THE BAKER’S DOZEN in the Sports section of the old The (Garden Grove) News in 1963.

Writers influence writers, and no sports writer ever influenced me as much as Hugh Baker, the sports columnist for the Garden Grove Daily News (later The Orange County Evening News).

From 1959 to 1970 he featured the strange, the regrettable, the amazing and usually amusing stars and stunts of sports six days a week in The News.

He held the title of sports editor of the three-person sports staff, but his main contribution was to use irony, sly humor and self-deprecation to put his “Baker’s Dozen” column on a par with other area columnists such as the Los Angeles Times’ Jim Murray.

It was he who introduced me (and other readers) to the travails of Marv Throneberry, first baseman for the 1962 New York Mets. Marv played the position as if he had just been introduced to the sport the previous afternoon.

He movingly (and humorously) described “Marvelous Marv” gamely trying to play the position, “battling those ground balls to the last bitter bounce” as his team lost a record 120 games.

Unlike some sports columnists who merely strung together short items (like Eddie West from The Register) or idolized sports stars, Baker sought to humanize not just the sportsmen but also the sportwriters, who he described as a bunch of free-lunch ne’r-do-wells drinking until they saw “little green men” more clearly than they did the players on the field.

He liked to play pranks on young sportwriters. He and long-time Angels manager Bill Rigney once cooked up a fictional baseball player named “Prison-Faced” Muley, inventing exploits that charmed the rookies until they went to the record books and found him as mythical as the Plainfield Teachers (you could look it up).

I’m not saying that my stuff is near as good as Baker’s was. All I can say is I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for him.