In any case, I had a question for him, but it was an embarrassing one. I hesitated and delayed and dithered until finally I decided: What the hell? How often was I going to find myself sitting next to Billy Williams?

“Mr. Williams,” I asked, “what’s the difference between a curveball and a slider?”

A couple of the more grizzled veteran reporters were within earshot and, predictably, they laughed. I felt my face burn red. It was like asking Mozart the difference between the white and black keys on a piano. But Billy Williams put his hand on my shoulder, and he took my notepad, and he began to diagram the exact difference between the two pitches. For the next 20 or so minutes, he gave me a master class on the curveball and the slider, the challenges of hitting both, the variances between Bob Gibson’s slider and Steve Carlton’s slider, between Bert Blyleven’s curveball and Tom Seaver’s curveball.

And at the end of the lesson, he smiled at me and said: “Don’t let these other guys fool you. None of them knows the difference between a curveball and slider.

Posnanski, Joe. The Baseball 100. Maryland: Avid Reader Press, 2021

Often the embarrassing question, the obvious question, leads to true understanding.

Baseball is in the details.