But my career bucket list wasn’t complete until the other day.

I shook hands with Bill Mazeroski for the first time.

Not to get all mushy here, but Maz was my first boyhood hero. For decades, I admired his skills and humility and work ethic from a distance. How could one not like a guy that never whined, never made an excuse, almost never missed a day, never held out in a contract dispute, caught  every ball within reach, turned every double play, was money in the clutch and never took a performance-enhancer worse than an occasional Iron City presumably?

If there's a professional athlete that has achieved more and been affected less because of it, then I’d like to meet him, too.

Team officials can only hope that the many young Pirates players paid attention the other day, when plans for a Mazeroski statue outside PNC Park were made official. I bet that only a few of the guys knew that Maz did more than hit a very famous home run many years ago. That’s understandable. We live in the ESPN generation now, which means that if something didn’t happen in the last 24 hours, then it probably didn’t happen at all.

But if these Pirates aspire to become something special, then they need only to do their homework and follow the lead of Mazeroski, one of the greatest of them all. Because if this group turns out to be anything close to him in body and spirit this season, then they’ll clinch the Central Division with one week to spare. Easy.