There’s a certain irony to the fact that the last game the Yankees played during Phil Rizzuto’s lifetime ended with a situation taylor-made for a Scooter squeeze bunt only to see the team decline the opporunity to put on the play. It’s also fitting that that game was won in that situation on a dink hit by the Yankee shortstop, a player who won the Rookie of the Year award in Rizzuto’s final season as a Yankee broadcaster much to the enduring delight of the Scooter himself, and a player who has come to replace Rizzuto as the greatest Yankee shortstop of all time.

Rizzuto was a tremendously important figure in my life given the importance that baseball and Yankee baseball specifically has taken in it. Rizzuto was the voice first, but more than that the spirit and the passion and the humor that lured me back to the game day after day during the lean years of the 1980s when my fandom coalesced. I put a few words together about Scooter over on SI.com. As you’ve done in the last thread, please continue to post your memories, anecdotes, and feelings about Scooter below. And feel free to repost things here that you’ve said elsewhere, it would be great to have all of them in one place.