King Kaufman's Sports Daily

The shocking news of Cory Lidle's death is a reminder of the strange relationship we have with pro athletes.

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Oct. 12, 2006 | The death of pitcher Cory Lidle in a plane crash Wednesday was one of those cold-water-slap reminders that these guys we watch for entertainment, cheer and boo and blame for our Monday morning grumpiness when the home team blows one on Sunday, they're real people. If you cut them, they bleed. And sometimes they up and die, just like that.

It seems like an obvious point. Of course they're real people. Some of us went to middle school with one of them or college with a bunch of 'em. It wasn't that long ago when you could be a person of relatively modest means and live down the street from a big-leaguer, or buy insurance or a car from one in the offseason.

But I wonder how many of us who follow these games really think of them, or care about them, as real people in any real sense.

For most of us, I think, they're names on a scorecard, a set of numbers, a certain way of swinging a bat or shooting a jumper. A very few stars emerge as knowable personalities, and even then only in the public-figure sense. But we know even less about those guys than we know about entertainers, whose private lives are much more available.

"I love you, Bruce!" a woman's voice shouts on this Bruce Springsteen bootleg I have somewhere. Springsteen waits for the cheering to die down, then quietly says, "But you don't really know me."

We know Mariano Rivera as classy, Barry Bonds as belligerent, Shaquille O'Neal as fun-loving, but that's about the extent of what most of us know about any athlete. And it's all most of us care to know, really.

When you heard that Lidle and Bobby Abreu had been traded from the Philadelphia Phillies to the New York Yankees in late July, did you think about where they'd stay in New York, what they'd do with their places in Philly, or South Jersey, or wherever? Or with their kids' schooling? Did you think about how the four players going to the Phillies, three of them minor-leaguers, would handle the move?

Or did you think about how Abreu would fit into the Yankees lineup, whether Lidle would offer any relief for New York's pitching woes, whether any of those guys the Phillies got back made the trade anything other than a salary dump, what all of this meant for your fantasy team?

That's all I did. For what it's worth, I wrote that Lidle would provide an upgrade over "a four-headed beast by the name of Shawn Chacon Aaron Small Sidney Ponson Kris Wilson."

The only other thing I ever wrote about him in this column was in the 2005 baseball season preview. As part of my argument that the Phillies' pitching was no great shakes, I wrote, "Cory Lidle is, not to put too fine a point on it, Cory Lidle."

Next page: Radio host Francesa to Lidle: "I haven't thought much about you at all, to be honest with you"