EDDIE COLLINS

They called him Cocky — Edward Trowbridge Collins of Millerton, New York — and for a quarter century he made second base look like a private office. Left-handed bat, right-handed glove, he sprayed singles and walks until the ledger quit arguing: three thousand three hundred fifteen hits and a .333 lifetime clip that still sits in the air like a dare.

Connie Mack got him first; Charles Comiskey bought him for fifty thousand dollars and a South Side second-base lease. Beside the $100,000 infield and later the Black Sox wreckage he kept counting — sixty-three steals here, one hundred nineteen walks there, then a .372 avalanche in 1920 when SkillScore peaked at one hundred forty-three point one nine.

What stayed was seven hundred forty-one steals, nearly fifteen hundred walks, and the memory of a keystone man who treated the bag like rented property and never paid late.