Diamonds In Mind

Bats And Balls And Fathers And Sons

Little League is starting up again. Tryouts were last week, and then the draft. It is my youngest son’s last year of eligibility, and I found out Friday evening that he is a Padre. I informed him of this Saturday morning when I went in to wake him up. He had no idea what I was talking about.

“William, you’re a Padre.”

Rubs his eyes. “What?”

He thought I was using some obscure term of familiarity, like compadre. I call him stuff like that sometimes. “You know, like the San Diego Padres. Mr. Dearing called, you’re on his team.” Dearing is someone I know, a good guy and excellent coach. Knowledgeable and even-tempered. I was glad it was him when I found out. My son was pleased, as well.

*****

People tend to get overly sentimental about baseball, especially about the part it plays in the relationship between a father and a son. The movie Field Of Dreams – which was twisted in this direction, away from the novel it is based on – is the best example of this. That novel, Shoeless Joe, was terrific; but almost entirely different in basic ways from the resulting movie, which I found pleasant, but not great. However, Field Of Dreams is useful in pointing out how some men feel about baseball, and their dads. Not me, but. . .

A father-son relationship can be complicated, and sometimes not so pleasant, especially during the child’s adolescence and young adulthood. That is my experience with my father. It was not an Oedipal thing, in the Freudian sexual sense. My father was funny and easy-going on the surface, but was by necessity the aloof authority figure in our two-parent family setup, and therefore a representation of repression to a son who was trying to break free and establish his own identity. Further complications arose from big expectations projected onto me by him. But I am getting off the subject here, and out of my depth. Simply put, a father-son relationship does not have to be overtly ambivalent, but sometimes it is.

The thing with baseball is, it can be a neutral ground in this conflict. A love for the game, passed on by a father to his son and nurtured by a mutual interest, can be a place of respite in an otherwise turbulent relationship at the time, and/or a way to resolve old conflicts later on, when both the son and his dad are presumably more mature and can look at their relationship with a greater sense of equanimity. Even if the father-son interaction is not openly difficult, there is almost always a distance there, I am not sure why. Baseball can be a way to bridge that distance, at least for a little while.

My relationship with my own sons is far from perfect, but not nearly as crazy as mine was with my dad, for many reasons. Our baseball relationship has been steady but not so intense, partly because our conflicts outside of baseball are not large, and also because I have consciously de-emphasized my own place in my kids’ baseball lives. We go to games and talk about baseball and I have tried to pass on to them the knowledge I have from playing from childhood through high school, but I have never formally coached them, and never will. This is again in reaction to personal experience, as my own father’s and my relationship, already tenuous in my teenage years, was almost destroyed forever by the two seasons he decided, against my tacit wishes, to be my Senior League coach.

For all the gauzy good feeling about baseball and paternal relationships, I have seen real ugliness in youth baseball. Even as kids, we used to make fun of the minority of the dads who would get all worked up about the games and yell and scream and stuff. Even if they were our own. We used to call them ‘railing dads’ because during games, instead of sitting in the stands with everyone else, they would group along the fence rails behind the first- and third-base lines, and mutter to each other and yell at the kids and coaches and umpires on the field. We thought they were fucking nuts; and we resolved to never be that way ourselves, when we grew up.

I have kept that resolution, but it has cost me. I’ve never formally coached either of my boys, as I said, and I have restrained my natural passion at their games, for fear of becoming like those railing dads.

But apparently, not everyone has kept the promises we made, as kids. I have seen a new generation of overbearing fathers at games, hovering over everything like a dark cloud at a picnic. And though I have restrained myself, I have at least a passing familiarity with the ugly, creepy feeling that comes when you realize you are way too wrapped up in a kids game, probably because in some way you are trying to relive your own glory days vicariously through your children; or, even worse, you are depending on your child out there, standing in the outfield watching an airplane fly over instead of the action on the field. . . you are burdening your own sweet child with the task of redressing your failures in baseball, and making up for your own shortcomings playing a game. That is a sick feeling, and it kind of scares me.

*****

One other thing people tend to do when discussing baseball is over intellectualize it. Like I have been doing here, for practically this entire post. Because for all the heavy theorizing, the real pleasures of baseball are mostly simple and visceral and tactile. Yesterday afternoon, between church and a Boy Scouts meeting, my son and I decided we should go to the schoolyard and throw the ball around, to start getting ready for the upcoming season. I still enjoy playing catch with him and his brother, even though I have a frayed rotator cuff now, and every time I throw the ball it feels like my arm is going along with it.

We gathered up some balls in the garage and our gloves and we walked to the schoolyard down the street. Once we got there, we stood maybe ten yards apart and started throwing the ball to each other, in a smooth, easy motion. Once we got warm, and started throwing with some velocity, we heard the familiar sound of the ball popping the leather of our gloves. I could imagine that, from a distance, it appeared we were engaging in a sort of reciprocal dance, a basic instinct to throw, and then catch. . . catch, and then throw. Just like it has been done for so many springs, and probably will be for many more.

Just a boy and his dad, standing out in the late afternoon sun on the yellow-green grass of a schoolyard, tossing a ball back and forth and talking and laughing. Sharing the simple joy of throw-and-catch, of mindless banter, and of spending some time together, however brief, out in the sweet sunshine.

*****

Living With It

Melon Collie And The Infinite Sadness

I once had a friend of mine – we’ll call him Phil – tell me about this recurring dream he had about the Washington Senators. It was a weird dream on a couple of levels; one being Phil wasn’t really much of a baseball fan at all, so why would he be dreaming of the long-defunct Washington Senators, of all things?

It’s the last ride
Our little game is over

Actually, Phil said he had his dream from the point of view of a pigeon. That’s right. He was a pigeon in his dream, from Washington, D.C., and he liked to hang out at RFK Stadium when the Senators would play. He liked all the people, and the movement and color and action. And he liked all the food scraps they left behind.

He would wheel in and out among the rafters of the grandstand, and watch the game and the people and look for food. He said he was happy in his dream, as free as a bird. But then he began to notice the crowds at the games were getting smaller, and less friendly. There seemed to be an almost palpable sense of melancholy, even dread, in the air. He would fly around under the upper deck, and he could feel the sadness, wafting up. And then it turned out some a-hole bought the team, ran it into the ground, and then after the 1971 season moved it to some podunk town down in Texas.

It’s the last ride
It’s time to take you home

Phil’s dream ended at that point. He doesn’t know if he just died after that, or was reduced to begging bread crumbs in a square somewhere. He said he thought what happened was the pigeon in his dream died of sadness when the Senators moved, and its soul transmorgified into Phil, just as the latter was surfing down his mom’s birth canal on the way to his very first birthday. And Phil said that having a soul that was part pigeon was why he kept having that dream.

I think we might have been high when Phil told me about his pigeon dream. Back then I didn’t really question things very much. I just went with the flow. It certainly would’ve seemed silly, in the context of the telling, to call bullshit on him at the time. I think all I said was, “Wow. Pretty freaky, man.” And the conversation moved on.

And we can’t cry ‘cause we seen it coming
No use running, take it slower

As for Phil, he’s dead now. He was shot through the head, accidentally, by another friend of ours who was playing with a pistol he didn’t know was loaded at the time. The two of them had been sitting around Phil’s garage, getting stupid drunk. This was about 15 years ago. I had been married for awhile by then, had my first kid, and I was pretty much past that sort of everyday mindless craziness in my life; but Phil wasn’t, quite.

Anyway, he is probably the closest friend I ever had to get killed like that. I remember being messed up about it at the time. But not for long. We had always lived by such a devil-may-care, laissez-faire code back all those years we hung out together, it would have seemed hypocritical for me to go on too long about the senselessness of his death. Instead, I thought about stuff like his pigeon dreams. And somewhere in there, it occurred to me. . . Phil had said the pigeon’s soul transmorgified into him from RFK, in 1971 (the last year the Senators were in Washington), just as he was being born. Except Phil was born in, like, 1961 or something. So when that pigeon supposedly merged with his soul, he was already, like, ten years old.

Wow. Pretty freaky, man.

********

And the road rolls around
And turns through the town

I don't dwell much on stories of past loves, lost loves, etc. And rightly so. That kind of thing tends to be like self-flagellation, I guess you’d call it; plus, no one else is interested in hearing it, anyway. But. . . well. . . I’ve just this one. . .

This is from back when I was 15 or 16 years old. High school. This cute girl fell in love with me, and I with her, and it was the real thing. Back then I was still pretty new to the intricacies of romance and all that, and I must say I just loved her without any reservation. I loved her naívely. I knew bad stuff could happen, but I didn’t think at all that anything bad would happen, so I never held back. I just showered this girl with my love and affection (and she did me) for a long while.

The depression drips down
And glazes the ground

At that age, one tends to think the first love might be the last one, too. The only one. I think I believed that for a little while. I was in no way prepared for the day my girlfriend sat me down and let me know, in the gentlest terms she could come up with, that she felt like it was time for her to be moving on.

I wanted to be devastated about it. I felt like what had come before would not have meant as much if I wasn’t. So I was, a little bit. But not nearly as much as I would have expected. After a few weeks, a month maybe, I pretty much shook it off, and went on. There was a part of me I didn’t even know was there beforehand, telling me of course I was shocked by her wanting to break up, because I had chosen not to think about that possibility at all. I had loved her unequivocally; and sure, I was hurt and embarrassed for awhile after she dumped me, but that was nothing compared to a year-and-a-half of loving her all day, every day, joyfully, without any reservation. A small price to pay.

And I have always tried to love that same way, ever since.

Horizons east and skylines west
The moon, the sun, and all the rest

Funny, though. The only thing I really remember clearly from that day was what she said to me as she smiled at me, ruefully, while sticking the knife through my heart. She said, “It’s all over, baby. Just let it go. I’m gone.”

The loving son, the faithful wife
The burnt out wreck of a poor man’s life
The father, son, and holy ghost
They all turned away love when they needed it most

-- Todd Rundgren, The Last Ride

*****

On Being Haunted, Part 1

Will The Wolf Survive?

Wolves are not our brothers;
They are not our subordinates, either.
They are another nation, caught up just like us
In the complex web of time and life.

-- Henry Beston 1888-1968

*****

I was recently on some business out Sour Lake way, and as I was coming back into town on Highway 105, something I did not understand at the time compelled me to turn off the highway onto Keith Road and drive through the rice fields out that way. Occasionally driving around the farm roads out west of town has been a lifelong practice, or at least since I got a drivers license. As kids, we found that area of sparsely populated farmland and lightly traveled roads a great place to take a date parking at night, or just to drive around and drink and listen to the radio. The rice field roads continue to draw me to them in my adulthood, I think because, for some reason, I just find it calming to drive around out there.

I remembered the other day another reason I am drawn out that way from time to time; something I thought I’d almost forgot, an incident from back when I was 18 or 19. Like happens sometimes, thinking again about this long ago and odd and seemingly random occurrence caused it, at first fuzzy, to become crystal clear in my memory again. And, although I did not realize it fully at the time it happened, I know now this seemingly trivial event would end up having long-lasting resonance in my life.

*****

My cousin and I were out riding around one afternoon in his pickup truck, around the rice field roads out west of town, drinking beer and listening to an Astros game. We liked to do that. There was something so peaceful and calming about riding around those empty two-lane roads, some of them barely paved, some of them no more than caliche and dust, riding around on the front end of a buzz and listening to the game. We would do that for hours. Out there, we were just outside the city limits; so we didn’t have to worry about cops, and there was just enough rural-ness about to make it seem like we were really out in the country, even though in most places we were no more than ten to fifteen minutes from town. Still, sometimes we could ride along for miles and never see anything but levees, irrigation canals, rice fields either flooded or fallow, rows of tallow trees along the fence lines, and every so often a collection of farm buildings and a house. I suppose the lack of visible clutter lent to the calming effect, that and the cold beer. But the Astros announcers – Gene Elston and Dewayne Staats on that particular day – lent to the good feeling, as well. We’d been listening to those guys broadcast Astros games on the radio, in one configuration or another, since we were kids.

*****

One of my clear childhood memories is of being eight or nine years old, lying in my bed one night and listening to Elston and Harry Kalas and Loel Passe broadcasting a game against the Dodgers. I was listening on this Philco radio I had, larger than a transistor but still a portable, listening under the covers with it turned down low, because it was past my bedtime. It was late in the game and the Astros were down by a run. They were up to bat, and had made two quick outs, but then had got a man on. And up to the plate came Jimmy Wynn, The Toy Cannon. He was the Astros last, best hope, for that game anyway. It seemed like Elston’s play-by-play during Wynn’s at bat, and the commentary from Kalas, just heightened the tension of the moment. The entire time I lay there with my fingers crossed on both hands, and my toes crossed on both feet, hoping against hope that Wynn would get hold of one and really drive it. I was giving it everything, everything I had, as I am sure Jimmy Wynn was. . . but, alas, on that night it wasn’t to be. Wynn went down on a weak pop up; one could sense the disappointment in Gene Elston’s otherwise even tones. Dangit! The Astros were on their way to another close loss.

Of course, had I been more sensible back then, I’d have realized that the late, dramatic home run was pretty rare, probably a silly thing to wish for. But I wasn’t that sophisticated in those days. Had I been, it might also have occurred to me that baseball was full of disappointments, particularly if one was an Astros fan. But I didn’t realize that yet, either; and in retrospect, I am kind of glad I didn’t. Most of life’s disappointments were still ahead of me, and I was always naïvely hopeful when it came to the Astros. Good for me.

*****

Now here we were, a decade later, all-knowing teenagers driving around drinking beer in a pickup truck. Still listening intently to the game, creating our own mental images of the action to go along with the commentary, as the countryside passed us by. I have often felt that one of the only true connective threads running through my by now pretty long and often turbulent life is my affiliation with and affection for the Astros. It is poignant to me to think that all along, no matter how fucked up I or my life was – or how un-fucked up, for that matter – I always kept up with the Astros, made as many games in person as I could, listened to the broadcasts when I couldn’t. Those days in the rice fields are just one example.

On that particular day, a gloomy Saturday afternoon and drizzling rain where we were, the Astros were taking on the Cubs, I think at Wrigley. The game had been going along for awhile, and it was tied or maybe Houston was behind by a run. We’d been through most of a six-pack and were coming around a ninety degree turn on one of the farm roads in the rain when the back tires skidded across the pavement a little and the truck spun out and ended up nosed in against a barbed-wire fence, facing across some guy’s field. It wasn’t any big deal, we hadn’t been speeding or anything. I think the beer and a preoccupation with the game on the radio had caused my cousin to forget to compensate for the fact the asphalt was wet and slick, and we sort of gently skidded partway off the road.

We sat there and collected ourselves for a moment and kind of laughed; a moment of quiet before my cousin would put the three-speed in reverse (three-on-a-tree, remember?) and back us onto the roadway again. He was about to do just that when we saw it. Out across this field we were facing, almost all the way to the back of it, was a gray wolf, standing there in the straw, looking over to see what the commotion was.

I’d seen red wolves before, out duck hunting; but they were pretty small, and very elusive. Pretty much the most I’d ever seen, in the half light, was the ass end of one as it disappeared over the side of a levee and off into the marsh. But this was a big wolf, and gray, no doubt about it. I don’t know what the hell it was doing out there – I don’t think big wolves have ever been indigenous this far down (I’d seen signs of them around our place in Tyler County, in the Piney Woods, but never on the coastal plain), and this was pretty close to the city, which wolves generally avoid. Anyway, it didn’t really matter, it was an amazing sight. My cousin and I sat there for several seconds, mesmerized. Then before we knew it, the wolf was gone; and almost immediately we went about trying to confirm with and affirm to each other what had just happened. I don’t know why, but we were almost giddy about it for awhile. Eventually, though, the moment passed, and we got back to our beer, and the game. The Astros rallied late that afternoon, and pulled another one out in the end. Fuck the Cubs.

*****

I never told my cousin, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that wolf, for a long, long time. How he was free, but not really. He was being fenced in, and he was probably not long for this world. But he had it in him to be free, he knew what it felt like. I couldn’t get over that. I kept thinking if I could have just looked into his eyes for a few moments longer, I would have been able to feel what that felt like, too. Ridiculous, but that is what I thought. For many years, on the odd occasion I had to pass by that field, I would stop my vehicle and get out and look. I didn’t really expect to see a wolf again. But sometimes I would see one, just as it turned from looking at us, not caring at all, and then loped off across a field and faded into the brush, as the pipes and flares from the Mobil Chemical refinery rose off in the distance, through the gray and misting rain, beyond the rice fields.

Maybe it was the ghost of that wolf I saw. Or maybe I was a ghost of myself, back to see that wolf again. I’ve never been able to work it out, and after awhile I get really confused trying to. But, God. . . I am haunted by a wolf I barely saw, thirty years ago. I am haunted by a freedom I never had, was never meant to have, never will have. And, I think, I am haunted by the scariest ghost of them all. That being myself.

*****

Baseball, Hot Babes, Crystal Beach, & Chevrolet

A Pretty Good Day For George Bjorkman
(and for a twenty-something Yours Truly, too)

July 14, 1983. When I woke up, I was laying crossways at the foot-end of a double bed in the beach cabin, on my back, uncovered. I had on a pair of Lamar U. gym shorts, once bright red but now faded almost pink – magenta, maybe – with the white piping along the sides and bottoms of the legs fraying and coming loose. The skin along my chest and belly and on the tops of my arms and legs had turned medium to dark brown. I had been out in the sun a lot that summer. After having burned off a few layers of skin early on in the spring, I no longer got sunburned. Rather, each subsequent exposure just turned me darker. And, melanoma be damned, I didn’t use sun block; at times I slathered on a coconut-oil based Coppertone product called Savage Tan, something like that, which not only did not block UV rays, but I am fairly certain was formulated to actively attract them.

Anyway, I lay there, admiring my tan, with the white, four-blade ceiling fan whirring clockwise at medium speed overhead. I could smell the sea breeze coming through the open windows on the south side of the room, and hear the waves washing up on the distant beach, faintly. The daylight was bright and streaming in at an angle from the east. Without a clock or anything to look at, I guessed it was about 10:30 a.m.

I glanced to my right, and saw my girlfriend, Diane, in light-blue panties and an oversized Moose Head baseball T-shirt (mine, actually), sleeping in a semi-fetal position on her side and facing toward me, up near the head of the bed. Poor girl. I would nearly kill her in the bed at nights sometimes. I tended to flop around like a fish in my sleep, especially after a lot of drinking; meanwhile, Diane would reactively move around the bed, sort of like a hermit crab, trying to avoid me. I’d met Diane originally at a friend’s party, and we’d been together for nearly a year. I wondered sometimes how she put up with me.

She was goddamn beautiful, Diane was. She was about 5’ 6”, slender but not skinny. Between blonde and brownish hair, I don’t know what you call it, with (she said) natural streaks in it. Physically, she had most of the right things in pretty much all the right places, and I never could decide which of her many assets I liked the most. Which was a nice problem to have, mind you. Even better than that, she was funny, and intelligent, and could and would party her ass off. She could drink most women (and a lot of men) under the table, without being obnoxious about it. And, she liked hanging around with me. Just about a perfect girl. We partied together, laughed together, made love, talked about Thomas Mann and Kafka and Goethe and Herman Hesse – I’d been bogged down in Dostoevsky for quite awhile by that time, the fuckin’ Karamazov brothers and those guys, and Diane was the one who got me off the Russians and into the Germans, bless her.

One other thing Diane had going for her was she could wake up in the morning, first thing – her eyes all swollen, hair going everywhere, no makeup – and still look, well, very desirable. As I lay there that morning, just looking at her for long moments while she slept, all the while suppressing an almost overwhelming urge to get up and go relieve myself, I wondered idly, if I washed my face and brushed my teeth while I was up, could I come back to the bed and maybe wake her up and interest her in a little early morning fun time? Hmmm… I should probably say, I was a bit of a self-centered prick back then. And kind of still am, really. And always sort of will be, I guess.

But don’t get me started going on about Diane, man; or this thing will never get to where it needs to go.

**********

The 1983 MLB season had begun as one holding reasonable hopes for the serious Houston Astros fan. People forget, but the first half of the 1980’s was similar in some ways to the late 1900’s-early 2000’s for the Astros. That team had actually begun its run in 1979. I’ll never forget it, because I cut the standings out of the newspaper and saved the article for some time – on July 4, 1979, Houston was 52-31, in first place in the NL West, ten-and-a-half games ahead of second place Cincinnati. Like most Astros fans, by then I felt certain the team, which had never won anything up to that point, was having a special year. Of course, they immediately went into a tailspin, losing something like 13 of the next 15 games, letting everyone else in the division back into the race. A race the Reds eventually won, besting Houston by a game-and-a-half at the end.

The team recovered to come within an eyelash of going to the World Series in 1980, and made the playoffs as the “second-half” winner in the fucked up 1981 season, the one split in half by a player’s strike. The Astros fell back some in 1982, but were reloading for another run by the beginning of ’83.

Astros’ kismet being what it is, those early hopes for 1983 were dashed quickly. The team stumbled out of the gate, losing its first nine games. They didn’t even get to .500 until the end of June; but from there they played pretty good baseball, finishing the season in third place in the NL West, six games back of Los Angeles. Coincidentally, starting catcher Alan Ashby went down with an injury around the same time in June that the team finally broke even, and shortly thereafter a minor league backstop named George Bjorkman was called up to help Luis Pujols fill in for Ashby (3rd catcher John Mizerock was sent out when Bjorkman was called up.) It was a move that probably went unnoticed by a lot of Astros fans at the time, certainly by me.

**********

My best friend Rocky and I had worked it so we were both off the same week in July. It really wasn’t that hard to do. He was operating heavy equipment for a large local construction company, and had vacation time coming. I was going offshore, working as a deck hand and racking pipe on a big-ass semi-submersible rig about 100 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico, off of Grand Chenier, LA. Two weeks on, two weeks off. Rocky and I had also made arrangements to secure a beach cabin down on Bolivar Peninsula for the week. Well, our girlfriends made the arrangements, actually – we couldn’t arrange shit, then or now. But anyway, Rocky and I set it up so we (and our women, and numerous other acquaintances who drifted through the cabin that week) had nine straight days to look forward to, of nothing but drinking, sitting out in the sun, surf fishing, and sleeping late.

Which we proceeded to do. Our basic itinerary for the week was to wake up about 11:00 a.m. or so, mill around, ice down beer in the coolers, eat breakfast, get the girls moving, then be down on the beach – in lawn chairs, oiled up, stereo blaring – by noon at least. I had these 12-foot long fiberglass rods with big open spinning reels we would wind with 20-pound test line. At the end of the line we tied heavy weights that had little flanges on them, like tiny anchors, and about three feet up from that we’d fix our bait, and about three or four feet up from that, a float. Then we’d wade out to chest deep water, and cast out as far as we could. The idea was the weighted anchor would secure the line in the sand on the bottom, the float would keep the line more or less perpendicular to the surface, and meantime the currents and wave action would keep the bait moving around like it was swimming. We would walk back to the beach, playing out line, and then set the drag and put the rods in these holders I’d made out of heavy rebar with plastic tubing wired to it, which we’d hammered down a couple of feet into the sand. From there, it was Forward Drink! If a small shark or hardhead or, hopefully, speckled trout hit one of our lines, the drag would sing out and we could tend to it. Meantime, we were listening to tunes and slamming down cold ones, while the girls talked about whatever, looked for seashells, went for walks on the beach, etc.

Around 3:30 or 4:00 p.m. we’d be “all in,” and would collect our stuff and go back to the cabin. Next up was a shower, something to eat, and a nice long nap. By the time we awoke again it would be dark out, so we’d load up and go back down to the beach and party some more, build a fire if there was enough wood laying around, and so on. And then, sometime much later, we’d go back to the cabin and go to bed. Good times.

When I woke up that morning at the foot of the bed, I didn’t have that draggy hung over feeling like I did most mornings, because I hadn’t gone back out drinking with the others the night before. I did have a bump on the top of my head, though. The previous day, we’d come back to the cabin mid-afternoon after several hours on the beach. After a tepid shower, I was walking around the living room area in my briefs when one of our other friends who was visiting challenged me to show off some of my karate kicks. I didn’t really know karate at all, but after enough beer I could be persuaded that I did. Some of my “friends” liked to take advantage of this from time to time. So, anyway, after awhile I was well into it and was doing my famous flying Bruce Lee spin and kick move for them, but unfortunately I was doing it through an open doorway, and at the apex of my jump I slammed into the underside of the door frame with the top of my head, and then dropped like a rock to the floor. For entertainment value, it was great, I guess – everyone present laughed like hell. But it gave me a serious headache, and a bump on top of my head which was painful to the touch.

I finally got up out of the bed and walked stiffly to the bathroom, where I off-loaded some of the previous day’s beer, and then washed my face and brushed my teeth. Then I crawled back into bed, and “accidentally” woke up Diane. She wanted nothing to do with me, though. She was pissed off at me for kicking her in my sleep the night before. I tried to explain the kicking probably happened during a recurrence of the dream I had intermittently for years, the one where I was playing center field for the Astros in the ‘Dome, and was trying to run down a long drive in the left center gap while simultaneously keeping an eye out for Bob “Bull” Watson, who had got up steam and was careening in my direction from his spot in left field. Diane wasn’t placated, though – “Bob Bull who?” – so I eventually gave up on her and went off looking for something to eat.

**********

Luis Pujols was a nice enough guy, solid defensively, but he never could hit worth a shit. When Alan Ashby went down to injury in late June of 1983, and someone named George Bjorkman was called up from the minors to help out behind the plate, Pujols was chugging along at a .205/.227/.229 clip, actually not too bad for him. One supposes Astros skipper Bob “Flea” Lillis figured, what the hell? So he handed the starting job to Bjorkman upon his arrival. To that point the rookie had zero big league experience.

George Bjorkman went 6’ 2”, 200 lbs. and hit right-handed. Had kind of a modified flat-top haircut. He’d come out of southern California to attend Oral Roberts University and helped lead ORU to its only College World Series appearance, in 1978. That summer, he was drafted in the 4th round by St. Louis. Bjorkman spent the next several years working his way up through the Cardinals’ system. At one point, the Giants had acquired him in the Rule 5 draft, but he was ultimately returned to St. Louis. His breakout year was in 1981 when, at age 25, he led the AAA American Association with 28 home runs. From the comment and statistical record extant, it appears Bjorkman was adequate defensively. Offensively, he was a low average hitter with some power and above average plate discipline. His offense would probably be somewhat more appreciated today than it was in his time.

Bjorkman got to Houston on July 10, and then started the next 13 games at catcher for the Astros. He hit .225/.326/.425 in that stretch, and managed not to mess up too much behind the plate. Ashby returned the last week of July to reclaim his job. Over the next 2 ½ weeks, as Ashby worked himself back in to playing shape, Bjorkman started 5 more games and he caught well, but his hitting began to fall off. He went below the Mendoza line on August 10, and was farmed back out in favor of Mizerock.

Bjorkman was called back up by the Astros on September 1 when the rosters expanded, and got a half dozen more starts behind the plate in the final month of the season, as the Astros – out of the NL West race by then – gave some younger players a look. He hit .304 in those starts (7-for-23) and raised his batting average by 35 points.

Despite the positives at the end of the 1983 season, George Bjorkman never played in the majors again. Spring Training 1984 saw 22-year-old catcher Mark Bailey burst onto the scene for the Astros. Bjorkman, at 27, was past prosepect status, was considered no better than Mizerock or Pujols, the established backups, and he was looked on as a journeyman at best. The Astros sent him to Montreal in late March as the PTBNL in an earlier deal made in February for another 27-year-old journeyman catcher, Tom Wieghaus. Wieghaus appeared in all of six games for the Astros in 1984, going 0-for-10.

Bjorkman moved to the Expos farm system, and was released after 1985. He was last seen at the major league level as a Spring Training NRI by the Cardinals in 1986. However, he failed to make the team.

**********

After I bashed my head on the door frame, and had done my duty as an object of derision for all my closest friends, I went into the other room to lay down for awhile. I was still buzzing from the beach, and my head hurt like hell. So I took a short nap, and it seemed to revitalize me. I woke up with the sudden urge to go watch the Astros game that night. I hadn’t been keeping up with the intricate details of the team that week, needless to say, but I had listened to parts of games here and there over the radio in the midst of us perambulating around the beach. I knew the Expos were in town for a three-game set, and that Nolan Ryan would be pitching on that night. So I asked Rocky, as serious an Astros fan as I was, if he was interested. But The Rock was pretty deep into a terminal trip at the time, in the midst of a serious downward spiral. For one thing, he’d taken to drinking Jack Daniels on the beach at night, mixed with pink grapefruit juice. I’d never seen anyone do that before. He would buy one of those glass half-gallon containers that Tropicana juice used to come in – tall, rectangle-shaped, with a hand grip molded into the side – and he would pour out one-third or more of the juice, and then fill the container back up with Jack Daniels. Shake it up good, and then drink it straight out of the juice bottle the rest of the night. Nasty, nasty.

So, anyway, Rocky wasn’t interested in going. Neither was Diane, really. She humored me in my baseball obsessions, but truth be told, she wasn’t really much of a fan. It was her only serious flaw, as far as I knew. Bottom line, no one wanted to go to the game with me; but my resolve was strong, and I decided to go by myself. I’d made the trip from the beach to the ‘Dome a few times before. If one was used to driving over from Beaumont, the drive from Bolivar wasn’t bad at all – after the ferry, straight up Broadway through Galveston to the causeway, then up 45 to the South Loop, and then in a few miles, the Astrodome. Around a quarter to six that evening, I waved goodbye to my friends, kissed Diane, jumped into the Chevelle, and headed up the beach highway, in the direction of Port Bolivar and the ferry landing.

The drive to Houston was uneventful, and the traffic wasn’t too bad. I had the windows down and the stereo turned up, as usual. As I passed through Dickinson and League City, I thought of some cousins I had living there. I was driving up the infamous “I-45 corridor”, the killing ground for one or several serial killers, from the early 1970’s to the present. 32 bodies recovered in all so far, mostly young women. But I didn’t know from serial killers at the time. I didn’t know a lot of things. I was just heading to the game, man, with hardly a care in the world.

**********

I arrived at the ‘Dome about thirty minutes before game time, and walked right up and bought a ticket for a seat in the mezzanine, first base side. I stopped on the way in to purchase a bucket of popcorn, a large beer (in a waxy Aramark cup), and a game program. The crowd was larger than the usual mid-week ‘Dome crowd of the time, due to Ryan, no doubt. My seat ended up being right in front of some people I knew from Beaumont, which was kind of a long shot, I’d guess. Perhaps, were I the reflective sort back then – and I wasn’t – it would have occurred to me something special might happen that night. Nothing like that registered, though. I sat down, situated my beer and popcorn, and began filling out my scorecard.

By 1983, the Expos had been a good team recently under manager Dick Williams, but then Williams had left in 1981, and successors Jim Fanning and former Astro manager Bill Virdon had seen the team fall off from its 1979-1980 heyday. The 1983 squad, led by Virdon, featured many of the all-time Expo stalwarts – Gary Carter, Andre “Hawk” Dawson, Tim Raines, Steve Rogers – as well as capable baseball vagabonds like Al “Scoop” Oliver and Chris Speier, and some decent starting pitching. But the ‘Spos were destined to be no better than a .500 team that year. Against Nolan Ryan that night, they were sending out righthander Charlie Lea, an unspectacular hurler who was having a good year. He would end up 16-11 with a 3.12 ERA that season.

Filling out the Astros side of the card, I penciled in many familiar names – Puhl, Thon, Garner, Cruz, Doran – but who was this Bjorkman guy? Never heard of him. I briefly thought of Glenn Borgmann, a nondescript backup catcher for the Twins through most of the 1970s, but he’d been retired a few years by then. Bjorkman, hmmm? I resolved to check him out during the course of the game.

A game which moved along smoothly at first. Ryan was pitching well – he would go on to win his eighth straight game that night, raising his record to 9-1 – and Lea was getting the job done. Bjorkman had come up in the bottom of the second (he was hitting eighth), with Bill Doran on second base and two outs, and was intentionally walked by Lea to get to Ryan (who grounded out to end the inning.) The Expos put up a run in the top of the third; but then the home team exploded for five in the bottom half. Jose Cruz drove in two with a triple, and in his second plate appearance Bjorkman got credit for a sacrifice. He bunted Doran to second with Ray Knight on third and one out (the Expos screwed up the play, and Knight was able to score.)

As far as I could tell, Bjorkman was holding his own behind the plate. He was a big guy, but moved around pretty good back there. I was impressed by two blocks he made, on a couple of the 58-foot curveballs Ryan would sometimes let loose with. Ryan was calling his own game, obviously; but he and Bjorkman appeared to communicate pretty well. There weren’t many shakeoffs or meetings between the mound and plate or anything like that.

The Expos got one run back in the top of the fifth on a Tim Wallach home run. In the bottom half, Phil Garner led off for Houston and reached on an error. He was balked to second and, two outs later, Bjorkman came up and drilled a single to right, between the first and second baseman, scoring Garner. The Astros were up, 6-2.

Montreal got another run in the top of the sixth, this time on a Dawson jack to deep left center. In the bottom of the seventh, with two out and no one on, Knight doubled, and Doran followed with an infield single. Runners on first and third, two outs, and Bjorkman, after working the count to his favor, drilled a shot high and deep to straightaway left. A three-run ding-dong. The Astros went up 9-3, and the game was officially out of reach. Ryan sailed through the eighth. Montreal scratched out a run against reliever Bill Dawley in the ninth, but the game was well in hand by then, thanks largely to rookie catcher George Bjorkman, playing in just his third major league game.

Bjorkman’s line for the game? Two official at bats, one run, two hits, five RBIs. (1.000/1.000/2.500). Not bad. Apparently he was a modest guy, too. When asked afterward if the three run blast was his biggest baseball thrill, Bjorkman said no, catching Nolan Ryan was.

It was the best game of Bjorkman’s major league career, by far. And by chance, I had been there to see it. Neither one of us realized any of this at the time, I am sure.

**********

There weren’t many other cars on the ferry with me on my ride back across from Galveston to Bolivar that night. And even less people out on the deck, milling around. Most drivers, after they have made that ferry trip a few dozen times, get jaded and just sit in the car for the duration of the crossing. Not me. I’ve made that trip hundreds of times, but I always get out, and either lean against the steel gate on the bow, watching the waves, or go up onto the walkway around the second level. Not so much to see anything, but to feel something. Or, to see and feel something – the wind blowing through my hair, the unique and indescribable smell of the ocean, the heavy night air, the lights of Galveston receding into the distance. I don’t want to go into a swoon about it or anything, but there is no other feeling like that – the sensation of being out, at night, traveling across the water. Not anywhere I have found, anyway. I sure as hell wouldn’t miss it to sit in a hot car for twenty minutes.

On this night, from my spot on the little walkway down in front of the ferry’s wheelhouse, I could look out across the blackness of Galveston Bay and see a few lights on the point at Port Bolivar, and if I squinted hard enough, or perhaps imagined, I could just make out the outline of the Bolivar lighthouse, a black hulk in the night now, which shone light no more. Looking toward the Gulf, I could see the lights stringing out along the horizon from all the merchant ships, waiting at anchor for their turn to travel up the Ship Channel. A little further out, I could see the blinking lights of a platform rig, almost too faint to be discerned, almost over the curve of the horizon itself. Looking up (it was a clear night), I could see a billion million stars, arranged at various unimaginable distances away from me. Would it have been too much for me to think, just for a brief moment then, that those stars were put up there, in just such an arrangement, just for me? The sheer vastness of it all. . . one might think one would be overwhelmed by it. But seeing the firmament at night like that, and all that was laid out underneath it, surrounded by water, never made me feel small or insignificant. Rather, it always made me feel really big. Alive. Important, vital, somebody. Like a ten-ton manta ray, as Hunter Thompson once said. My chest would fill up with pride. Or was it with love? A feeling of contentment? Or perhaps just an extreme sense of well-being, however temporary; and a sense of thankfulness, too, to God, or Allah or Buddha or Albert Einstein, whoever, for laying it all out there for me on this night, just so.

I don’t know what George Bjorkman was feeling that night. I imagine he felt pretty damn good. Maybe he, the major league baseball player, felt something like I felt; me, a relative nobody standing in the dark on a boat, having deluded himself into thinking he was as bad-ass as King Kong or somebody. Maybe, like me, George Bjorkman, in all his fullness of himself at that moment, had a vague sense, too, that the bright shining moment wouldn’t last forever, and resolved to enjoy it while he could. I sure hope so, but I don’t know. Just a brief moment in the sun is all most of us can ask for. To have it, and to also have a sense of how fleeting that moment will almost surely be, is more than almost any of us could ask for, me and George Bjorkman included.

As I got back into my car that night, and the ferry gate lowered down to meet the dock at the land’s edge, I felt like a million dollars, or whatever today’s equivalent of that would be. I was happy. I had just been exhilarated by the ferry ride. I was coming from watching my team pummel the opposition. And I was on my way to a place I knew had a lot of ice cold beer in it, a lot of good tunes in it, a lot of good times in it. A place where there were people waiting up late for me, including a girl who was so fucking beautiful that, even after a year of seeing her at her worst and her best, she still took my breath away, every single time.

I didn’t know then, even if I had a vague sense of it, how brief that time would be, the time of feeling carefree, and happy, and content. I didn’t know any more that night than George Bjorkman knew, his major league career only having about a month-and-a-half left in it. I am pretty sure Bjorkman, in the glow of his achievement, allowed himself to imagine a full time MLB catching job, and several seasons of productivity before a well-earned retirement. I am sure, in my exhilaration, I allowed myself to imagine a long future of partying, of loving Diane, and of doing whatever the hell I wanted, whenever I wanted. Pretty much, anyway. To paraphrase something Joe Ely once sang, I thought the road went on forever, and the party would never end.

I am sorry that it did end, but I am thankful for the moments that I had. And I’ll bet if you asked George Bjorkman today, he wouldn’t give back the two-plus months with the Astros, or the otherwise run-of-the-mill, mid-week game between two non-contenders on a humid July night in Houston in 1983. Not for a million bucks, he wouldn’t.

But none of that mattered to me at that moment. As I drove off the ferry, clattering across the steel gate that, only moments before, I had leaned against to watch the ocean go by, I impulsively decided to put the top down on the Chevelle. So I did, and then I shoved Lou Reed’s Rock ‘N’ Roll Animal into the tape deck. Reed’s live version of the Velvet Underground standard “Rock And Roll” was blaring forth by the time I blasted through Port Bolivar, on my way back to Crystal Beach, down the beach highway. Or, as Joni Mitchell put it once, down the free, free way.

“Hey baby, rock and roll
Despite all the amputations
You can dance to a rock and roll station. . . all night”

Trudging Back To Brighter Days

We are at the halfway point of the baseball offseason, more-or-less. Up to now I have been basically disinterested in most of the hot stove goings on. It is like this every year: I decompress for a couple of months after the World Series, not really caring about who gets the post-season awards, or the trade rumblings or free-agent signings. I think I get more wrapped up in the regular season than I realize, and then I need some time away from it after it is over. And for a hard core Houston Astros fan, the last few of off-season decompression periods have been especially welcome, as the team has developed the perhaps thrilling but maddening habit of waiting until the last possible moment to quit floundering around and put together a mad dash for the pennant (actually a wild card spot.) They made it in 2004 and 2005, but fell just short this past season. All three were draining for the serious fan.

But about this time each offseason, though, I get over it. NFL football has grown interminably boring to me, and offers no diversionary charm; and I cannot keep up with the college teams, BCS, bowls, etc. I've never been much of a fan of basketball, and I simply don't understand or care about most of the other things that pass for "sport" in the baseball offseason. And then there's the fact that unlike any other major sport, baseball in its dormant state offers an almost continual stream of at least vaguely pertinent news, from early November all the way to that happy day in mid-February when the pitchers and catchers report again to the spring training camps in Florida and Arizona. So I have been peripherally keeping up with all that; and then of course the Astros have been busy, signing FA slugger Carlos Lee and adding hometown boy Woody Williams and perhaps Jon Garland of the White Sox to the starting rotation to help replace Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, who appear to be gone. And so on.

So anyway, I am becoming engaged again; but before heading off full tilt into 2007, this talk about the late charges the Astros have made toward the ends of the last few seasons reminds me of something I wrote awhile back to commemorate one of the Astros division rivals, the ridiculous Chicago Cubs; who haven't been to a World Series since FDR was running things, or won one since Woodrow Wilson was, who are known less for winning and more for their many late season collapses, their belief in silly curses, and their fans' propensity for showing up in droves to their "green cathedral" ballpark to watch the games, be seen, and get stupid drunk, year after year after year, whether the team out on the field is any good or not.

I wrote the following just after the end of the 2004 season, and it is highly topical. 2004 was the year after the most famous Cubs collapse of all when, up 3 games to 1 in a best-of-seven playoff series against Florida and with a huge late lead (at home) in game 5, the act of a fan maybe interfering with the flight of a foul ball that maybe the Cubs left fielder could have leapt up into the stands and caught but did not caused the curse-obsessed Cubs and their followers to fall instantly, completely apart. The Cubbies quickly blew the lead and lost game 5, and the next two games also, and the upstart Marlins went on to win the World Series against the mighty Yankees. Meanwhile the Cub fans considered lynching one of their own, the poor bastard who had supposedly caused it all to happen by reaching out for a souvenir at exactly the wrong time. They thought better of it in time, and instead they held a ceremony where (I am not kidding) they blew up the ball.

Anyway, 2004 was the season after the meltdown. The Cubs, obviously recovered from that horror and still with dominant starting pitching were again a solid playoff contender, and looked to be drafting the even-better St. Louis Cardinals to an easy wild card playoff berth in the NL Central. The Cubs coasted along like that for a month or so, and then around mid-August they casually glanced in the rear-view mirror to see just how far back the rest of the pack was. . . but what they actually saw was the Astros gearing up for another insane run.

That was one hell of a month-and-a-half, after that. Houston went 36-10 while the Cubs sputtered. There were a couple of awesome home-and-home series between the two clubs along the way, filled with beanballs and ejections and bitter accusations and generalized acrimony all around. In the end, Houston ran the Cubs down from behind, and then ran them over.

Damn, that was a fun month. Even though the Astros were later knocked out of the playoffs by St. Louis, I was still thinking about the thrilling beatdown of the Cubbies when I decided it really should be commemorated in verse.

My apologies to T.S. Eliot, by the way. On the other hand, Eliot was a St. Louis native, and for all I know a Cardinal fan in his youth, at least. If so, then I'd like to think he'd understand.

**********

The Love Song of John Q. Cubfan

Vous pouvez connerie le boulanger
Et obtenir les brioches
Que vous pouvez soutenir de chaque affaire
Excepté une

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a Cub fan drunk and passed out in his seat;
Let us go, through certain Wrigleyville streets,
The muttering retreats
Of idiots who believe they're cursed by goats
Who drink old fashioned beer that tastes like oats:
Streets that follow like a tedious interview
Of a whiny manager with a fucked-up world-view
That leads to an overwhelming question. . .
Oh, do not ask, "What the hell?"
Let us head for Wrigley on the El.


In the stands the vendors come and go
Selling their swill for six bucks a go.


The yellow journalists who just can't rant enough
The yellow piss that makes the hands so tough
Get mixed together on some lost afternoon
When Sammy the rightfielder, who is a buffoon
Hops around like a bunny at the sight of a long, lazy drive
And gets gunned down at second by four feet or five,
And sensing another sign of the gods' disdain
We order up another nasty brew to drain.


And indeed there will be time
For the wild card lead to disappear,
Onrushing giants and spacemen getting near;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare to face the nagging fear;
There will be time to whine and moan,
For the umpires to conspire, the announcers to berate
As after another loss we head for home;
Time for beanballs and ejections,
Time for the sunshine to wear out the whiteys,
And time for Steve Stone to call us un-mighty,
As pointless as a lonely, Viagra-fueled erection.


In the stands the vendors come and go
They sell that shit for six bucks, you know?


And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "What the fuck?" and "What the fuck?"
Is it The Curse? Is it lousy luck?
Or just that our bullpen really sucks?
[They will say, "Your bullpen blows."]
Borowski's hurt, so the one we chose
LaTroy, to come in late and close
[They will say, "You cut off your face to spite your nose!"]
Do we dare
Take the Almighty's name in vain?
In a minute there is time
To curse a blue streak, and go down in flames.


For we have known them all, already, known them all: --
Have known the games pissed away by errors, wind-borne flies, blown saves,
We have measured out our lives by the games we gave away;
We have lost must-win games to chumps, and have been appalled.
From the second deck falls a chunk of concrete, about half a ton
Should I try and run under one?


And we have known the indignities, already, know them all --
Beat out by a team in McDonald’s uniforms back in ’84,
Or ’89 Will Clark went all Babe Ruth on us (“It’s gone! It’s gone!”)
And how could we forget Brant Brown (Brant Brown?!) dropping that fly ball?
What the hell is going on?
Cincinnati (Cincinnati?!) beats us three of four
Should I go and get a gun?


And we know how this ends, already; we must remember –
Confident in a solid lead held almost up to the end,
[“Oh, don’t be silly!” they say, as the inevitable descends]
How will it be this time? Like the ’69 Mets?
Another incredible mind-fuck we will never forget?
Our hopes as dead as the ivy in November.
Could I sneak a knife in, nice and neat
Commit Harry Caray right in my seat?
. . . . .

When Ruth stood pointing out to Waveland Ave., was he really calling his shot?
Or just showing us the way to the exits, saying,
“This thing’s all over, boys; why’n’t you just head on home?”


I should have been a ragged old glove
Scuttling across the floors of silent dugouts
. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
As smoothed by several rounds
Asleep…tired…slowing down,
Stretched out on the bar next to my ratty blue cap with the “C”.
Should I, after another shot ‘n’ a beer
Have the strength to walk on out of here?
But though I have wept and fasted, blown up balls and genuflected,
Though I have longed to see Dusty’s head [the stupid toothpick in its mouth]
brought in upon a platter,
Truth is, I can’t do shit—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of our greatness flicker,
And I have seen the Base Ball Gods shake their heads, and snicker,
And in short, I’ve seen my own impotence reflected.


And was it all worth it, after all,
After elimination, the acrimony, the accusations,
Bitter doubt entering our conversations?
Was it worth raising the payroll to $100 million
Just to bring the types of players with the skills in
When one skill is not holding onto the fucking ball?
The skill to wear sunglasses and still not see,
The can of corn come wafting out,
While our pitcher grins on the mound with glee,
Saying, “I know you’ll catch that ball."
"I know you’ll catch that fucking ball!”


And was it all worth it, after all,
Worth all the money, care, and time spent,
Putting together a team which only wasted all its promise?
Which would rather initiate, and then retaliate, than win the game –
Rather kick a wall and get a knee sprain –
And get 15 days on the DL,
While the whole season goes to hell.
Was it worth it, all the discontent?
When, with our backs up against the wall,
Against the lowly Redlegs and the Braves,
They say, “You lost them all."
"You lost them all!”
. . . . .


No, we are not championship material, nor were meant to be,
We are lovable losers, lots of fun,
Someone to get well against, if you’ve been on a bad run,
Come to the ballpark, the ‘Taj Mahal’, and get drunk out in the sun.
We’ve got great starters, but our bullpen sucks,
Our offense has its moments, but is full of holes,
And just when you think they give a fuck,
They blow a lead and lose control,
And the whole damn season comes undone.


We can’t take it. . . we can’t take it. . .
When our Sammy starts to jake it,


Shall we keep our hopes alive? Shall we go into the breech?
We shall play the Reds at home, and watch their offense be unleashed.
I have heard the fat ladies singing, each to each.


I do not think they will sing for me.


We have seen them at night wearing too-tight slacks
Stumbling out of the bars in Lincoln Park
Looking for their SUV's double-parked.


We have lingered in the dream world of fantasy
Sustained by our collective hysteria, and a whole lot of booze
'Til reality sets in, and we lose and lose

His Name Was Joe

Joe Niekro, a knuckleball pitcher who came from obscurity to become the Astros' all-time leading winner, died Friday.

Niekro, 61, suffered a brain aneurysm Thursday night at his home in Plant City, Fla., and died Friday at St. Joseph's Hospital in Tampa, Fla.

--Houston Chronicle
October 28, 2006

221 wins. A twenty-year major league career, the great majority of it as a starting pitcher. Two 20-win seasons, back-to-back for Houston in 1979 (21-11) and 1980 (20-12). Stellar performances in pressure games, including pitching the 163rd game of the 1980 season, clinching the Astros first ever division title (the extra game was precipitated by a tie between Houston and Los Angeles for the NL West crown – precipitated because the Astros went into LA for the final series of the season, holding a three game lead, and proceeded to lose all three games, all by one run); pitching 10 scoreless innings vs. the Phillies in Game 3 of the 1980 NLCS (the Astros won 1-0 in the 11th); and 8 scoreless innings against the Dodgers in Game 2 of the 1981 NLDS (the Astros eventually won the game, again in the 11th.) In fact, in 20 post season innings (including two in his only World Series appearance, for the Twins in 1987), Joe Niekro gave up 14 hits and exactly zero runs.

All this accomplished with a mediocre fastball, an average curve and change, and a good-but-not-great knuckleball he usually only threw around 50% of the time (most knuckleball pitchers throw the pitch 75% of the time or more.) All this after his once promising career (with the Cubs and then Tigers) had stalled almost completely by his mid-twenties, due to arm problems and ineffectiveness; he made his way off the scrap heap and eventually to Houston (where he would resurrect himself in time) by way of waiver deals and outright sales – by that point Niekro apparently wasn’t even considered worthy enough to be included in an actual trade, even as a throw in.

Even after he got to Houston and the cozy (for pitchers) Astrodome, Niekro was a middle reliever and spot starter for three years, as anonymous a position as there was in the major leagues at that time. He pitched very well in that difficult role, however, and toward the end of July in the 1977 season, Niekro was moved into the Astros starting rotation. At that point he was 32 years old, and had 72 career wins.

Niekro won nine games the last two months of that 1977 season, including 9 complete games in 14 starts. He went on to pitch another 10 full seasons, with the Astros, the Yankees, and the Twins, well into his forties, collecting 149 more wins along the way.

But it really wasn’t the wins, or any other statistic, that told the story of Joe Niekro. What Niekro had, what made him so popular with many fans, was an abundance of guile to go with his average stuff. That, and what we used to call ‘stones’. . . he was tough and fearless on the mound, it seemed even more so when everything counted the most. Pitching in his late prime with more illustrious teammates like J.R. Richard and Nolan Ryan, Niekro was usually overlooked; and of course he had an older brother who overshadowed him, too. Brother Phil, also a knuckleballer, would win 318 games and be elected to the Hall of Fame. (In this narrow sense, I tend to think of Joe Niekro in conjunction with Jim Perry, who pitched in roughly the same era; Perry won 215 games himself, but all the attention went to his colorful and even more accomplished brother Gaylord, like Phil Niekro a 300-game winner and Hall of Famer.)

Joe didn’t get much attention at all -- until much later, when he got caught on the mound with an emery board in his back pocket by a perceptive umpire; at the time Niekro claimed not to know how it got there. I always felt this incident just added to his ignominy, as fans tended to believe Niekro had doctored the ball all along, and that is how he won so many games. By that time I had long despaired of convincing non-Astros fans, and Astros fans who didn’t pay attention (and there were and are a lot of those), that Niekro was a very good pitcher, and not some kind of gimmick or cheat. I finally decided Joe probably preferred people just go ahead and underrate him; it had happened through most of his career, and he could always take pride in his sizeable success despite the short shrift.

*****

That game in 1980 versus the Dodgers, the pennant-clincher, I’ll never forget that game as long as I live. When it was announced it would be carried on television, I was going to call in sick (it was a day game), but instead I just called my boss and told him I wasn’t coming in because I was going to stay home and watch the Astros. He said it was okay, he was taking off early to do the same thing. Most people will remember wishing Ryan was available (he’d lost his start two days before), or maybe Art Howe’s big home run in the third, or his two-run, two-out single the next inning that put the game out of reach; I will, too, but what I will always remember most was my absolute confidence, before the game even started, that Houston would win, no doubt about it, with Joe Niekro out there on the mound, and everything on the line.

I really hadn’t realized how much having Joe Niekro to watch and admire meant to me back then in my formative years, until I heard of his death yesterday. It hit really hard, a lot harder than I would have expected. Of course, losing one of one's early heroes, its losing a little of oneself, as well. Part of my sadness is selfishly wrapped up in that. But I do not want to be selfish just now; I want to remember clearly, as clearly as I can twenty-six years on. I want to remember Niekro standing calmly on the mound in Dodger Stadium, in the late afternoon, early fall sunlight. Standing there with the Astros whole season in his hands, in a sense all of their history in his hands, standing there cool and unflinching. . . he looks in to Ashby for the sign, begins his slow, easy windup, and then delivers another pitch, headed safely toward home.