Having covered major-league baseball for 19 years, the one absolute I know is that there are Hall of Fame people as opposed to Hall of Fame players. The former grace the game as much as the latter. And if you combine in one body both ingredients, you have something truly special.

Willie Stargell was truly special.

The phrase "larger than life" falls far short in describing the shadow cast across baseball by this gregarious gentle giant of a man, who died yesterday of a stroke. Not even the 12-foot statue of Stargell unveiled by the city of Pittsburgh on the eve of the opening of the Pirates' new stadium begins to tell the story.

A truer measure of the man who was the loving patriarch of the legendary "We Are Fam-i-ly" Pirates teams of the 1970s was the tears that were guaranteed to be shed throughout the majors yesterday when the larger extended family learned it had lost Stargell far too soon, at age 61.

"I tell you what, in the history of baseball, there is only one Pops," said Phil Niekro, a fellow Hall of Famer who choked back tears yesterday as he recalled the golden era of baseball when his Braves teams battled Stargell's Pirates.

"He was the leader, the glue, the center for any club he was on," Niekro said. "As a person, there was just so much wisdom. Talk about a gentleman; he was a prince, on and off the field."

In recent years, Stargell fought a tortured battle with kidney disease, an illness that so whittled this once seemingly indestructible Paul Bunyan that it turned Stargell into a fragile splinter. "The last time I saw him, I didn't even recognize him," Niekro said quietly from his Georgia home.

As alarming as this recent view of Stargell proved to be, nothing could destroy the more lasting image, let alone the legend. Not for those of us who will forever see Willie Stargell not only as the strongest of men but also as the greatest of heroes and most cherished of friends.

So today we dutifully, fondly, pause and remember:

The Hall of Fame statistics.

The unprecedented trifecta of being named most valuable player in the National League, the National League Championship Series, and the World Series in the same year.

The classic clashes between Stargell's Fam-i-ly and Schmitty, The Bull, Lefty, and the other Phillies who bravely manned the ramparts in the war that was the Pirates-Phillies rivalry of the '70s.

Then there are those tape-measure home runs that Stargell used to make the mightiest ballparks look small. Philadelphians need only look to the distant 600 level at the Vet to recall the strength. Stargell visited those heights so often that only this week, Jim Bunning, a fellow Hall of Famer, joked that the location of the Phillies' new ballpark would be just beyond Stargell's longest poke to the right-field seats.

Dodger Stadium, that pitcher's park cherished by Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale and Don Sutton, managed to hold every great National League slugger, from Hank Aaron to Willie Mays to Stan Musial to Mike Schmidt. But Stargell cleared the outfield pavilion roofs with home runs sent clear to the distant parking lots at Chavez Ravine. Twice.

Stargell gave no ground in any park. The man who swung bats resembling telephone poles as if they were toothpicks owned seven of the 18 homers ever hit over the imposing right-field roof at Pittsburgh's late, great Forbes Field. At one time he held the long-distance home-run records in half the parks in the National League.

To know Stargell was to know that his greatest strength came from within. This natural leader of men, this quiet breaker of barriers and believer in the human race as a family worth believing in, could prompt others to smile, while commanding their total respect, as easily as he wielded those tree-trunk bats.

With a deep, mellifluous voice, Stargell would and could on any occasion spellbind, so complete was his gift for storytelling.

The man known as Pops could recreate in one instance the full-bodied fun of the Bucs teams that borrowed their nickname from Sister Sledge's rhythm-and-blues classic, "We are Family," interjecting anecdotes with a laugh that soared like those home runs. In another instance, he could bring you to tears when poignantly talking about his fallen hero and teammate, Roberto Clemente.

Stargell could entrance with his tales of the California kid who was thrust into the middle of the integration movement when, as a teenager, he helped integrate the Sophomore League in the Southwest.

Stargell took you back to the front lines when he spoke of the day a Klansman greeted him at the gates of the ballpark in Plainview, Texas, by putting a shotgun to his head and daring him to play.

Stargell played, anyway, only to be all but undone when he mistook the backfire of an automobile for the shotgun blast he was promised if he took the field. "I went to my knees, my kidneys got weak," Stargell once told me during an interview.

"But I played an outstanding game," he continued. "I had made up my mind that if I was going to die, I was going to die doing what I really wanted to do. I didn't want to go back to the projects in California. I wanted to play baseball, in the worst way."

Willie Stargell showed how not to be bitter, how not to tear down when you can build so much up, whether it be a team, a league, a game or a society. And Willie reinforced every such lesson with a bear hug and a laugh, sealing it forever in the memory banks of anyone who would listen.

This is what the Hall of Fame people are, and they shame the few but well-publicized player-brats who dare to whine about the hard row they supposedly hoe.

The truly great are forever - from Ruth to Gehrig to McGwire and Ripken, from Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby to Frank Robinson, from Frank Robby to Brooks, from Richie Ashburn to Mike Schmidt, from the gentleman Cubs Ernie Banks and Billy Williams to Sammy Sosa.

Hall of Famers such as Aaron, Koufax, Bench, Berra, Brock, Musial and Morgan; non-Cooperstown residents but class acts all the same such as Joe Torre, Dallas Green, Dusty Baker and Don Baylor; and officials such as Fay Vincent, Len Coleman, and the Phillies' Larry Shenk give baseball and life the dignity, the class and the joy both deserve.

These are the true giants. To walk among them is a privilege; to lose one too soon is heartbreak without end.

Willie Stargell left too soon.

Rest in peace, Pops. You will always be as missed as you are respected and loved.

Claire Smith is a sports columnist who's work appears in the Philadelphia Inquirer. She has been a beat baseball writer for 19 years. Claire Smith's e-mail address is smithc@phillynews.com.