Steve Lyons Drops His Pants

July 16, 1990, Tiger Stadium. Steve Lyons, the White Sox utility man whose nickname was Psycho, led off the fifth with a bunt single against Dan Petry and slid into the bag. While Petry argued with first baseman Cecil Fielder, Lyons felt the dirt in his uniform and did the thing a person does in a backyard: he unbuckled his pants to shake it out.

He got them to his knees, remembered the crowd and the broadcast, and hauled them back up. He was wearing sliding shorts. Nobody was hurt. The clip outlived almost everything else he did on a baseball field, which is its own small injustice and also the reason it is in the catalog. Lyons later became a broadcaster and told the story on himself, which is the decent version of this kind of moment.

It is here as a personality entry, not as a moral one. The sport has room for a man who forgot, for three seconds, that he was not alone.