Differentiation.

Late the other night my cell phone rang and the caller ID told me it was my old teammate from so many years ago, Gulliermo Sisto. Sisto was the oldest player in the Mexican Baseball League when he joined the Seraperos and I was the youngest. But that didn't stop us from becoming as close as Castor and Pollux or Damon and Pythias or Abbott and Costello. 

Sisto served as manager Hector Quesadilla's extra coach, and could fill in, creditably, at any position at any time. He could get behind the plate and don the tools of ignorance. He could take to the hill and close out an inning. He could stop one in the hole or the gap and make the peg. Also, though he was pushing 40 back fifty years ago, he handled the lumber like a coked-up majorette with a flaming baton at home-coming.

Sisto built a small, square cinder-block house just down the cul-de-sac from the home Hector and Teresa invited me into to live when I was ready to leave Saltillo and return to New York. Hector, Teresa and Gulliermo stopped me.

We spent many evenings drinking Teresa's too-sweet lemonade or eating her arroz con pollo and telling stories about the game and the boys who played the game, their rises and mostly, their falls. Like Hector, there wasn't much preliminary about Sisto. When he had something to say, he was out with it.

"Gulliermo," I began. "Teresa is ok. She is well."

"All is good here, Jorge. I wish you and su esposa would visit with us again. It has been too long."

"Too long," I agreed. I've lost many people in my life, and not one of them did I speak to or visit as much as I should have. 

"I was thinking about your business, Jorge."

"There's not much to think about," I coyed. "I write ads for a living. I am not like Señor Hemingway, fighting the white bull that is the blank page."

"I was thinking about you telling me how you help companies find out what makes them different. Everybody has to do that. There's no money in being one of many."

I could hear the squeak of his old rocking chair on the wood flooring of his covered porch. 

"It's no different from how you build a ball team. You look for a guy with a little something extra."

"Yes," said Sisto. "That little extra is why a great player like Espiño never went up to the majors."

Hector had over 500 Mexican League homers and zero in the bigs.

"He might have been born too soon. No people of color in the bigs when Espiño was most Espiño."

"That is true, too, Jorge. But then I thought of a puzzle. A riddle, if you will." 

"A mystery inside a conundrum wrapped in an enigma."

Sisto laughed at that. It was fifty years ago that we played and traveled and ate and laughed and cried together. We still know each other's jokes and how to finish each other's sentences. I still, so many years hence, find myself in a situation asking myself, "what would Hector do? What would Sisto do?"

"My riddle is this. You can use it I think to get more clients."

"I can always use more clients," I answered. "Though I think more than ever about hanging up my spikes. I have creaks now in my brain like I had in my throwing shoulder."

"My riddle is this: In the hundreds of years of baseball. In the thousands and thousands of games. In the millions and millions of pitches and the billions and billions of beers, why has there never been a pitcher nicknamed 'Righty'"?

I laughed.

"A million pitchers named Lefty. Never a Righty."

"There are players called Moose. There are players called Peewee. There are even players called Tubby. There are legions of players called Specs. But there's never a player called 'Average-size.'"

"Being a righty is normal. Being a lefty is different. So players are called Lefty."

"Everybody needs a little Lefty in them. Even if they are a righty."

"Everybody needs a little Sisto, too." I answered.

"That's what makes you different, Jorge. You've got a lot of Sisto in you, and Hector too."

"I am a man blessed with many fathers."

"You are a good son." And he clicked his adios.

Probably right-handed.

And, btw: