Jose Morales
September 16, 2006
I started kindergarten the same year Jose Morales reached the major leagues, 1973, and I was expelled from boarding school with one month left in my senior year in 1985, the year after Jose Morales’ quietly competent, useful career as a right-handed bat-for-hire concluded. That summer, after taking and passing a GED exam, I moved to Cape Cod to live with my grandfather, who got me a job at a gas station where I was required to wear a shirt very similar to the one poking out from under Jose Morales’ uniform. I pumped gas, washed windows, checked oil. People asked me about problems with their cars and I had to tell them I knew nothing about cars. I didn’t even know how to drive. Also, people kept swerving into the station, rolling down their windows, and shouting at me that they were lost. But I didn’t know how to get anywhere except from my grandfather’s house to the gas station and back, and I probably couldn’t have articulated even that path with any clarity. But if anyone had ever screeched to a halt by the pumps needing to know who owned the single-season major league record for pinch hits, I could have helped. Jose Morales, I would have declared, uselessness briefly abating.
Cardboard Gods 
1. Good stuff, Josh. I love the collared shirt underneath Jose’s jersey and the fact that you wore something similar during the summer you spent working at the gas station.
2. Born a decade after Jose Morales’ career started, there’s a new Jose Morales, at least there was in 2007.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/m/moraljo02.shtml
Both catchers at one point. Both played for Minnesota.. not related!
3. 2 : Yes, I became aware of this second Jose Morales recently, while perusing stuff on Tom Paciorek, which led me to stuff on John Paciorek, which led me to the second Jose Morales, who if he never makes it back to the bigs will stand with John Paciorek at the top of the all-time batting average list.