Stoking my personal stove recently was a timely Christmas gift: Ken Burns’ 10-DVD set titled “Baseball,” the history of what I still consider the national pastime from its origins in the 1840s. This was no mere evening’s entertainment, you should understand. To view it all in one sitting would take just under 24 hours, and I’ve yet to hear reports of anyone’s trying to accomplish that extra-inning feat.

Like a big league pitcher needing rest between starts, I worked at it sporadically until some time last month before hanging up my spikes and heading for the showers.

It gave me a chance to view face to face, so to speak, players who were already legends when I was young: Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner, Napolean Lojoie (I was a grown man before I learned that was pronounced “Lahjoway” and not “Lajoey”), Rogers Hornsby, Christy Mattewson, Babe Ruth and all those other immortals in the Valhalla of the game.

While we had professional baseball in the Sacramento of my youth, it was the Coast League players with whom we were familiar, not the elite of the majors. After all, with only 16 teams in the American and National leagues, how many of those elite athletes were there? No more than 400 at any one time.

So sure, I can say I saw Ted Williams hit home runs and Fred Hutchinson pitch rather spectacularly, but it was when they were teenagers with San Diego and Seattle, respectively.

My only sight of Honus Wagner was in 1938, when Pittsburgh played an exhibition game in Sacramento. By that time the Dutchman was 68, and I could only imagine those gigantic hands at the end of those long, long arms scooping up ground balls. To my youthful eyes, it seemed his knuckles would drag in the infield dirt.

Paul Waner was also part of the Pirates’ entourage that day, but “Big Poison’s” days of potency were well past their peak. It was Waner who once claimed that his nearsightedness aided his hitting because the ball looked larger coming at him. I still find that hard to believe, being nearsighted myself. The ball just looked like an indistinct blob of white when it was thrown at me.

Of course, kids don’t have a well-developed sense of history, and in those days no one took much note of PCL umpire Sam Crawford, except to boo him when his call went against the Solons. It was only later that I realized this was “Wahoo Sam” Crawford who, 88 years after his playing career ended, still holds the major league record for three-base hits with 311. Looking back, I don’t recall any Bee or Union sports writer ever taking note of this when he was umpiring. Time is fleeting, and so is fame.

One of my most unforgettable baseball experiences took place, not in the stands, but in the press room after a game between Sacramento and Oakland. It was in the late 1940s, when Casey Stengel, the “Old Perfessor,” was managing Oakland and “Rowdy Richard” Bartell was the Sacramento pilot.

I was there as the guest of Clyde Giraldo, a San Francisco Chronicle scribe who was covering the Acorns, and it promised to be an interesting affair with the two mouthy managers on stage. Bartell, however, was uncharacteristically quiet in the presence of the ever-vocal Casey.

Stengel was a man who acted out his stories, a feat made a bit difficult because the space he had to maneuver in was about 3 feet wide and 6 feet long, but he did manage to make do. I guess I should add an “and how!” to that.

Casey’s story had to do with a teen-age pitcher he had managed in the majors in 1943, during World War II. In that circumscribed space, he acted out the story as he told it, alternately portraying the pitcher, the catcher, the hitter and the baserunner. It’s a little difficult to describe, but he pitched, swung, missed; the catcher caught the ball and returned it to the pitcher. Then the same thing except this time, he pitched to himself, swung the bat, connected and proceeded to run the bases before managing to tag himself out at home.

The only thing he failed to do was raise an umpiring arm and call himself out.

As for Bartell? In the presence of the master, Rowdy Richard stood transfixed. And, for once, silent.

There was another noteworthy night back in 1937, when I was just a teenager, when I was treated to the unique — maybe never before or since in the game’s long history — sight of an umpire being thrown out of a game and escorted from the premises by the police. The charge was public drunkenness, and I can’t think of a more public place than a ballpark.

It wasn’t his gazing fixedly at the moon between innings and trading banter with the fans behind first base that completely undid Jack Powell, the self-christened “King of the Diamond” that night.

No, what did him in was calling Solon outfielder Lou Vezilich out at second on a stolen base attempt when the ball had eluded the shortstop and was sitting untouched in center field.

Forty years later, I could still get a rise out of Lou by asking, “Do you really think you were safe at second that night?”

Proving that justice is sometimes blind, Powell, after being suspended for the balance of the season, regained his job the following spring. But the cold sober arbiter behind the plate, technically in charge but a rookie without influence over the league’s umpire-in-chief — Sacramento’s own “Midnight Mayor,” Faucho Valerio — was not offered a contract for 1938.

After retiring from a long and respected career with The Sacramento Bee, Stan Gilliam found that he just couldn't stop writing. So he brought his "Stan's Sacramento" column to the Spectrum, where it has been a favorite of readers for 15 years ... and counting.

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