burdette posed with his glove on his right hand, in mid wind-up, as if he were a lefty pitcher --- apparently playing a joke on a photographer who didn't know any better. During the first decade or so of Topps cards, there are several well-known examples of photos being accidentally reversed in the printing process. But Burdette's 1959 card is not one of them, as his Braves uniform reads correctly from left-to-right, and it's clear that Lew posed as he did on purpose. As a result of his jokester pose, that 1959 card remains one of my all-time favorites.

Also, although he fell far short of 300 wins, Burdette was the Gaylord Perry of his time. Throughout his career, like Perry, he was accused of throwing the spitball --- making him a real or imagined throwback to the era before the pitch was outlawed in the early 1920s. Also like Perry, Lew just smiled at the accusations, quite content to let the hitters be psyched-out by the mere possibility he was juicing his pitches. During my early years of baseball fandom, I developed a great, if rather perverse, appreciation for hurlers who used unorthodox pitches and deliveries (including, notably, knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm and submarine stylist Ted Abernathy), so --- real or not --- Burdette's "spitball aura" endeared him even more to me.

In the early 1990s (I've forgotten the year), just before the start of spring training, there was a somehow SABR-related week-long cruise of the Caribbean which featured Burdette and my number-one childhood hero, Stan Musial, as the two draws. As I recall, it was something like $1,300 per-person, sans air fare, which made the whole thing entirely too extravagant for our budget at the time (besides, cruises are supposed to be justified by romance, not by wallowing in self-indulgent nostalgia). I would've liked to have gone. But the fact I didn't hasn't diminished Lew Burdette's significance in my life an iota.

So, R.I.P., Lew Burdette --- gone but not forgotten.