WORTHVILLE, Pa. — In his day, Jimmy Slagle, a native of this speck of a town in northwestern Pennsylvania, was one of the best players on the most dominant team in major league baseball.

Slagle, in a team photograph of the 1906 Chicago Cubs, often returned to Worthville.

The New York Times

Slagle was a starting outfielder for theChicago Cubs, who were, believe it or not, the Yankees of his time. The team went to three World Series in four years, won consecutive titles in 1907 and 1908 (the Cubs have not won a Series since) and, in 1906, had a winning percentage of .763, a record that still stands.

By any measure, Slagle was the most famous person ever to come out of Worthville (population 85, as of the 2000 census), about 70 miles northeast of Pittsburgh.

But time can erase just about any memory, and after he died, childless, 51 years ago in Chicago, Slagle quickly slipped from local lore.

And that is where he would have stayed if not for the efforts of one Worthville man, Randy Raybuck, who could not forget the stories his father, Todd Raybuck, now long dead, had once told him.

“They were tales of Jimmy coming back for visits,” the 55-year-old Mr. Raybuck recalled, “and the legend that he could throw a ball over the roof of his home here and run in back and catch it on the fly.”

Indeed, it was his speed that earned Slagle one of his nicknames, Rabbit. (His lack of height — he stood, at most, 5-foot-6 — brought him another, Shorty.)

But what Mr. Raybuck took most from his father’s stories was that “Jimmy would come back; he was one who was never ashamed of Worthville.”

For Mr. Raybuck, who lives in the home where he grew up, that was important.

Some time back, Mr. Raybuck realized that this October would be 100 years since Slagle had his finest hour before his career was cut short by injuries.

During the 1907 World Series, against Ty Cobb and the Detroit Tigers, Slagle stole the show, in all but the most literal of senses. Not only did he drive in a team-high four runs and score the winning run in the deciding fifth game, he also stole six bases, an achievement that remains a record for a five-game Series.

So Mr. Raybuck, acutely mindful that Worthville had done nothing to honor Slagle, set out this summer to do so.

He proposed to the Borough Council that a memorial be put up on Main Street in front of the Worthville Community Center, which happens to have been the one-room schoolhouse that Slagle probably attended as a boy.

“I thought it was a nice gesture,” said Lowell Young, 70, the Council president, who lives in the house where Slagle grew up. “Of course, people in town didn’t think paying taxes for a memorial was a good idea.”

Worthville’s entire annual budget is $1,900 — most of it for power and maintenance of the town’s 13 streetlights — and so appropriating enough for a $1,200 memorial was perhaps more than could have been expected.

Mr. Raybuck, who works for the local gas company and owns a small auto parts business with his wife, briefly tried to raise donations, with little success. But he went ahead on his own, paying for the bronze plaque that lists Slagle’s accomplishments, as well as the 600-pound sandstone rock it is mounted on.

In the end, Mr. Raybuck said, he thought it a good way to honor not only Slagle but also his own father, a former amateur ballplayer who died of a heart attack at 53, but not before passing down some lasting memories to his son.

On Oct. 19 the memorial went up, “dedicated to the memory of a country boy who made his mark on the world.”

It was a “Field of Dreams” moment. Jimmy Slagle’s memorial reconnected an old ballplayer to his community, and Randy Raybuck to his father.

“I think he would have been proud,” Mr. Raybuck said.