PITTSBURGH — It must have seemed silly to think a moment already so special could be enhanced, but a certain in-game visitor to the Pirates dugout made it so.

The date was Sept. 30, 1972. The place was Three Rivers Stadium. Roberto Clemente had just recorded his 3,000th hit, smacking a fourth-inning double off Jon Matlack of the New York Mets.

Standing on second base, Clemente waved his helmet to the small but adoring crowd, creating an image that will last forever. The hit turned out to be the final one of Clemente's illustrious career. He would be killed in a plane crash three months later.

After assuming his position in right field one more time in the top of the fifth, Clemente was removed from the game. (Bill Mazeroski pinch hit for him.) That is when Clemente's teammate, Steve Blass, looked up and saw Willie Mays walking across the infield toward the Pirates dugout, an image that has me thinking of Shoeless Joe Jackson walking out of the cornfield in "Field of Dreams."

Mays was then a part-time player for the New York Mets, and not a bad one. At age 41, in 195 at-bats after coming over from San Francisco, he had eight home runs, a .408 on-base percentage and an .848 OPS.

But those are just numbers. This was basically a movie scene. Bruce Markusen, writing later for the Baseball Hall of Fame, described the encounter this way: "Although Clemente and Mays were never particularly close, they had played together one season in winter ball during the mid-1950s. The two stars clearly respected each other. Mays hugged Clemente, congratulating him on the milestone."

Wait a second, Clemente and Mays once played in the same outfield? Did a baseball ever hit the grass? For Blass, them briefly sharing the same dugout was enough to provide a lifetime memory.

"I saw that, in our dugout. I have to pinch myself. I was there," Blass said late Tuesday night, shortly after news broke that Mays had passed away at age 93. "Both of those guys had the ability to take a 10-year major league veteran and turn him into a 10-year-old kid. You didn't want to miss anything."

Willie Mays. It's one of those magical sports names from another time — like Babe Ruth or Joe Louis, Joe DiMaggio or Jesse Owens. When ESPN ranked the top athletes of the 20th Century, Mays came in at No. 8, behind only Michael Jordan, Ruth, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Wayne Gretzky, Owens and Jim Thorpe.

That sounds about right. I never saw Mays play in his prime, but I knew from the time I was around 8 that he was maybe the coolest athlete who ever walked the planet. I knew about the basket catches and the bullet throws and the 660 home runs that would have been way more if he hadn't missed nearly all of his age 21 and 22 seasons on account of an Army stint, after winning NL Rookie of the Year as a 20-year-old. That might have cost him 80 home runs and the No. 1 spot all time, considering he hit 41 his first year back.

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