I’ve known Lonnie Wheeler for so long I can’t remember exactly when we met. It seems forever that we’ve been exchanging advice, support, and recommendations of various dark Scandinavian television series involving morose inspectors chasing serial killers.

Lonnie was an important contributor to the literate old Ohio magazine of the 1980s and early 1990s. Then we spent a large part of a year writing “The Cincinnati Game” (where he saved me time and again with the game knowledge I lacked, and it was all HIS work that led The New Yorker’s Roger Angell to say it was “the first original work on baseball that I’ve come across in years”).

We survived that experience to collaborate on three more books, and recently I’d line-edited his new book, “The Bona Fide Legend of Cool Papa Bell” (Abrams Press). It prompted a paroxysm of emails through much of last year, which I stuck in a file, as some of them amused me by being quintessentially Lonnie, particularly on issues of grammar.

At one point, I wrote him about his hyphenation policies: “You should be ashamed of sending an old faux-grammarian into an hour of figuring out why HE (if not YOU) would never hyphenate the verbs ‘started up’ and ‘rounded up.’ But it’s YOU we’re speaking of, and there’s honor at stake.”

I explicated, as painlessly as possible why there should be NO hyphen in what I called phrasal passages.

Lonnie accepted what he called “my tediously small and pathetic case.” Then he wrote, “Not saying I like it, though. Phrasal passages: sounds like sinus trouble to me. And tell me you've had a better hour in the past two weeks. Can't do it, can you?”

Nope, I couldn’t. In total, I’d accumulated forty-two pages of letters/emails and some 15,000 words. Reading back through them, I could hear Lonnie’s droll, intelligent voice—always the trait that set him apart from so many in the profession.

It’s also the voice of his good new book on Cool Papa Bell, the man Lonnie was driven to write about because, as he said, “Papa is not only a legend of historic proportion, he is perhaps the noblest man I've come across in a lifetime of writing sports.”

What better time in America for Lonnie to put such a man in front of us. It’s at once a tribute to Cool Papa Bell and to Lonnie himself.

Noble is as noble does.