Hearing that Tug McGraw had died was one of those pieces of news that unexpectedly put a huge lump in my throat.

I was a Phillies fan when I was little. They sucked most of the time -- often, they sucked a LOT -- but they won the World Series in 1980. I had a team poster on my wall for a year or two, and it had these cheesy drawings of every guy on the team of significance. One of them, of course, was Pete Rose, whose contributions to baseball (har har) are just now being discovered in full, but another one was Tug McGraw.

I have two particularly sharp memories of McGraw. One is that image of him doing his patented thigh-slap with his glove whenever he got out of an inning. He was a great one for scaring the living crap out of you -- not one of those relief pitchers who liked to make it easy, but one of the ones who liked to make you nervous. Eddie Guardado is the same way for the Twins. Anyway, whenever Tug got out of an inning, you'd see him walk off the field smacking his glove on his leg. Smack-smack-smack-smack-smack-smack. Happy, excited, nervous, relieved . . . probably all of those.

And then Tug was pitching, of course, on the last play of the Series. When Willie Wilson struck out to end the whole thing, I remember that I jumped up in the living room from my spot down on the floor right in front of the set, so I was blocking the picture from the sane adults sitting on the couch. That's the moment, just after that last swing, when Tug McGraw turns toward third base and just waits patiently. In the TV picture (which I remember, but have also been lucky enough to catch on ESPN Classic once or twice), you can't see what he's waiting for, really, even as he slides sideways toward Bob Boone (who was catching and therefore approaching from home plate) without looking at him. All of a sudden, Mike Schmidt flies into the picture and flings himself over the top of Tug in celebration, landing horizontally across his shoulder so that they almost make a T. I remember thinking they were lucky Schmidt didn't break McGraw's ever-lovin' neck.

Goodbye, Tug. Big love from the kid jumping out of her seat.