I was sorry to read in Aaron Goldstein’s blog that Bill “Moose” Skowron has gone to that great dugout in the sky. Another of my boyhood baseball cards has left us.

Skowron was a good hitter, traded by the Yankees to the Dodgers after the 1962 season. It must have been a great pleasure for the Moose when the Dodgers swept the Yankees in the 1963 World Series with Skowron hitting .385.

In the fifties there were two Major League Baseball players nicknamed Moose. Walt Dropo was called Moose because he was from Moosup, Connecticut. Skowron was called Moose because he looked like one. Then there’s the business of the boot camp buzz cut his grandfather gave him. Because of the look, people started calling him Mussolini, which, with the help of the facial resemblance, got shortened to Moose.

Dropo, also a power-hitting first baseman, died in 2010.