The following excerpt comes from Billy Crystal's 2010 Broadway Show "One Thursday," a collection of stories from his one at-bat with the Yankees during a March '08 Spring Training game: 
As I lean here on this doorframe on this sparsely decorated stage, I can't help but remember that one glorious day that I was a New York Yankee and say memories about it out loud. I still have trouble taking it all in -- I was the Designated Hitter for the New York Yankees. Mr. October. Donny Baseball. And now, me, a schmuck from Long Beach who hosted the Oscars a few times, was slipping into the most storied uniform in baseball history. Too bad my Aunt Cheryl didn't see it that way.
Designated Hittuh? Oy! You know, your cousin Sydney just sold his screen doooer factory for seven figyahs, he can retiyah if he wants and he's only twenny-nuyen! Why don't you start a screen doooer factory, William? Exactly what I need -- career advice from someone who smokes more than Hillshire Farms.
So I show up at the field that fateful Thursday morning, and my goodness, it's too surreal; here's Johnny D, Derey J, Alexy R -- guys I used to love watching on tv when I was 58 and they're all standing three feet away from me. Well, not three feet, they weren't all crowding around me in a huddle, but you get the idea. Anyway, coach comes up to me, says how ya feeling, I say can't complain, then he comes right out with it: "Good, you're hittin' lead-off." You want me to go
first? Me??? Jews never volunteer to go first for anything, unless we're talkin' about the 4:00 buffet at the New China House in Sarasota.
There I am, trembling in the batter's box, staring down the great Paul Maholm, a guy my father never once talked about because he died many decades before this man was even born, and he's whipping balls at me faster than a Boston-area priest. I swing at the first pitch -- at least I think it was the first pitch, I actually started my swing while I was driving to the stadium -- and crack! A thunderous sound, the ball rips off the bat, and for one glorious moment, I can see the scoreboard exploding and fireworks everywhere and I hear the music from "The Natural" and Willford Brimley's jaw is just about to drop and....... Foul ball, strike one. Before I know it, I've got one strike on me and
three balls -- sorry, Lance Armstrong -- and I'm standing there thinking, "I didn't come out here to draw a walk, that's like kissing your sister!" I think I just heard Peter Fonda say "I don't get it". Well, maybe not these days, Mr. Fonda. But anyway...
I swing at the next pitch -- WHOOSH! -- nothing but air. One pitch away from striking out -- that's the last thing I need my mother to have to deal with next time she has Mr. and Mrs. Koufax over for Passover. I say to myself, "Alright, you chump -- you're gonna knock this one out of the park!" Unfortunately, that's the same thing I said to myself before "City Slickers Two," and guess what? Struck out both times. As I head back to the dugout, I can almost hear the words of my high school baseball coach, Morty Pepperman -- you know, one of those guys who treated his whistle like the Torah and his players like he'd been with them in the desert for forty years:
Some uh the people in thizz world, ya know, they's just not ment tah be no heroes. ...Coach wasn't exactly head sheriff at the grammar rodeo, if you catch my drift...
But iff ya cun juzz be hero once, even iff izz just farr a day... then my son, you'ze lived a helluva lot more than moze people. Maybe it was just a fleeting, forgettable little detail -- just another never-was up there, swingin' and missin' in a meaningless exhibition baseball game. But maybe, just maybe, my father's up there in heaven telling Mick, "There goes my son -- the New York Yankee."