In the meantime, he asked for a good place to shoot pool. I told him of a few joints close to his place near Times Square but said that Amsterdam Billiards on the Upper West Side was the place to go. Apparently, he took me up on that. A lot. Enough for people there to see what kind of fellow he truly was.

"He was just one of the guys," Greg Hunt, the owner of Amsterdam Billiards, told me Wednesday. "He wasn't a big guy -- he was like 5-10, 180 pounds, and he fit right in. We had a lot of matter-of-fact conversations about playing for the Yankees, and it was almost like talking to someone about his day office job. Just normal conversation among guys."