In the middle of the day, I get a call from Big Mike, who's looking to launch phase three of our ongoing debate about Sam Fuld, backup center fielder for the Chicago Cubs.

Don't worry — I promise to spare you the details.

The thing is — in the middle of our endless chatter, I flashback to another baseball argument from years ago. And out of the blue, I think of Dave Fremon. I see his face and hear his voice. It's almost like he's in the same room. It gives me a chill, almost makes me cry.  God, I miss Dave Fremon.

I met him in the early `80s, either right before or right after Harold Washington was elected mayor, and that would have been 1983. He reminded me of myself: Poorly dressed, clothes never matched, hair rarely combed — usually looked like he just climbed out of bed.

He was one of the smartest guys I knew. Lord, lord, the things he had crammed in his brain. He knew more about baseball than any man alive, with the possible exception of Big Mike himself.

Dave and I had this longstanding argument about the Rick Sutcliffe/Joe Carter trade of 1984. It went like this....

Me: The Cubs gave up too much in that deal cause Carter's gonna be a Hall of Famer....

Dave: Without Sutcliffe, the Cubs never would have won the `84 Division, so the deal's good, no matter what....

Me: Considering how the Cubs blew the `84 playoffs to the Padres, I wish they hadn't won the damn division to begin with....

Dave: That's just too illogical to believe....

We must have had a variation on that argument for — I don't know — ten, twelve, fifteen years. It's amazing, but we never got tired of it.

By the way, just to set you straight, Dave did a lot of other far more significant things than carry on silly baseball arguments with me and his other friends. He got married, had a son, and wrote "Chicago Politics: Ward by Ward." It's a great book — an almanac of politics in Chicago. I got a well-worn copy of it on my book shelf. Take it down whenever I need to look up a fact and I wind up reading at least a few pages. It's so wry and funny — it's hard to put down. The only problem is that it's 22 years old and needs an update.

I wish Dave were around to update it. But he died of cancer back in 1999.

There's a lot of ways people live on after they're gone. There are monuments and statues; there's plaques attached to buildings or bridges. There's the books, songs, plays and/or movies they create. If they're really famous, there's the books, songs, plays and/or movies other people write about them.

Or they live on in the memories of the friends they've left behind....