soft-spoken

He’s like Clark Kent with peach fuzz: tall, slender, soft-spoken, favoring khakis and long-sleeved shirts and more earnest than a Peace Corps volunteer.

One can hear the wonder still evident in his voice when he recalls the improbable trajectory of the soft-spoken grade-school dropout who left this place behind and became a baseball icon.

“When he died, I had the rug pulled out from under me,” she says in a soft-spoken tone as she gently molds a ball holder for an incense stick.

This series, soft-spoken veteran Chris Taylor told his teammates in a hitter’s meeting before Game 1 on Saturday, would be all about intensity.

In person, he’s tall and commanding, still with the muscular frame of a young athlete, but also the soft-spoken baritone of someone who’s worked out a lot of complicated feelings in his songwriting.