For the entirety of my forty-year childhood I was obsessed with baseball. Never mind Christmas, Thanksgiving, or my birthday; the most eagerly-anticipated event of the year was Opening Day.

Wide-eyed from start to finish, I witnessed my first live big league game more than a half-century ago at a sparkling, barely three-year-old 55,000-seat, state-of-the-art stadium  in New York.

I wrote about baseball for my college’s student newspaper, called the school’s games on the campus radio station, and later got a job doing radio play-by-play and publicity for a semi-pro team in Fairbanks, Alaska.

That led to similar opportunities with professional teams in North Carolina, Florida, Montana, and ultimately Maine. All told I spent 14 years doing my dream job.

But my interest in the pro game waned after I became a dad; the last big league contest I attended was in Montreal, where professional baseball ceased to exist in 2004. Four years after that the now-decrepit old stadium where I had witnessed my first big league contest was demolished.

These days my connection with baseball is limited to coaching and/or umpiring youth games.

But the game and the people in it taught me some valuable life lessons, many of which had nothing to do with athletics. One remarkable fellow taught me about the foolishness of prejudice.

As the new radio “voice” of the Carolina League’s Durham Bulls in the mid-1980’s, I attended an informal pre-season press conference at Durham Athletic Park, the facility where the team played their home games. Between sips of beer in his pint-sized office, the team’s new field manager was duly responding to generic questions from local reporters about the team’s prospective infield, outfield, and starting rotation when one of them asked about a specific player, one I’ll call Mr. X. A former 1^st-round draft selection, X was beginning his fourth year in Durham. (Generally more than one year at the Class A level means the player in question should be actively working on a Plan B.)

Puffing on his cigarette, the team’s nominal on-field mentor matter-of-factly replied, “That fat little African American won’t play an inning for me.”

Except the term he used to denote the player’s race was, then as now, one no decent human being should ever use. I spent the rest of the session in a fog. I couldn’t believe I’d be spending the following five months riding buses with (and running errands for) such an ignorant bigot.

Once the season got underway the manager was good to his word. X took batting practice with the other scrubs, then shagged flies or hit grounders until the visitors took over the field for their pregame workout. Once the actual contest began he and I did exactly the same thing. The only difference: hewasn’t on the radio describing what he was watching.

But players got injured, reassigned, or released, as they always do during a 143-day, 140-game minor league baseball season. One night, short of able bodies, the manager pressed X into service. It turned out that while he might not have been a budding superstar, X did a lot of little things well. An outfielder who always hit the cutoff man, he never missed a sign at the plate. A hitter who could spray the ball to any field on command, he was a fearsome baserunner; if he was occupying first base when a Bulls’ batter hit an infield grounder, the opposition would NOT turn a double play.

Late in the season the team was going nowhere; the guys who hadn’t been promoted or released were pretty much playing out the string. Then one night Atlanta’s farm director called, informing the Bulls’ skipper two outfielders had gotten hurt in Greenville (the Braves’ AA affiliate at the time), and reinforcements were needed pronto. He requested a specific player, a large, photogenic Caucasian who’d received a sizable bonus to turn pro not long before. “You can have that fellow if you want him,” our skipper said. (Except he didn’t say “fellow,” instead using a slang term nearly as offensive as the one he’d spouted four months earlier in his office.) “But if you want my best player, you’ll take X.”

X was indeed promoted, and performed impressively enough to land a AAA spot the following spring. And all because a beer-swilling, chain-smoking, epithet-spouting manager had recommended him.

I thought back to that press conference in early April, when I quickly and without any doubt labeled someone an ignorant bigot because of his coarse, inappropriate vocabulary.

Maybe he was prejudiced. But in retrospect, he wasn’t the only one in that tiny room who had been guilty of unfairly prejudging someone he didn’t know.