The ultimate baseball lifer, Rigney spent 60 years in the game, as a player, manager, coach, scout, broadcaster and executive.

An honest baseball lifer, Watson was just telling it as he saw it, even though it is not that simple.

Torre has developed friendships with the fellow cancer patients that he frequently sees and, like a baseball lifer, called them his teammates.

Actually, for a baseball lifer like Showalter, it is much more excruciating.

That is a direction a baseball lifer rarely takes.

And always positive, he's looking ahead, like every baseball lifer, to next year.

He never seemed to be a baseball lifer, the old coaches or scouts or even managers who cannot live without the game.

Torre was 55 then, a baseball lifer getting a fourth chance at managing a major league team.

The key contribution was made by Sandy Johnson, the baseball lifer who is the assistant general manager.

But Johnson is the kind of baseball lifer who deserves a shot at the top job.