PIE TRAYNOR

Harold Joseph Traynor came out of Framingham, Massachusetts, and picked up the nickname Pie somewhere in boyhood, the way ballplayers do — no ceremony, it just stuck. He got to Pittsburgh in 1920 and never wore another uniform. Eighteen seasons at the hot corner, which is no place for the faint of heart, and he played it like a man who had measured the ground and found it trustworthy.

The bat was where the legend lived. A .320 career average, 2,416 hits, 164 triples — a right-handed hitter who made the line drive an art form and the triple a habit. In 1923 he piled up 208 hits, 19 of them three-baggers, and knocked in 101. In 1928 he drove in 124. He stole 158 bases across a career, which surprises people who picture him as a station-to-station man. He was not.

In 1925 the Pirates won it all, and Traynor hit .346 in the World Series, because of course he did.

They put him in the Hall of Fame in 1948, and when the writers argued about the greatest third baseman who ever lived, his name was the one they used as the measuring stick. He died in 1972, a Pirate to the end, the hot corner his address for eighteen years and change.