In journalism, there is an old saying that a reporter should never become part of the story. While that remains good advice, there are those reporters who become so linked to their beat that they become part of the story.

That's surely the case with longtime Advertiser sports writer Ferd Borsch, who died this week at age 77. While he could (and did) write about almost every sporting event, his first love was baseball.

He covered every game the Hawaii Islanders ever played in the Pacific Coast League. And it seemed as if he could quote you any possible statistic from each and every one of those games.

Ferd Borsch was a man of great enthusiasms, for baseball, for jazz, for the joys of good food and drink and, most of all, for his family. We should all live life so fully.