Genes‪.‬

I came up to the majors when Harley Post was in his prime. He was the best that I ever saw. Everybody felt the same way. Players, managers, scouts, the media, everybody said they'd never seen anybody like him. He could do it all: hit, run, field, steal bases, and he had that instinct that only the great ones have. He always knew when to take the extra base, where to throw, how to shade the hitters, where the wall was, when to shoestring it, how big a lead to take, all of that kind of stuff. He was the first "forty-sixty man," and he's still the only one. I can't hardly imagine a guy having those high .350-something averages, hitting that many homers, and stealing that many bases in a year. He did it three years in a row. A-mazing! He was part of that great line of center fielders--Speaker, Cobb, DiMaggio, Mantle, Mays. Yeah, he looked like the direct heir of those guys, the sure-fire, Hall-of-Fame, real deal. What was different about him was that he really didn't belong to our time of big, pumped-up, steroid-happy sluggers. No, he was a throwback to the days of black-and-white photographs. He had that lean, hungry look--high cheekbones, thin mouth, and squinty eyes, like you see in pictures of Pepper Martin or the Waner brothers. He was a California boy, and you can bet he had more than a little of the Grapes of Wrath in his blood. He played like it, too--with all-out, one-hundred-percent do-or-die. On the field, he came at you smoking, always on fire. Always!