Steve Rushin. Again.

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A Bottomless Cup of Coffee

If you riffle past the Alous and just beyond the Boyers in The Baseball Encyclopedia, pausing before the Conigliaros and the DiMaggios, you'll find a major league baseball family almost as big as any of them, the two sets of Boyle brothers: Jack and Eddie and their nephews Buzz and Jim. Of those Cincinnatians, Jimmie Boyle had the shortest professional career -- indeed, the shortest possible professional career -- playing a single inning of a single game for the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds 80 years ago this summer.

And while more than 900 men have appeared in one -- and only one -- game in the majors, Boyle did so without ever setting foot in the minors. "Not on the way up," says his son, Patrick, "and not on the way down."

It's an extraordinary trick, like painting one fresco on the Sistine ceiling without a ladder, but Jimmie Boyle remains an elusive figure, a less-celebrated version of Moonlight Graham, who made one appearance for the same Giants -- and the same manager, John McGraw -- in 1905.

Graham gained global fame when Burt Lancaster played him in Field of Dreams. Boyle was fleetingly famous after graduating from Xavier in 1926, when he promptly joined the Giants for $250 a month, his every workout breathlessly chronicled in The New York Times, in which Boyle shared the sports pages with Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, Bobby Jones and Bill Tilden.

There were 40,000 fans at the Polo Grounds on June 20, 1926, to see the Giants host the Pirates. Before the top of the ninth, with the home team down 8-0 and Sunday-afternoon shadows playing across the field, McGraw removed catcher Paul Florence. As the Times reported the next day, "Jim Boyle from Xavier College got behind the bat." It was after 5 p.m. when Boyle crouched to catch Chick Davies, a lefty who would lead the National League in saves that season. The Pirates went down without a score, and Boyle didn't bat in the bottom of the inning. And yet that three-out career was less a cup of coffee than a shot of espresso: It never left his system.

In July, still moldering on the bench behind Florence, Boyle wrote to his parents from St. Louis. "To the best mother in all this big world," he began, before marveling at his good fortune to "realize an ambition that I have harbored since birth." That ambition was to play in the big leagues. The letter was signed "James" and dated July 24, 1926. Beneath the date, in impeccable script, Boyle proudly affixed, "New York Giants."

You can almost see him in his room, fountain pen in hand. Boyle's roommate on the road was Heinie Mueller. Twenty-five seasons later, Heinie's nephew Don would break his ankle sliding into third just before Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard Round the World at those same Polo Grounds.

Boyle's son, Patrick, now 65 and retired in Reno, says, "Dad was a typical Cincinnatian. They go away for two weeks and get homesick. I think he knew he'd be assigned to the minors the next season, and the minors were not his thing." Jimmie Boyle wore bespoke suits and buffed his nails. He'd play in the big leagues or not at all.

A dozen years ago Patrick bought a ball signed by 25 members of the '26 Giants from a New York dealer for $1,500. There were six Hall of Famers on that baseball, but Patrick treasured only one signature: jimmie boyle in a clear, bold hand.

"We get lots of calls from folks looking for Mel Ott and John McGraw autographs," owner John Brigandi of Brigandi Coin Co. told Sports Collectors Digest in 1994, "but this has to be the first one looking for a Jimmie Boyle autograph."

It wasn't the last. For several years one of Jimmie's daughters, Ann Burns of Cincinnati, received letters from a young baseball-crazed doctor in Madison, Ala., seeking anything signed by Jimmie Boyle. Three summers ago he pulled into her driveway. "I gave him a class assignment from third grade with Dad's signature at the top," says Burns. "It was all I could find, he's been dead so long."

Jimmie Boyle died of leukemia on Christmas Eve of 1958. His brief appearance at the Polo Grounds led his obituary in The Cincinnati Enquirer: "Requiem High Mass for James J. Boyle, 54, former major league baseball player and for 26 years sales manager for Aluminum Industries, Inc., will be intoned at 9:30 a.m. Saturday in St. Antoninus Church." The story noted that Boyle left a wife, Clare; a son, Patrick; and two recently married daughters, Ann Burns and Jane Rushin.

It was my mother's stories about her father that first sent me to The Baseball Encyclopedia at our local library, where I happily got lost in the sports stacks. They looked like skyscrapers -- unscalable -- to a 10-year-old dreaming of a life in sports.

To this day, people say I look like my grandfather.