Learning to Pitch

We met in the Clark Fork. That's the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. I had gone back to school for a graduate degree, was training hard for a 50-mile trail race, and was wearing only tiny shorts and a running bra. I'd just finished a long run and had gone down to the river to soak my middle-aged legs in the rush and gurgle of nippy water. I kicked off my running shoes and picked my way gingerly through the rocks that lined the shore, yelping at the cold, my arms helicoptering to keep from falling. The air was hot, the sun soaked my skin, and soon enough my legs were comfortably numb. A trio of fisherman stood in the water up river. This is not unusual, even in the middle of town. Missoula, Montana is a town where people do things like run 50-mile races and stand in rivers in deep summer.

Next thing, one of the fisherman, a white guy and older than the other two, had moved downstream. I heard him call out to the young fellows: "No question about it, this is the best view you'll get fishing anywhere."

"Why, Bob?"

Laughter. No answer.

His view was of the traffic going over the bridge, the hotel behind him, and, well, me.

He was aloof, maybe shy. I asked him what position he'd played.

One of the young pups bounded over and started barking out questions: Are you a runner? Do you live here?

I was, I did. He was a baseball player, as was the other kid (there just aren't that many black people in Montana; I had already guessed they weren't local). They played for the Ogden Raptors, and were visiting for a three-night series against the Missoula Osprey. This was the lowest rung of minor league baseball. Rookie league.

"Who's the old dude?" I asked, gesturing to the man who had gone downstream.

"He's our coach. He's a legend."

I looked at him. Tall, rangy, bald.

"What's his name?"

"Bob Welch. Played for the Dodgers and the A's."

"Never heard of him."

"He won the Cy Young Award," the young pup whispered, suddenly shy.

"Oh."

I'd heard of that.

So, after a while, after I'd caught him looking at me a few times, I walked over and started talking to him, the old guy. He was aloof, maybe shy. I asked him what position he'd played.

He told me. Without comment.

I confessed that I'd watched Major League baseball for only one season: 1986. I was a Mets fan. My future ex-husband liked the Mets and we lived in New York City.

"I played against those guys," he said, and began listing names. I loved big Gary Carter and scrappy Lenny Dykstra. I had been thrilled to discover that Keith Hernandez was a Civil War buff. I grieved at Darryl Strawberry's fall from grace.

The only other baseball I'd watched was when I first moved to Durham, North Carolina. My friend Julius, a historian, and I would go to Bulls games when they were a Single-A team. Julius is the smartest person I know. He would tell me about the Negro Leagues, point out nuances of the game being played, and talk about plays that reminded him of other plays from other games, and then told those stories.

The Bulls got a new stadium and two more A's; Julius moved to Ann Arbor. My connection to baseball dwindled to once a year when, during the Boston Marathon, I looked forward to seeing the folks streaming out of Fenway Park and cheering for us runners.

The rangy man in the river told me that he'd always been a runner. I believed him; he had the long, lean look of someone who could go the distance. He'd once run 17 miles, he told me. Before he got new hips. I didn't tell him that I ran that distance most Sundays.

I had a question. Was the movie "Bull Durham" accurate?

He shook me off. "Would never happen. Not with an older woman. Younger women, sure. But not older."

I'd forgotten that it was a relationship movie — I was thinking only about the baseball parts — about the culture of the minor leagues, about the zeitgeist.

"Oh," he said. "Yeah, that part was right."

Then I turned to him, faced him, hands on hips. He was more than a foot taller than me.

"You mean those guys" — pointing to the pups — "wouldn't go for a 43-year-old woman like me?"

The first smile. "Well, I don't know about that," he said. "Did you see how fast they sprinted down here when you got into the river? They might. But a 48-year-old man sure would."

My legs had been appropriately frozen and the guys had to leave for the ballpark. Bob said he'd leave me some tickets, if I wanted to see the game.

It was a Friday night. I had nothing else to do.

* * *

* * *

Bob called the next day. I'd gotten enough writing done that morning, and it being summer and me being in school, I didn't have much planned. He said that he was going to be fishing in the river, in the same spot, if I wanted to come down.

Now I was coy. "I don't know," I said. "Maybe."

But I finished my run at the river. Bob smiled big when he saw me.

He wanted to teach me how to fish. I did not want to learn how to fish and demurred, but still, he kept wanting to show me where the critters were likely to be hiding out, how you can tell by the riffles in the water, showing me the rhythmic motion from 10 to 2 o'clock as you let the fly alight. I already knew this. I lived in Missoula; I'd read "A River Runs Through It."

"What I'd really like," I told him, "is to learn to throw a baseball." I throw like a girl. I hate that about myself.

Bob dropped his rod, picked up a rock and put it in my hand. Then he started teaching. "The ball is a piece of chalk in your hand. Hold it like this" — he showed me how to grab — " lightly," he said, "lightly — with two fingers and a thumb. Get these other ones out of the way," he said, making my ring finger and pinkie disappear.

"Ouch," I said.

"Make a circle on the blackboard. When you release it, let it come off your fingertips." I tried. Plunk into the river. I tried again. And again.

After I'd gotten the hang of it, bending my elbow at the top of the arc, he told me to spread my legs. "Now," he said, "put your weight on your back foot. When you move forward, let the inside of your foot roll forward. That's the trick," he said. "It's all about that. Lots of guys just can't get it, that move."

I tried.

"You've got it!" he said, excited. "That's it!"

A couple of times he warned, "I have to touch you — is that okay?" If his face hadn't been sunburned, I'd swear he was blushing.

He stood behind me and placed his hands on the bony crest of my hips to show me how to shift my weight. "I do this with the guys," he said. And then he added with a smirk, "But it doesn't feel like this."

"Now," he said, "when you pitch, bring your left knee up to your chest." I told him that my knee doesn't go that high; my legs are runner-tight. He grabbed my left leg and pulled it up, showed me the motion.

"Ouch," I said.

I tried it as he watched. Something was clearly wrong. "Don't just throw it up like that."

Concentrating on getting the leg up, I had stopped thinking about putting it all together.

For an hour, I pitched stones into the river. Bob kept telling me to be more graceful, more feminine. He also told me that I had it. I had the touch, an intuitive way of holding the ball. He had it, he said. Some guys never get it. But still, you need to practice. He'd shake his head, smile, and cast into the river, looking over at me as I practiced firing rocks into the cold mountain water. "That's it, darlin'" he'd offer. "That's it, girl." No one darlin's or girl's me. But he seemed to be getting away with it.

* * *

* * *

He'd left tickets for me again. I got to the game that night in the top of the seventh, and sat with my feet up on the dugout. Bob came over during a break in the game. I shared with him my newest trenchant insight: "The pitcher kind of has the glamour role, doesn't he?"

He smiled. "I guess so."

"But the catcher's job is harder?"

"No," he said, still smiling, but stern. "I wouldn't say harder. But it is more physically demanding."

"Want a ride after the game?" I asked.

He sure did.

We went out for dinner again, but this time it was different. I hate it when women, asked what they like about a man who seems otherwise unattractive, will say, "He's funny." It's the only way to account for the fact that Adam Sandler or Woody Allen has ever had sex.

But, well, Bob was funny. He was quick and witty in a way that kept surprising me. He asked questions. He didn’t seem to have that normal human need to talk about himself. He listened and remembered things. He paid attention, close attention, picked up on and remembered the smallest details. I guessed that this was part of what made him good at his job. He wasn’t so great at conjugating his verbs when he spoke.

I told him that when I'd coached high school cross-country for one season I had my runners do vocabulary drills. I cared more about academics than athletics. I was, at bottom, a nerd.

"Give me some," Bob said.

"What?"

"Vocabulary words."

"Obstreperous," I said.

He asked me to use it in a sentence. I did. He rolled it around his mouth like a marble. I later learned Bob Welch travels with his own pillow and a dog-eared paperback dictionary.

My second book had been published six months before, a memoir about loving animals and men. Just before it came out I'd had lunch with my editor and my agent. I joked that after the book was published I'd never go on another date. My agent scrunched up her face, put her hand on my arm, and said, "Rachel, you're right." My editor, looking on the bright side, said, "Or you'll just have to date men who can't read."

When he saw copies of the book in my apartment, Bob said, "I've read maybe five books in my life, though I did write one." He'd gotten help from New York Times sportswriter George Vecsey to do a memoir about being a young alcoholic. He wanted my book to be the sixth he'd read. He took a copy, even though I'd told him not to.

* * *

* * *

Bob showed up at my apartment at 7:30 the next morning with coffee and way too much perkiness. He was excited about fishing, excited about the prospect of seeing more of Montana, excited about a date with me. He was way too boisterous, too obstreperous for morning.

We passed a tiny fishing store on the way to Rock Creek, which was a good thing because Bob had bought only a two-day license. The place was run by an older couple. The woman behind the counter went about filling out the paperwork while Bob pumped the man for information about where he might find fish and which kind of thingamabobs he should use to catch them. Then the wife called out that they didn't want to help him too much — he worked for the Dodgers.

The man had been watching Bob, trying to place him. "What's his name?" he whispered to me.

Our team sites

Los Angeles Dodgers

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Oakland Athletics

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When I told him, the guy belted out something about a curve ball. They both lit up and said that Dusty Baker came here to fish. They were Giants fans, and cheerfully scolded Bob for wiping out their team. They pulled out a photo of three men. "The greatest ball player ever," the man said.

"That's debatable," Bob said.

I looked at the photo and could not identify them. One was, apparently, Willie Mays.

Later I asked Bob who he thought was the greatest. He didn't spend a nanosecond thinking about it before he said. "Sandy Koufax." He said, "I was struggling with my curve when I got to LA. Someone on the team said, ‘Go talk to that guy over there.' Sandy Koufax occasionally hung around the field. He taught me. I always used his curveball and we became good friends." That night, in the kitchen of my small apartment, Bob taught me the grip for a four-seam fastball, a slider, and a split-finger something or other. That one kind of hurt.

The fishing people said they hadn't heard from Dusty for a while. Bob asked for the time (he never seemed to know the time) and said that Dusty was probably at the ballpark. "Let's call him."

"Hey," he said into the cell phone, "Guess where I am?" They chatted for a while. Bob looked at me and told Dusty Baker he'd found a great fishing guide. I rolled my eyes. They talked about nothing for a while and then Bob handed the phone to the man in the store.

When we left, Bob looked concerned and wondered how the couple knew he worked for the Dodgers.

"I didn't tell them," I said, a little defensive.

Then he realized that he'd had to list his employer on his fishing license. Bob told me he generally gave fake professions when people asked what he did for work. "I'm often a mailman," he said, with a grin. He hated to be recognized; never mentioned that he'd played ball. I asked if he thought that was typical of people who owned World Series rings. "No," he said, "I don't think so."

Back in the car I commented on what a nice thing he had done for the fishing store people. He looked at me as if he had no idea what I was talking about and put his hand on my leg. "Your legs are harder than mine, stronger," he said, grinning like a teenager.

* * *

While I was running along Rock Creek, Bob caught two fish and released them. He didn't talk about it. Just said he'd caught two fish.

During my run I thought about failure. In running, you can win a race and still fail, if your goal is to run a certain time. With events like high jump and pole vault, an athlete will always finish with a failure — even if she beats the competition, she still wants to best her best and tries until she knocks down the bar. Baseball and fishing require a different sort of relationship to failure. The ratio of the times you try to the times you make it is exceptionally high. And so when you succeed, on those rare occasions when everything comes together, what you have are stories. Fish tales and baseball lore are narrative arts that often begin "Remember the time when ..." They are quiet, thoughtful endeavors, without the bruising crashes of football or the feverish pace of basketball.

Baseball has provoked so much lyrical prose, I think, because it taps into something, the ring and rhythm of the seasons and the way they align with the budding of the trees and the falling of the leaves. There's something about the game that's close to the natural order: the long waits during which nothing much happens, and then a sudden frenzy of action. It's life-like, baseball.

We met in what I thought were the mid-seasons of our lives, Bob and I, in the momentum of the summer, still full of promise. Each of us had been around enough bases to know how the hours get shorter. We had both found early success and then worked at reinventing ourselves. We had learned how to grab a moment and enjoy it. We were both eager to teach and hungry still to learn.

Bob had been married for a long time and then divorced. I'd been married briefly and had been dating for decades. Even as we aged, our bodies had stayed improbably lean and useful. We just kissed. We were old enough not to be in a hurry and we knew that we had shared something that would last longer, could stay sweeter. It was like being back in high school. I remembered how the young pups had described him: "That's our coach. He's a legend."

When we talked about the Renaissance scholar who left the presidency of Yale for the green fields of summer, Bob had said the guy had no business in baseball. He didn't understand the game. As a fan, maybe, but not as an insider. Perhaps. I don't know enough to know.

I do know that A. Bartlett Giamatti understood and was able to express the deep appeal of baseball: "I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun."

Nine summers ago I met a man standing in a river. He taught me how to pitch.

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Bob Welch died on June 9. He was 57 years old. Read more about his career.