Editor’s note: This week, The Athletic’s writers are offering essays on some of their favorite athletes. Read more of them here.

I talked with Joe O’Malley on the phone one night years ago, briefly, but I never met the man. I wanted to meet him, hoping to sweet-talk him into fleshing out his story a little, but he was a quiet, humble Boston cop who didn’t give a lick about blabbing to sportswriters and no way in hell was he going to let us take his picture and plaster it all over the paper.

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Joe O’Malley came to mind the other day when I was asked to write about my favorite baseball player growing up. And my favorite baseball player growing up was Tony Conigliaro, the star-crossed Red Sox right fielder whose plaque would be on display at the Hall of Fame this very day were it not for what happened on the night of Aug. 18, 1967, at Fenway Park. “Conig” had already established himself as the ultimate local kid done good, born in Boston, raised in Revere, just 19 years old when he debuted with the Sox in 1964. He socked a home run in his first Fenway at-bat. In 1965, he led the American League in homers. The year after that he became the youngest player in AL history to amass 100 career home runs. He had it all — looks, talent, swagger — and there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t continue for years.

And then came Aug. 18, 1967, Red Sox vs. California Angels, Fenway Park, bottom of the fourth inning.

Conigliaro, all of 22 and already a star, stepped up to the plate to face Jack Hamilton, a journeyman right-hander whom the Angels had acquired from the Mets a month earlier.

A couple hundred feet down the right-field line, in the alley near where the tarpaulin is kept, stood Joe O’Malley. He was 27, having completed his work at the Boston Police Academy and in his rookie year as a cop. On this night he was doing a detail at Fenway Park.

Hamilton’s first pitch was a fastball up and in, causing Conigliaro to throw his head back. Rico Petrocelli, Boston’s on-deck hitter, later recalled that the ball seemed to follow Conigliaro before it crashed into his face, “making the sound you’d hear if you smashed a piece of fruit,” said Rico.

Conigliaro fell to the ground, holding his hands to his face as he rolled over. Bill Valentine, the plate umpire, stepped up from his crouch and put his arms in the air. Petrocelli was first on the scene, followed by trainer Buddy LeRoux.

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A stunned silence fell over Fenway. As Conigliaro was being attended to, O’Malley and another rookie cop, Eddie O’Neill, stepped out of the alley and onto the field, as per protocol.

Finally, after several anxious minutes, Conigliaro was wheeled off the field and taken by ambulance to Sancta Maria Hospital in Cambridge. His cheekbone fractured, the retina in his left eye severely damaged, Conigliaro missed the remainder of the Sox’ pennant-winning season and all of 1968. He made a triumphant return in 1969 and hit 20 home runs, and he hit 36 more in 1970, but toward the end of that season Conigliaro was having trouble picking up the ball. He was using his right eye to compensate for what the left eye could no longer do, and this didn’t bode well for the future. Selling high, the Red Sox traded Conigliaro after the season — to the Angels.

Hamilton was long gone by then. Nonetheless, Conigliaro’s time with the Angels was brief and sad. He played in just 74 games, hitting .222. He eventually retired, though he made a second comeback with the Red Sox in 1975, earning a spot on the team’s Opening Day roster. But the same struggles persisted, and soon Conigliaro’s playing career was over, and for good.

In 1982, while being driven to Logan Airport by his brother Billy after auditioning for a broadcasting job with the Red Sox, Conigliaro suffered a heart attack, causing severe brain damage. He would linger for eight years, needing constant care, before he finally died on Feb. 24, 1990. He was 45.

It can be said that a little of Tony Conigliaro died on that August night at Fenway Park. But nobody knew that at the time, just as nobody knew that the slugger’s season was over, or that he’d miss all of 1968.

All anybody knew was that Conigliaro was on his way to Sancta Maria and there was a game to be resumed.

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And so Petrocelli walked to the plate to face Hamilton

And, a few hundred feet down the right-field foul line, rookie cops Joe O’Malley and Eddie O’Neill stepped back inside the alley.

With pinch-runner Jose Tartabull taking Conigliaro’s place at first-base, Petrocelli swung at the first pitch, launching a foul ball that made its way into the alley where, according to O’Neill, “ it went off that back wall and Joe one-handed it on the bounce.”

O’Malley, believing it to be the baseball that had hit Conigliaro, put the ball in his pocket. When he got home that night, he put it away in a bureau drawer and it remained there for 35 years.

Until he gave it to me.

But before we get to the part where O’Malley’s buddy Jay Connolly pulled up in front of my house one night in a Boston police cruiser, rang the bell and when I opened the door handed me a Ziploc-brand food storage bag containing a big-league baseball with American League president Joe Cronin’s signature on it, some background on Joe O’Malley is in order.

To say he was a decorated Boston cop is an understatement. In 1993, O’Malley and fellow officer Patrick Russell were presented with one of the highest honors a Boston police officer can receive, the Schroeder Brothers Memorial Medal. Earlier that year, at the Area A-1 station in Government Center, a prisoner lunged at police officer Thomas Rose and got his hands on Rose’s gun. Rose, a veteran cop, father of three, was shot. He would later die during surgery at Mass. General Hospital. O’Malley and Russell struggled with the prisoner, with O’Malley getting control of the gun, preventing Russell from being shot.

O’Malley later received the George L. Hanna Award “for heroic acts of bravery and outstanding conduct,” from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He also earned the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association’s Brotherhood Award.

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It wasn’t until 2002 that Joe O’Malley entered my life. I had written a couple of columns for my old newspaper, the Boston Herald, on why I believed, and still believe, the Red Sox should retire Tony Conigliaro’s No. 25 — not just because of the fine seasons he had already submitted but in consideration of what he may have accomplished had his career not been cruelly derailed.

A few weeks after one of those columns appeared, I received a jolting call from a member of Tony Conigliaro’s family: Tony’s daughter, Jessica Wheaton, wanted to meet me.

Up to this point nobody outside the family was aware Conigliaro had ever fathered a child. But as I would learn when I met Jessica, she held no hostility toward Conigliaro over the brief relationship between the ballplayer and her mother that took place a few months after the 1970 season. She spoke eloquently and from the heart, how her mother decided to raise the baby on her own, and how the mother’s parents, Jessica’s grandparents, eventually got on board and played a major role in Jessica’s life.

Jessica told me about the only time she looked upon Tony Conigliaro: She knocked on the door of the funeral home hours before the wake and very nicely said she’d like to pay her respects to her father.

As part of my research for the story I was doing on Jessica, I contacted Beverly Bruno Collins of the Bruno Funeral Chapel. “I opened the door and saw this pretty young woman with big, brown meatball eyes,” she told me. “She looked so much like her father that she didn’t even have to say a word. I just knew.”

When Joe O’Malley read the piece on Jessica I wrote for the Herald, he thought of the baseball that had been buried inside his bureau for so many years. Not once had he ever thought about selling it, and, though he did consider reaching out to the Conigliaro family, he always held back. This tragic reminder of that August night in 1967 was probably not something they’d want to see, he decided.

The story about Jessica Wheaton changed things. The fact that the Red Sox had never retired Conigliaro’s number changed things.

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I was contacted not by O’Malley, but by another Boston cop, Jay Connolly. He explained to me that Joe had decided the baseball should no longer remain in the bureau drawer, and he was wondering what Jessica Wheaton’s thoughts were on the matter. After thinking it over, she felt it belonged in a museum — and that’s how a plan was hatched to offer it to the Sports Museum of New England. Joe and I eventually talked on the phone, but it was made clear he didn’t want to meet. We communicated for weeks, usually through Jay Connolly, but things didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I began to think Joe had lost interest, or had made other plans for the disposition of the baseball.

And then, on a late summer night in 2002, a Sunday night, the weather unseasonably muggy, Jay Connolly called. He asked if I was home. Yes. He asked for my address. He explained that he was on the Southeast Expressway near the gas tanks and that he’d be coming by.

Less than 20 minutes later a Boston police cruiser pulled up in front of my house. Jay rang the bell. When I answered, he handed me the baseball.

We talked for a while, mostly about Joe O’Malley, how he’s such a quiet guy, sticks to his family, doesn’t like publicity. I was fine with all that, I said. Jay left. I sat here with the baseball, turning it over in my hand, inspecting the Joe Cronin signature … and wondering: Is this really the baseball that crashed into Tony Conigliaro’s face on that August night in 1967?

The ball that hit Tony Conigliaro on display at The Sports Museum of New England. (Courtesy of The Sports Museum)

I was very lucky in this respect: The person best equipped to answer that question — the plate umpire, Bill Valentine — was still living.

“There would have been no reason to throw it out,” he told me. “You have to understand that this was a different era. It’s not like today, where they change baseballs on just about every pitch.”

Valentine noted that in those days, “We were under orders from Cal Hubbard, who was the supervisor of umpires, not to be changing baseballs. That night, the ball hit (Conigliaro) in the eye and fell to the ground. I didn’t throw it out. I’d swear to it. I would have remembered that. Guys got hit all the time and we just threw the ball back to the pitcher.”

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I also contacted the first-base umpire from that game, Bill Kinnamon, 83 at the time.

“I remember very vividly that memo from Cal Hubbard,” he told me. “It was a directive to keep baseballs in use. We didn’t throw baseballs out of the game.”

(Valentine, who later became the longtime general manager of the minor-league Arkansas Travelers, died in 2015.  Kinnamon died in 2011. The other umpires who worked the game, Larry Knapp and Frank Umont, had passed away prior to 2002.)

I had determined that the baseball was almost certainly the one that Jack Hamilton held in his hand that night as Tony Conigliaro was digging in. It was not a happy realization for me. I again held it my hands, pondering the alternate historical timeline it had denied us. Tony C. might have hit 700 home runs had he remained healthy, and if he hit 700 he might have kept plugging away and chased after the home run record — 755 — that Henry Aaron would later set.

I’ve heard people say that was never going to happen. Given the way Conigliaro crowded the plate, they say, he was an accident waiting to happen. Bullshit, I say. Lots of players crowd the plate. Frank Robinson crowded his way all the way to Cooperstown.

There was a nice little ceremony held when the baseball went on display at the Sports Museum, located inside TD Garden. But despite several invites, Joe O’Malley skated his lane by not showing up. He designated his grandson, Joseph Mackintire, nine years old at the time, to be his emissary.

As I learned on Tuesday, Joe O’Malley died in 2017. He was 77. A magnificent procession of uniformed police officers turned out at his funeral, everything very official and dignified, after which his remains were transported in the “Blue Goose,” a 1950s-era Boston Police wagon, to Cedar Grove Cemetery in Dorchester.

“The tribute at his funeral was sad but impressive,” his daughter, Mary Mackintire, told me Tuesday night.  “He would have been steaming about it. He never wanted notoriety. He never wanted the limelight. He never wanted his 15 minutes of fame.

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“You couldn’t even buy him lunch. He always insisted on buying you lunch. He’d go to a Red Sox game and buy the cheapest ticket he could find, saying he didn’t want to sit in those $75 seats. But he’d want you to sit there.”

Yet there were occasions when Joe O’Malley would positively beam. He’d beam over the successes of his family, his friends, his co-workers, and, Lordy, did he ever enjoy the simplicity of hanging out with buddies.

And, yes, surprisingly, happily, Joe O’Malley beamed that time when he want to a Saturday afternoon Bruins game at the Garden and viewed the glass case containing the baseball he’d held onto for 35 years.

“I think he loved seeing it there because people had told him, oh, you know you can get all this money for it on eBay,”  said Mary Mackintire. “Hearing that, he knew he wanted it to be somewhere where people could see it, and then tell baseball stories. He could see that it made his friends happy, and that’s what made him happy.”

(Photo: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)