Hunter died after an all-too-brief fight with ALS, but he knew when he contracted it last year that it was the way nearly all ALS sufferers end. It was a disease that not only robbed men and women of their muscle functions but their hope, because there remains no cure.

But when Hunter was diagnosed with ALS after discovering during a hunting trip that he could not raise his right arm, he decided that hope was too precious a thing to surrender. He assembled a foundation to help fight ALS, knowing that in all likelihood he would not be one of its beneficiaries. He was an active advocate for ALS awareness and traveled when he could to spread the word himself. He may not have had time, but he had plans.

Those plans ended when he fell backward down a set of concrete steps at home, unable because of the disease to break his fall. He was in the hospital for weeks, but was released Saturday in "fair" condition. It seemed as though he might at least return to functional consciousness.

Five days later, he was dead. It might have been a cruel accident, or it might have been him improving enough to go home and die in his own bed, with his family and his farm in sight. The body does remarkable things when its owner can muster sufficient will.

Then again, Hunter did remarkable things much of his life. He was one of baseball's dominant pitchers for nearly his full career. He was one of the early champions of player freedom when he called Oakland A's owner Charlie Finley on a willful contract violation. He was a generous teammate, with time and with money, by every available account.

Most of all, though, he was genuine. He never participated in sham, and was even uncomfortable with the nickname "Catfish," which Finley glued upon him when he was signed. He didn't glad-hand, or schmooze, or hang with the beautiful people. His beautiful people lived with and around him, in Hertford, N.C., and he never gave even the slightest indication of outgrowing what citified types always wrongly described as "humble roots.'"

A better word? "Deep." Hunter had seen too much urban life to be a stereotyped man of the soil, but unlike most people, he had a sense of where he belonged, and he understood that much of life is about understanding where one belongs, and with whom.

Most people didn't see that. They saw the squinty eyes and the almost Turkish-sized mustache standing atop mounds across the American League. They saw him master late-inning, bases-loaded situations, and they saw him give up solo home runs by the boatload when the game already was safely retired. They saw a man who played baseball without any wasted motions or signature gestures. He wouldn't have done well in the sound-bite, three-second video clip world in which we live.

To understand Hunter the pitcher was to make a full commitment to all two hours and 25 minutes of the game, because another thing he did was work fast. One, it was the way he liked to play, and two, it was the best way to keep the players behind him in the game for every pitch. He knew baseball, and what he didn't know, he learned from people who did. Mostly, he never forgot anything he learned, and he applied it all at one point or other.

We know only some of what he learned about ALS. We didn't know enough to cure the disease before it claimed him. On the other hand, it is a hard fact that we all die of something eventually. It isn't the dying that's at issue.

It's the quality of the life Jim Hunter lived, and the lives of those who knew him best and were touched by their knowing him.

And it is the quality of his death that matters here, too. ALS is hard on the dignity as well as everything else. But he did die in his own bed, which was only right. Jim Hunter was about a lot of things, and maybe nothing more than about one man's connection to his home.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Examiner is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.