2020
“You’re making me dig,” he tells the interviewer.  He rubs the nape of his neck and leans back against the armchair, trying to erase the cameras, microphone booms, and backstage crew.  “My earliest memory of the game,” he says, repeating the question.  He strokes the slim flannel tie Bronwyn picked out for him before jetting out of snow-packed Idaho for snow-dusted New York, to go with his old wool suit, and looks for her and her cotton-ball hairdo. 
            She sits in a folding chair beside a sturdy tripod, wearing a mustard dress and brown cardigan, all set to flag down a taxi just as soon as the interview ends, he knows, and head to the reservations she made at a famous steakhouse downtown.  Her smile steadies his nerves.  He’s looked to her for strength and direction throughout his long career.  He’s still not sure he deserves to be one of the men featured on an hour-long ESPN special, entitled “Baseball’s Unsung Heroes,” scheduled to air at the tail-end of spring training.  
            She nods and soon enough he finds snapshots and voices in his memory.  He drags a thumb across the wormlike scar above his left eye, his glass eye, and begins piecing together what little he remembers of that Christmas morning in the horse pasture with his father and older brothers, way out in Picabo, Idaho, when he was four years old and lost half his sight to the fat end of a bat.

1949
He remembers his father and brothers telling him to keep back by the fence post and wait his turn.  He remembers them forcing him back each time he interrupted the game.  His father lobbing the hardball to one of his brothers gripping a bat while the other squatted in tow with an outstretched mitt.  All of them packing down six inches of fresh powder with their bootsteps, playing with the gifts they’d been given that morning.  Gifts that had been opened individually yet needed to be shared because of their expense. 
            He watched the ball—his gift to unwrap—get clobbered.  They’d all assumed he wanted his chance to hit, but he didn’t care about the bat or mitt.  Those were the gifts his brothers unwrapped.  He wanted the ball and thought of ways to get it back.  Eventually, he made his move—once his father committed his windup, once his brothers were lost on the pitch—sneaking up from behind, reaching out, and sticking his hand in front of his brother’s mitt.  But his head got in the way.  The blow knocked him sideways, and the blood warmed his hands as he held his throbbing face and moaned. 
            That’s when he got the baseball.  His father helped him grip it with both hands, then wrapped his head with the scarf he’d been wearing and shouted commands to his brothers—one to saddle his horse (the flatbed was useless in the snow), the other to run inside and have their mother phone Elmore Brown—a man trusted to shoe and mend horses in their remote farm town, a man oftentimes called upon to mend people in emergencies, he’d learn.  On the horse ride over, he remembers how his grip on the ball grew tighter when he thought of all the black iron tools he’d once seen pegged to the wall above Elmore’s massive workbench. 

1966
“That year towered over every other year in my career,” he tells the interviewer.  The climax, he recalls: battling against his hero, Sandy Koufax (nine years his senior), for the Cy-Young as well as the most wins for the season.  By the tail end of September, the intensity of battling back and forth was visceral, with 26 wins tied to their names, and just a handful of games left in the season. 
            The sportswriters drummed up the drama, as if they were two bloodied boxers facing off in the final round of a ring, though they’d actually only battled once, face to face, earlier in the season, and Koufax had taken the loss.  But he seems to be the only one to remember that victory, and the bittersweet taste that accompanied beating the man he’d admired more than any other.  But the intensity only increased.  The yearlong battle had strained his arm, yet he was unwilling to tell his coaches for fear they’d bench him.  Too many nine-inning games, he figured, and not enough time to recoup between starts—the muscles and ligaments starting to scar and tear around his elbow.  But he could rest and rebuild in the offseason, he told himself.  He couldn’t lose his shot at the Cy-Young or the season’s record for wins. 
            He pushed himself until the eighth inning of the final game of the season in early October, while Koafax worked from another mound, in another state, at the same time.  But he never finished the game.  Something snapped in his left arm after he released a four-seamed fastball—a wild pitch—and had to motion for his catcher with his glove hand.  The reliever that took over blew his 2-1 lead and what would have be his 27th win, which would’ve tied him with his hero and given him a shot at the trophy.  But the loss to Koafax quickly took a backseat to the loss of his arm.  He can only explain the intense fallout to the interviewer in terms of exertion, as if he’d been hiking up a steep cliff all season, only to get shoved off and tumble down in an instant, to a depth far below where he’d first begun at the start of the season.   

1967
He remembers the string of train and bus rides to get back to his hometown, and being thankful for long, exhausting days on the farm and the fact that he could still rope and ride.  He worked cattle for his father, but also hired out to Elmore Brown, breaking and mending horses.  That’s where he first noticed Bronwyn, Elmore’s only offspring. 
            He’d known of her for the better part of his childhood (she was five years younger), but his years away had turned her into a woman—curvy, freckled, and confident—and a skilled horse whisperer.  He found ways to make small talk with her whenever possible, and even though he was more interested in hearing her voice, she always wanted to hear baseball stories and descriptions of the big cities he’d visited—subjects his family avoided.  She listened fully and never seemed troubled by his glass eye, unlike the women he’d met on the road. 
            Talking with Bronwyn made him realize how much he missed the game, how much he loved hurling from the rubber, how much he’d suppressed his emotions.  He even admitted his fault one night.  He told her how he’d abused his arm, how he’d lost sight of his career on trophies and records.  But she didn’t seem to see it as his end.  “You have two arms, don’t you?” she asked then reached for what had always been his glove hand.

1972
No one recognized him at first.  He had better control with his right, though his delivery had been harder for batters to pick up with his left, and his fastballs had been faster, too.  He no longer had the speed or stamina to start games, but he quickly became valuable in late inning situations, working from the stretch as a reliever.  He faced batters with his glass eye and painted the inside and outside corners of the strike zone with junk: knuckleballs, curveballs, splitters, screwballs.  Late in counts, after batters scooted up in the box, he’d reel back and deliver heat.  Then, after he’d gotten his team out of a jamb, he’d head to the clubhouse and open the briefcase Bronwyn had given him at the start of spring training, stocked with jars of pungent horse liniments and a thick catalog of exercises and stretches, to keep his joints and muscles elastic.
 
1999
He doesn’t remember much about his final performance in September.  He can’t recall if his last pitch was a fastball or changeup.  He doesn’t remember tipping his cap or bowing to the standing ovation.  He only remembers feeling like a relic as he walked off the mound and entered the history books as the oldest man to play the game next to Satchel Paige. 

2020
“Doc was the only moniker to stick,” he tells the interviewer.  He’d been called The Fortune Teller for his glass eye, then Switch for throwing with both arms, but the names came and went with the papers.  It wasn’t until he’d taken the job as pitching coach in the spring of 2000, he remembers, that his staff took to calling him Doc for the way he nursed them with the tools in his briefcase. 
He explains how the name clung to him for a decade of coaching then followed him back home, into retirement.  He remembers the landline ringing late in 2011, the call from a manager he admired, asking if he’d help a pitcher trying to bounce back from Tommy John surgery.  He felt obliged to help, he recalls, but had just gotten settled on the farm with Bronwyn.  The only way he’d be able to work with him, he remembers telling the manager, was if the talent came to him. 
“I didn’t think anyone would come out to Picabo,” he says and grins.  “But they’ve come, one after the other, year after year, with similar stories.”  He explains how they sleep in a detached guesthouse, but share meals and chores with him and Bronwyn, in exchange for his help in a converted horse barn—a truck tire hanging from the rafters, a five-gallon bucket of baseballs on a hardpan mound ninety feet away. 
“The work is mental and mechanical,” he says.  “Some pitchers stay two weeks, others two months.  Then they’re gone.”  That’s the hardest part, he thinks, but doesn’t know how to explain the unease he feels after they leave the farm.  He never knows if they’ll find their way back to greatness.  He looks to Bronwyn, wanting her to help explain in some way.  How they both grow to root for these men.  That’s when he sees flashes of them at the airport, each pitcher tottering off with one of Bronwyn’s souvenirs—a loaded briefcase—to get them back on the mound.  
 
# # #

 Kyle Bilinski has worked as a painting contractor, delivery driver, flight attendant, commercial estimator, building plans examiner, and manned plumbing and electrical will-call counters. His writing can be found in places like The Baltimore Review, Blue Cubicle Press, BULL, Eckleburg, Hobart, Monkeybicycle, and Slag Glass City.