Here’s a rather nice story about Eddie Cipot, once a pitcher for the Mets system (mostly in the minors) now…something else.

He recalled, too, that even in his dissolute years in the minors something had inspired him to find a Catholic church every Sunday morning, no matter what city he was in, no matter how he had misspent Saturday night.

Later in the 80’s, struggling with an actor’s chronic search for paying parts, Mr. Cipot asked Father DiSpenza yet again for advice. For the first and only time, Father DiSpenza mentioned entering a seminary

Mr. Cipot did not take that next step until 1993, the year Father DiSpenza died.

“I kept hearing a voice asking me, ‘Eddie, what are you doing with your life?’ ” Mr. Cipot recalled. “I couldn’t get this out of my head, that maybe God was calling me to do what Father Joe did.”

Ed Cipot was ordained as a priest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in May 2000. As Father Cipot, he served in two parishes in Harlem, St. Charles Borromeo and Resurrection, and spent a year as vocations director for the New York Archdiocese, in part looking for unexpected midlife candidates for the priesthood, as he had been. Since January, he has been assigned to the Holy Child parish on the southern end of Staten Island.