Dick Thompson, VA nurse, devoted baseball writer; 52

DICK THOMPSON

A first published book can be cause for preening by many writers, but Dick Thompson kept his feet firmly planted on the ground - the baseball diamond, to be precise - when his turn to strut arrived in 2005.

"Not being a professional writer, I just look at it as a hobby," he told the Globe that year when "The Ferrell Brothers of Baseball" hit the stores. "If people buy it, that's great."

More important things than self-aggrandizement were on his mind. A regional champion at baseball trivia, he liked to shine a light on careers he believed had been unjustly forgotten.

"Anything he did with his baseball work - and this is just my opinion - was always clarifying and righting errors, to make somebody get the credit that they were due," said his wife, Barbara of Dartmouth. "I was flattered that I would be married to someone like that, with that kind of moral integrity."

A nurse for many years at the Veterans Administration medical centers in Brockton and West Roxbury, Mr. Thompson was 52 and planned to retire in a couple of years. He died Jan. 2 in St. Luke's Hospital in New Bedford, 36 hours after he began experiencing flulike symptoms. His wife is awaiting results of tests to determine why his health declined so rapidly.

"Do you want to hear a great Babe Ruth story? Or maybe read another Ted Williams interview? Well, not me," he wrote in 1995 for the Baseball Biography Project of the Society for American Baseball Research, based in Cleveland. "Give me a player who made just a brief big league appearance: They are the people with real stories to tell."

Mr. Thompson discovered his affinity for baseball while growing up in Middleborough and turned to writing in the 1970s when he read about the baseball research society in Sports Illustrated magazine. He joined the organization and began writing for its journals.

Although writing remained a hobby, something to pursue when he wasn't nursing patients back to health in intensive care units, his research was meticulous.

"He was like a monk scribe, somebody you would see quietly attending to the details of everything," his wife said. "He was just getting it all straight for history."

In 2004, the Society for American Baseball Research gave Mr. Thompson its highest honor, the Bob Davids Award, named for the organization's founder.

Richard J. Thompson was born in Brockton and graduated from the School of Nursing at Brockton Hospital. He served as a nurse with the US Navy during the Vietnam War, stationed stateside.

The couple met in 1981, when both were nurses at the VA Medical Center in Brockton.

"I was most struck by his kindness and his organizational skills, not only with the patients but with me as a new nurse there," she said. "He was always helpful, like the Boy Scout promise. He even had a boyish look about him, especially when he was happy. He had a little lift to his step."

And while Mr. Thompson was a dedicated runner and loved to golf, hike, and bicycle, he may have been happiest delving into the recesses of baseball history, unearthing and polishing gems from the murkiest niches of the sport's past.

Of late he was writing about Cannonball Bill Jackman, a Negro League player whose astonishing performances as a pitcher are largely forgotten today. For one essay, Mr. Thompson found a newspaper account from 1929 documenting a game Jackman pitched.

"He tossed 151 pitches and fanned 14 in winning the 6-1 contest," Mr. Thompson wrote. "The victory reportedly brought his season's record to 49 wins against just five losses."

Other essays for National Pastime, a publication of the Society for American Baseball Research, featured accomplishments that were less illustrious, but no less interesting.

One Saturday in 1977, Mr. Thompson was watching a Los Angeles Dodgers game on television at Brockton's VA medical center when a patient who had fallen asleep in the chair next to him awoke and blurted out that his brother had pitched in the major leagues.

That brief exchange prompted Mr. Thompson to apply his research acumen to Haddie Gill, a Brockton native whose big-league career consisted of one inning for the Cincinnati Reds. Still, Mr. Thompson wrote, as a member of the All-Collegians, a touring team that played exhibition games against the pros, Gill pitched against the Red Sox in 1923 and three days later played outfield in a game with a New York Yankees squad that included Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

At the end of the essay, Mr. Thompson noted: "For a cup-of-coffee ball player, Haddie Gill sure got around."

Players whose careers take up but a few lines on a page in any baseball encyclopedia fascinated Mr. Thompson. In 1993, he spent a day on Cape Cod with Bill Chamberlain, who grew up in Milton and played 12 games with the Chicago White Sox in 1932.

"He started five and lost all of them," Mr. Thompson wrote. "But despite the fact that Chamberlain never won a big-league game, he has plenty of big league memories."

He concluded the article by writing, "You can keep those Hall of Famers. Give me an afternoon with gentlemen like these any day."

Like the players he wrote about, Mr. Thompson was content to work happily in the background.

"He was a selective genius," his wife said. "He was a genius about his work and also about baseball, but he never, ever put himself in the front."

In addition to his wife, Mr. Thompson leaves a stepdaughter, Eve Gates of Dartmouth; a sister, Jeanne Cianciola of Hanover; and three grandchildren.

A service has been held.