When I moved to the Philadelphia area to attend college in the 1980s, I became an admirer of Jayson Stark’s whimsical Sunday baseball column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rumblings & Grumblings. Stark’s tracking of oddball statistics (“last guy to get a hit”) and goofy stories in retrospect were an inspiration to my own approach to baseball writing. But the part where he’d include a weekly “Kinerism” featuring a mangled phrase or goof made by the Mets’ venerable announcer and Hall of Fame slugger never sat right with me.

To read it, you’d think Ralph Kiner was either a clown on the order of Bob Uecker or a dumb drunken unaware jock-turned-broadcaster like Rick Sutcliffe, but Ralph of course wasn’t either of those things: He was extraordinarily knowledgeable about baseball, could hold your attention when the game got close, and could make you laugh with a story about Branch Rickey. And his screw-ups to me never seemed out of proportion to the sheer volume of his work: the man called Mets games for 50 years after all. There may not ever be anyone with more to say about them.

So while you trudge through the dozens of #kinerisms you’ll be sure to come across today (many of which are already splintering into urban legend territory: I’ve seen Ralph “quoted” wishing mothers and fathers a Happy Birthday today) please also see pieces by the terrific Marty Noble at mlb.com and the Daily News’ Gary Myers who express the admiration people held for Ralph, and the fact that when he did screw up, he did it with self-effacing humor and class. RIP Ralph!