"THE THIRD BASE COACH OF HISTORY":

CLYDE SUKEFORTH IS SMILING. He's holding a Brooklyn Dodgers cap in one hand and pointing to the sky with the other.

He's one of the characters in the Norman Rockwell painting "Tough Call," although you can barely see him poking out behind the three umpires at home. The men in black are deciding whether to call off the game at Ebbets Field, and Sukeforth is representing optimism, while his counterpart, Pittsburgh manager Billy Meyer, is playing up the foreboding conditions. Painted by Rockwell for the April 23, 1949, cover of The Saturday Evening Post, this masterpiece of Americana now hangs in the art gallery of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

There's a certain magic to the painting, and also to the notion that Sukeforth is visited by hundreds of thousands of people every year. He's not in the Hall of Fame, per se, but he certainly belongs in Cooperstown.

For one thing, his father was once an actual cooper. More important, this humble, athletic, smart, thoughtful and resolute man from Lincoln County, Maine, changed the course of baseball history in many ways -- most of them good, one not so much if you were a Dodgers fan in 1951. Sukeforth was, in the words of the great writer Jimmy Breslin, the "third-base coach of history."

The proof of his reach in the game is in the sacred enclave adjacent to the Hall of Fame's gallery. That's where the plaques are, and Sukeforth would have been a wonderful guide for the folks strolling among them. He saw Babe Ruth pitch for the Red Sox in the 1918 World Series. He caught Eppa Rixey, Waite Hoyt and Dazzy Vance. He played with Edd Roush, Harry Heilmann, Hack Wilson, Al Lopez and Leo Durocher. He played for Casey Stengel and Max Carey and against Hall of Famers too numerous to mention. He was traded for one (Ernie Lombardi), replaced by another (Billy Herman) and took a job away from Rogers Hornsby.

Heck, he could have even corrected one of the plaques. It's the one that says Hack Wilson hit 56 homers for the Cubs in 1930. "Hack really hit 57," Sukeforth once recalled. "He hit one up in the Crosley Field seats so hard that it bounced right back. The umpires figured it must have hit the screen. I was in the Reds' bullpen and we didn't say a word." Or he could have pointed to the plaque for Dennis Eckersley and admitted he might have been wrong about him.

But there are three plaques in particular that speak for Sukeforth. If not for him, Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente might never have been waved home to Cooperstown. And then there's Branch Rickey, who always wanted "Sukey" by his side.

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