Decades before he became a fixture in World Series and Super Bowl press boxes as a top sportswriter in America, East Williston resident Hal Bock was just a teenage copyboy in a New York city newsroom, in awe of a legend.

When Bock was in college he worked at the long-dead World Telegram and Sun newspaper, and occasionally he would see famous sports cartoonist Willard Mullin, who worked at the paper.

“I was so intimidated by him, because I’d seen his drawings and was fascinated by them, but I never could get up the nerve to talk to Willard,” Bock recalled. “He was a gregarious guy, always talking to everybody, but I was a kid and thought he was too intimidating.”

As Bock grew up and became an accomplished sportswriter of his own, spending 40 years at the Associated Press, he got to know Mullin’s family and eventually convinced them to let him help write text to go along with a book of Mullin’s cartoons. Mullin died in 1978.

That book, “Willard Mullin’s Golden Age of Baseball Drawings 1934-1972″ was eventually published in 2013, and much to Bock’s delight, was recently honored by Esquire Magazine.

The venerable publication published a list several weeks ago of the Top 100 Baseball Books ever written, and the Mullin collection was among them.

“I was flaggergasted, stunned and thrilled,” said Bock, who retired from full-time sportswriting in 2004. “The books on that list are incredible, so to be included among that, is very exciting. I think Mullin would be thrilled too.”

Bock said the book shows Mullin’s whimsical sense of humor, and they were done at a time when baseball was one of the dominant sports in America.

“One of the interesting things about him, a brilliant thing, was he would sign every cartoon with 26 pen strokes, and all but two were horizontal,” Bock said. “I don’t know how he did that, but it was unique.”

Now, of course, baseball has fallen far behind football and basketball in popularity in the U.S., but Bock said he hasn’t lost his passion for it.

“I don’t like them putting that runner on second base in extra innings, and about 100 other things they’ve done to baseball over the years,” Bock said. “They shouldn’t tinker with the sport. But I still absolutely love it. I watched a few innings of the Mets game today, and just the whole package of baseball, the green grass, the players, all of it, is still so wonderful to me.”

Bock keeps busy these days writing a few times per week for New York SportsDay, and still does presentations from time to time over Zoom.

“I love that I can still feed my passion for baseball, and sports,” Bock said. “People have asked why do you still write. I say it’s because that’s what I like doing the most. The experience of sitting down in front of a computer and writing, I still love it.”