Chicken on the Hill with Will

There was a stretch in Pittsburgh when a Willie Stargell home run meant free chicken. Pops owned a restaurant up in the Hill District, and his broadcaster Bob Prince turned it into a piece of baseball liturgy. Every time Stargell connected, Prince would call for chicken on the Hill with Will, and somewhere in the city, dinner was on the house.

The beauty of it is how well it fit the man. Stargell hit the kind of home runs that felt communal, the towering shots that cleared the roof at Forbes Field and reached the upper decks at Three Rivers, the most of any hitter in the entire 1970s. He was the one handing out little gold stars for his teammates' caps. He was the one they called Pops because he held the whole clubhouse together. A promotion that fed the neighborhood every time he went deep was exactly right for a player whose game always felt like generosity.

The origin story has more than one version. In the most-told one, Prince promised the free chicken on the air before Stargell had even swung, never warning the restaurant, and the place got mobbed once Willie came through. Whether it happened exactly that way or grew a little in the retelling hardly matters. Some players you remember by their numbers. Willie Stargell you remember by the sound of a whole city celebrating, with a side of fried chicken.