Peter Schmuck: The column I never wanted to write

Beloved baseball writer Jim Henneman passed away on Thursday night, surrounded by a large loving family and immediately missed by all of us who knew him or learned many of the finer points of the National Pastime while sitting next to him in the press box or in front of a frosty brew.

He was 89.

“Uncle Henny,” as my kids loved to call him, knew more about the game than I ever will and imparted that knowledge to several generations of baseball fans during a journalistic career that was preordained during a boyhood watching the International League Orioles and Negro League Baltimore Elite Giants.

He was a mentor to a couple of generations of young sports journalists and friend to just about everyone who ever met him. To once again paraphrase a line often used to describe Orioles great Brooks Robinson, he was a terrific baseball writer and an even better guy.

Jim started covering the Orioles for the now-defunct Baltimore News American and went on to do so for the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Baltimore (Morning) Sun before retiring from full-time baseball writing in 1995. He spent the next couple of decades as the principal official scorer at Oriole Park and until very recently continued to impart his baseball wisdom on the PressBoxOnline.com website.

I met him way back in 1979 when I made my first-ever road trip with the California Angels to cover a series at Memorial Stadium for the Orange County Register and we became friends during the many times I returned to Baltimore as a visiting writer over the next 11 years. He was one of the people who made me feel right at home when I arrived here to cover the O’s for The Sun in 1990.

For the next 30 years, we spent every spring working together, starting in Miami and passing through Sarasota, St. Petersburg and Fort Lauderdale before returning to Sarasota for good and both falling madly in love with the place.

During a couple of those early springs, my family frequented a place called Captain Curt’s on Siesta Key (it’s still there) that Jim had found, and he frequently joined us to shuck oysters and bounce my kids on his lap. It doesn’t feel that long ago, but my daughter turned 37 today and got some very bad news this morning.

He was just a lovely fellow who loved everyone else, and he was so beloved in the Orioles’ universe that the team honored him last year by naming the press box after him. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house that day and there isn’t one in my house – and many, many others – today.

If you want to check out my tribute to Henny when that decision was made last January, you can read it here.

Farewell old friend.