Rod Beck drove a van conversion early in his career with the San Francisco Giants, and after he started making the big money ($750,000-to-1 million-plus) I was anxious to see what kind of rig he rolled up in the following year.

And, of course, at the start of the 1993 season he rolled up in the same van conversion. When I asked him why he didn't upgrade to a Lexus -- the totally un-Beckian car of choice for ballplayers in the early and mid-1990s -- he looked at me as if I'd asked him to shave.

"A Lexus?" he asked. "You ever try to tap a keg in the back of a Lexus?"

Beck was as real as that van conversion, and the friendliest and least affected ballplayer I've ever met. He came up to the Giants in 1991, the same year I began a four-year stint as a beat writer covering the team for the San Francisco Chronicle. He died Saturday at age 38, and he deserved longer.

One day before a game at Candlestick Park in 1995 he told me he spent the afternoon at a mall near his house on the Peninsula. He wanted a slice of pizza at Sbarro but he didn't have any cash, so he went to an ATM to withdraw a twenty. When he got the receipt, he saw he had more than $400,000 in his checking account.

"That's the hard part about making so much," he said. "You gotta keep remembering to move the money."

The man could pitch, too, but that part was secondary. He lost about 8 mph from his fastball at the end of the 1993 season, when he pitched in eight of the final nine games. Starting in the sixth or seventh of those games, he was getting outs on nothing but guts and junior-varsity fastballs.

Before the start of the season's final series, a four-game do-or-die in Los Angeles, he said he was going to position his outfielders with their backs to the wall to save them the trouble of getting there. When I asked him whether it might be a good idea to take a day off and let someone else close, he said, "As long as they want to keep handing me the ball, I'll keep taking it."

This Week's List
• Since it seems to be a topic of everlasting intrigue, here's the issue for baseball's Hall of Fame voters: Are you judging on the legitimacy of performance, or a personal morals clause?

• Because, in the case of Barry L. Bonds, here's your dilemma: If it's legitimacy of performance, there's no question, but it gets fuzzy if you say you're not voting for Sammy Sosa or Mark McGwire but you are voting for Bonds because Bonds would have been a Hall of Famer based on his pre-1998 body of work.

• The point being: If you're not voting for guys who are suspected of cheating, it shouldn't matter what they did before they were suspected of cheating.

• The last thing I want to do is question the legitimacy of legions of mock drafters, so consider this just another uneducated voice in the wilderness: Mike Conley Jr. has never looked like the No. 4 overall pick to me.

• Just for the heck of it: Scott Garrelts.

• Here's a question from my kind of fantasy league: Wouldn't it be awesome if the Lakers traded for Kevin Garnett and then turned around and traded away Kobe?

• And finally, yeah yeah yeah: I know Kobe has a no-trade clause, but can't a man dream?

• If you only could guarantee you wouldn't have to have a news conference ...: How many GMs are sitting there looking at Tank Johnson on waivers, there for the taking, and saying, "I want to, I want to, I want to but I can't."

• And meanwhile, at Titans' headquarters in Nashville, one sentiment prevails: Fellas, now we're going it alone.

• The best news of the baseball season: Interleague play, over.

• I'm only passing along the following information because I've already put my money down in Vegas: Quarterback Jon Kitna said the Lions would win 10 games, then he saw the schedule and decided it was so easy they'd win more than 10 games.

• Apparently BLUBARUB was taken: The award for most preposterous acronym goes to soccer's CONCACAF.

• And finally, YouTube isn't all that until it can give me the following footage: Bobby Cox in the meeting with feuding John Smoltz and Chipper Jones, taking off his cap and running his hand through his scalp before saying, "All right, dammit, don't I have enough problems without you two?"

Tim Keown is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. Sound off to Tim here.