Former colleague Michelle Gardner sent me a link to the latest from our favorite ballplayer, David Eckstein.

Eck, you may recall, was the little guy who made the most from a baseball career with the fewest natural gifts. Undersized, not very fast, almost no power as a hitter, a guy with a strange throwing motion and marginal arm strength … he persevered and had plenty of success by never taking a day off, or an hour off, or a minute off.

He was a vital cog in the Angels’ 2002 World Series champion team, a season in which he scored 107 runs and had an on-base percentage of .363, not because pitchers were afraid (ha!) to throw one in his wheel house, but because he had a tiny strike zone and because he never swung at a bad pitch. Check the numbers. He had a very nice career, given his physical limitations.

Now, Eck is doing the right thing the right way again, which as Michelle could tell you is so very Eck.

David Eckstein’s family has a genetic predisposition to kidney failure, and the healthy family members have been donating kidneys to the ill ones for 25 years. Little Eck is up next, as a donor, and he is fine with that, as explained in this nice piece by Steve Henson of Yahoo, a piece Michelle sent along to me.

It seems as if Eck’s baseball career might be over, and if that is the case then he is ready to donate a kidneys to one of his siblings (as his brother, a coach for the Washington Nationals, did last year), three of which have kidney disease.

The author or the story suggests that the Eckstein family history of dealing with deadly disease in a rational, productive manner is behind his all-business, don’t-waste-an-opportunity career.

I have written about Eck several times, most recently in September, and in this entry from 2008, he was No. 1 on my list of Angels, all-time.

Here’s wishing luck and blessings to David Eckstein and his sibling when time comes for the latest Eckstein family transplant. I don’t know if I could do that; doesn’t surprise me that Eck can.