“I don’t think there’s any place that I relax more than sitting in Nats Park and watching my now world champion Nats play a game,” (Dr. Anthony Fauci)

“People don’t realize that half of the people in Brooklyn, half of the kids in the street like me, were Yankee fans and half were Dodger fans,” he said, adding, “And we used to spend all of our time arguing who’s better: Duke Snider or Mickey Mantle? Yogi Berra or Roy Campanella? Pee Wee Reese or Phil Rizzuto?” (Dr. Anthony Fauci)

Anthony Stephen Fauci (born December 24, 1940 in NYC, NY) is an American physician-scientist and immunologist who serves as the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the chief medical advisor to the president.

Anthony was born on December 24, 1940, in Brooklyn, New York, to Eugenia Lillian and Stephen A. Fauci. His father was a Columbia University-educated pharmacist who owned his own pharmacy. Anthony's mother and sister Denise worked the pharmacy's register, and Fauci delivered prescriptions. The pharmacy was located in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn, directly beneath the family apartment, previously in the Bensonhurst neighborhood.

Fauci's grandparents immigrated to the United States from Italy in the late 19th century. His paternal grandparents, Antonino Fauci and Calogera Guardino, were from Sciacca, and his maternal grandparents were from Naples. His maternal grandmother Raffaella Trematerra was a seamstress, and his maternal grandfather Giovanni Abys was a Swiss-born artist noted for his landscape and portrait painting, magazine illustrations in Italy, as well as graphic design for commercial labels, including olive oil cans. He grew up Catholic.

Anthony attended Regis High School, a private Jesuit school in Manhattan's Upper East Side, where he captained the school's basketball team despite standing only 5 ft 7 in tall. After graduating in 1958, he attended the College of the Holy Cross, graduating in 1962 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in classics with a pre-med track. Fauci then attended medical school at Cornell University's Medical College (now Weill Cornell Medicine) where he graduated first in his class with a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1966. He completed an internship and residency in internal medicine at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center (now Weill Cornell Medical Center).

As a physician with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Fauci has served American public health in various capacities for more than 50 years, and has been an advisor to every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan. He became director of the NIAID in 1984 and has made contributions to HIV/AIDS research and other immunodeficiency diseases, both as a scientist and as the head of the NIAID. From 1983 to 2002, Fauci was one of the world's most frequently-cited scientists across all scientific journals. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, for his work on the AIDS relief program PEPFAR. He has testified in front of Congress more than 200 times.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, he was one of the lead members of President Donald Trump’s White House Coronavirus Task Force. In the early stages of the pandemic, The New Yorker and The New York Times described Fauci as one of the most trusted medical figures in the United States.

A devoted Yankees fan, who came to also root for the Nationals, Dr. Fauci enabled the (shortened) 2020 baseball season by recommending protocols that helped MLB manage through the season in the middle of the pandemic. His opening day pitch to kick off the season on 7/23/20, signaled the resilience of the American public and the sanctioning of baseball during difficult times. His wild ceremonial first pitch was accepted by Twitter fans, saying he threw wide because he doesn't like to "anyone to catch anything."

His 2020 Topps Now #2 baseball card was a smash hit during the pandemic, selling 51,512 cards in 24 hours and obliterating the previous record of 19,396 cards sold of Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s debut.

(excerpted from NY Times, Wikipedia)