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| The Reading Room |
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Nolan Ryan's Last Pitch
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by Ann Pai
My sister Joyce didn't speak to me for an entire summer when she found out I no longer knew the
Texas Rangers' starting lineup. "What do you mean, who's Ruben Sierra?" Through the telephone
line, her creaky voice leaped like a gloved hand at my throat. "How can you not know who Ruben
Sierra is? That's just... I don't... what do you mean, who's Ruben Sierra?"
"I guess I haven't paid attention for a while," I said.
In a fit of soundlessness, she worked this information through her calculus of ethics, balances of
loyalty and disgust. Her conclusions, however she assaulted them, proved airtight; she finally forced
them out. "Good grief," she said. "That's just pitiful."
"I might not know much," I said, "but I can still want the Rangers to win, right? Who is Ruben Sierra,
anyway?"
"I don't even know what to say to you," she said.
She didn't call me again for a full year, and when I called her she held the conversation firmly on the
monosyllabic rails of weather and our multifarious Texan aunts' and uncles' general health. I nibbled
these crumbs cheerfully, patiently. She'd forgive me eventually, or at least resign herself to the
indelible disappointment of my nonchalant ignorance.
That resignation never came. Toward the end, her hands strapped to the hospital bed and her
mouth, nose, and arms littered with tubes, tape, and needles, she still engineered a scoff and an
aggrieved roll of the eyes that I could, offending in my delusion, think myself a fan and yet not know
the starting rotation.
"Do you even know any of the Rangers," she wrote on her white board, one of three methods of
communication left her. The second was sign language, though to her dismay I remembered so few
whole words that she was reduced to spelling full sentences one letter at a time.
"Sure," I said. "Who's your favorite?"
"R," she signed with a twist of her right hand, and looked at me, and waited, then sighed and
winced. Clearly, I'd no idea who R might be, not even a guess. "R-a-f-a-e-l," she spelled quickly, her
fingers flashing each sign deliberately, but faster than mere cognition would grant me the answer.
I'd have to know the name to puzzle out the spelling. She shot me a look, a dare, and curled her
fingers under, rebuffing any request for repetition.
"Rafael Palmeiro," I said. She approved. Good. I knew at least one player's last name. But then
she cut a sharp glance at me, the long-time grade school teacher smelling a covert half-truth. I
opened my mouth to object, then drew up against her squint. "Right," I said, chastened. "Right.
What position does he play?"
"Arrrrg," she said through the tubes, and flapped her hands upward against the straps in
supplication.
We'd started out together with the same indoctrination. My dad, a left-handed, semi-pro pitcher in
the 1950's Oklahoma leagues, made sure we knew the important things by the time we were in
grade school in Dallas. Swing at a good pitch. Stay behind the ball. Find the cutoff man. Cheer for
each other. Don't blame the equipment, the weather, the ump. Try your hardest. Hustle.
And we followed the Texas Rangers. We wore our fielder's gloves to Ranger Stadium, no matter how
improbable our seating, no matter how statistically discouraging the team's batting performance. We
didn't want to catch just any home run; we wanted a Ranger home run. We affixed the Rangers
pennant to our bedroom wall, the workaday cowboy hat atop a faceless baseball. By wordless
agreement it never was displaced by the clamoring competition of adolescent pop stars, coifed TV
motorcycle cops. The felt triangle claimed the crown position, cushioned by empty wall from passing
fantasy.
And earlier even than that--the summer I was five and frightened by distance from my mother--Joyce
towed me toward an autograph table. "If you cry and make us go home, I will mail you away in a
box," she said.
She held my hand firmly, and we sidled through the afternoon heat toward the blue-skirted table on
the shopping center plaza. Tom Grieve and Toby Harrah sat uniformed, giant, and grinning, signing
souvenir programs and baseball cards. Joyce, a compact, clear-eyed child, gamely held out her
program and grinned back at them. When she nudged me, I jabbed mine toward the table as well.
"What's your name, pretty?" Toby Harrah asked me.
"You don't put my name," I told him. "You only put yours." He laughed and said to Joyce, "Hey, she
knows the rules, huh?" Momentarily distressed, I looked up to see whether Joyce was angry at the
sudden notice paid me by the heroes she'd had to drag me toward. But she rolled her eyes and said
to Harrah, "You don't know the half of it." She beamed at Tom Grieve. Whichever fate had caught
me in the brief net of attention had also unrolled for her a carpet of time, where with an
uncontestable privilege, she kept standing next to Tom Grieve. She caressed the page under the
black marker of his name. "Thank you, Mr. Grieve," she said. "Say thank you," she hissed to me.
"Thank you," I said toward the table skirting, but the players had reached past us to the next copy of
their faces waiting in line.
On summer nights or Saturday afternoons, we watched the games, television volume down to
obliterate the parasitically babbling announcers, and the Texas Rangers Radio Network turned up
loud enough to hear the fan noise from Arlington Stadium behind the wooly AM signal. We watched
in 1974, mesmerized by the ominous pause as Ferguson Jenkins slowly lowered his glove before the
windup. We watched in 1976, as we unpacked boxes in our new home in rural, northeastern
Oklahoma, as the team dropped from an exhilarating 19-9 to hover around fifth place after the All-
Star break. Jumping and shouting, we watched the replays of the Harrah-Wills-Hargrove triple play
in '77 and the Harrah-Wills back-to-back home runs that same August. We watched the yearly
plummet, like a fledgling bird pinwheeling from the nest, to last place; our cornflakes wilted while we
folded the daily paper to the standings and grumbled various exhortations at its unfeeling ink. We
watched a parade of managers scowling and spitting at the haplessly salaried team through our
childhood and teens, through our overlapping college tenures.
In our adult separation, I stayed in Oklahoma, eking out graduate student life in a furnished one-
bedroom that sat nearly atop a set of train tracks. Joyce moved back to Dallas, to teach flotillas of
second graders to read, and to take various, impressionable second cousins to the grandstands
above first base. In those years, though I still swore loyalty to the Rangers, I stopped watching.
She didn't.
That is, I stopped making a point of watching. If I visited Mama and Daddy, and a game were on, I'd
sit and listen to Daddy's prescient commentary, his weirdly accurate foretelling of the next pitch.
("Watch this now. This fellow's gonna throw a low slider.") If I happened to read the sports page,
I'd look for a story about yesterday's game. But I had lost my grip on context. I checked the
standings weekly at first, then sporadically, then only once or twice throughout a season, then not at
all.
Joyce kept scorecards. She knew which reliever was likely to trot out in a given inning, against a
particular opponent. She knew every hitter's on-base percentage, could tell you whose bat was
hotter than the preseason reports had anticipated. Dearer to her still, though, was her privately
invented system of statistical greatness--her classifications of players as heroes. She respected the
players who said less, stood tall, and charted high numbers of assists. She rated players highly who
kept their peccadilloes private, who never let media paint them as small and normal and mean; she
liked players who shilled for community charities, who made appearances to kids' groups. A player
who didn't brag or badmouth, who played hard and praised his teammates, would shoot to the top
of her heroes roster, a list not governed but merely tempered by game performance. "They should
pay him more," she'd say. "He's worth having on the team." Or, of a player she loved whose
performance had slipped, "He's sure not having a good year. Wish he could be playing like his old
best." Of a green player whose comportment surpassed his ability: "Don't you tell me he stinks.
What if he does stink. You get out there and do better."
Nolan Ryan, forthright, just, and of iron fortitude, led the heroes roster in multiple categories. He
was Joyce's sterling standard, the hero against whom no measure of dignity would be altered to
account for the era in which he played. Joyce had watched his last game, then called me. "It was
just awful," she said.
"Yeah," I said, thinking it sounded like more than simple end-of-an-era wistfulness, and thinking I'd
look it up later. I had already destroyed her illusion that as sisters we shared an intricate identity, a
mosaic of stats and lore. I'd admitted my lie of omission, my pretense that the nine-inning, play-by-
play soundtrack still threaded through my weekday summer evenings. I couldn't bear, in addition, to
tell her that I'd had no clue that Nolan Ryan was planning to retire, much less that he'd already
thrown his final pitch. I couldn't bear to tell her she was that much alone.
She never resigned herself to my lapse. It never seemed right to her that I could simply drift away
from baseball, not make a public statement of some sort, not disavow my place in the game's
panorama. But she did forgive me. She called me one mid-July, Saturday afternoon. "If you wanted
to come down for the game when they retire Nolan Ryan's number," she said, "I suppose I could get
us tickets." It was 1996; the Rangers were going to win the division, and even a dilettante like me
had felt a spark of excitement catch on the fragile tinder of post All-Star wins.
"That'd be--yeah! Oh, hey. Thank you. That's wonderful." We chattered then, planning the visit,
comparing notes on our parents' calls to us, telling stories from our respective summers, into the
early evening.
That September, she waited in the white-hot sunshine on the walkway outside the Ballpark at
Arlington. The Ballpark was new, its brick still sharply pointed and glowing, its landscape materials
young and struggling in the north Texas summer. Families, kids' ball teams, and clutches of young
professionals milled across the wide concrete walks; souvenir hawkers yelled their gitchers and
howsabouts, waving Nolan Ryan's pose on programs and posters. The gates hadn't yet opened.
(Daddy taught us: if you're not going to be there for the warm-up, you might think twice about going
at all.)
I wandered up from the parking lot, searching the crowd for her. When I saw her, I nearly stumbled,
short-stepping in shock. She'd been standing right in front of me, scowling at my obtuseness--she
was as obvious and invisible as a billboard among blue highway signs. She was huge.
Always a thick-wristed, solidly-assembled girl, Joyce had started to gain weight after college. For
years, her weight had been no more than average in our family--she was round, fat, but no more so
than many aunts, uncles, cousins--no more than was considered inconvenient, perhaps someday
unhealthy. Her weight had not impeded, as far as we knew, her life. When had this happened to
her?
She stood, a mounded island in currents of people who swirled around, avoiding her. People
swerved by, looking back with a repulsed grimace, as though she were an overflowing trash can.
She looked like a face zipped into a stubby, domed camping tent. Her single-knit garments draped
like tarps, a white shirt and a full green skirt. The skirt's broad tube clung to the blocky, cascading
rolls of belly and buttock, flagged around the bowed columns of her calves. She stood with feet
posted wide, bracing. A frown danced across the pale balloon of her sweaty face. Her long, brown
hair hung limp, half-brushed in back, pulled away from the puffy forehead with an alice band.
"Oh, hi," I said. She rolled her eyes at me.
"Right," she said. "Standing right in front of you."
We scaled the grievous ascent to our seats, halfway down the third base line, behind a steel girder,
two rows from the upper rim, and in the sun. I followed Joyce as she heaved up step after step,
slowly tottering from foot to foot. She wore her tennis shoes untied; they busted outward like
warped plywood. Her ankles bulged like creamy soft serve cones over the padding. Twice she
stopped to rest. The second time she turned to me in irritation. "Just go on ahead," she said.
Joyce, sullen, seemed torn between embarrassment at having paid for rotten seats, pique at our
distance from the Ryan ceremonies, and defensive wrath at my discourteous mention of the
ballpark's imperfection. Perhaps, too, the distress weighed on her mind, as it has in the confessions
and tears of fat women numberless: "I am the fattest person in the room. In this whole stadium,
I'm the fattest one." But rampant physical discomfort overruled emotion. She spent the game
wedged backward into the plastic seat, unwilling to face the vertical expedition to concessions or the
bathroom. Sweat trickled down her face. She didn't cheer. She didn't clap. She didn't smile--not at
the home runs, not at the win.
"What's wrong?" I asked. She simply glowered, fanning herself with the program. "Come on, what's
wrong."
"Stop asking," she said. "If anything's wrong, I'll fix it." Then she relented and glanced sidelong at
me, relaxing her frown into an impassive blink. "It's all right," she said. "I'm just hot is all. It makes
me cranky."
People who are all right don't behave like you, I wanted to say. More than that, I wanted to shout
from the panic that grew in me as I sat stuffed next to her warmth, breathing the musty scent of her
body. I wanted to scream, Do something! Save yourself! That day, for the first time, I understood
the danger of her flesh and that she could die. It didn't matter to me what had caused her to be fat.
It didn't matter if it was a moral failing, willful bad habits, as some people think, or a genetic disorder,
as others do, or an uncooperative environment, as do still others--those answers might provide a
frisson of superiority to those for whom obesity is an academic discussion--all I cared was that she
get help, that she find a path toward a less lethal body. I would beg her to find help. But she stood
by her virtues. Don't ask the coach to take you out. Don't ask for favors. Hang tough. Don't let
them see it hurts.
Five years later, at age thirty-eight, Joyce was admitted to an emergency room. Her skin was
jaundiced. She couldn't eat. She weighed more than five hundred pounds, her five-foot frame
tortured in its heroic effort to carry the wobbling load. "I don't understand it," she'd said once. "I
don't eat any more than Mama or Daddy. I don't eat enough to weigh this much. I don't know what
to do."
"You could go to a doctor," I said.
"Ha. Right. Doctors just tell me I'm overweight. Like I don't already know that. Tell me to diet. Like
I don't already try. They don't know what's going on any more than I do. Besides," she said,
"doctors are expensive."
She lay in the hospital six weeks. Her kidneys were failing; she battled four separate bacterial and
viral infections, one of which resisted antibiotics and, virulently infectious, sent her into isolation. Her
pancreas began to fail. Her body defied diagnosis. Too large to slide into the MRI or CT scan
machines, she lay prey to escalating fevers and oxygen depletion as a team of doctors struggled to
discover the underlying cause of illness. At last they understood. Free air and internal bleeding
indicated the truth--her colon and small intestine were riddled with holes, advanced diverticulitis and
peritonitis. Her food storage system was ruptured; she had been leaking noxious waste into herself,
for how long, no one knew.
The pulmonologist gathered the family quickly, preparing us for the first of two surgeries. "Joyce," he
said, "I know you can understand me, so I'm going to explain this to you and then I need to know
what you want to do.
"We need to do a surgery," he said. "We need to put breathing tubes down your throat. We think
you're going to need another surgery, a colonostomy. And if that happens we won't have time to
intubate you then. It would be too dangerous to do quickly. So we need to put the tubes in now.
"You have to understand," he continued. "Once we put the tubes in, it'll be very hard to take them
out. You'll have to be able to breathe on your own again before we can do that. You understand?"
She nodded. On the white board, she formed tidy, grade-school lettering, asking him to explain the
colonostomy. He grinned, marveling at her calm, neat printing; he apologized for grinning, explained
the surgery, and said, "We have to ask you now. Do we have your permission?"
She nodded. In case it weren't enough, she used her third and final resort of communication. She
spoke, a barely audible, dry-throated croak. "Yes," she said.
"I have to ask you one more thing," he said. "We ask this of everybody with these types of
surgeries. If during surgery, you are in an emergency situation, do you want the Code Blue
procedures? That means things like the paddles, things that will keep you alive in extreme
circumstances. You need to understand that these procedures are themselves dangerous, and there
is no guarantee. Do you want Code Blue procedures?"
Joyce looked around the room at me, our father, our mother, and sucked in her lower lip in doubt.
"I'll give you a minute to think about it," said the doctor. "But don't take too long." He left the room.
Joyce surveyed our faces one by one. She looked away and shrugged. "This is your decision, Joyce,"
Daddy said, his voice musical and wet. "You know what I think about it. But this isn't for me to say
or for your mama to say. Only you know what you want to do."
Joyce narrowed her eyes. She wheezed in a long breath, then another. She filled her lungs and
locked her gaze on her targets. And she spoke. Three loud words, like three hot strikes slamming
into the mitt: "Keep. . . me. . . ALIVE," she said.
She survived two surgeries, the intubation and a brutal seven-hour harvest of the remnants of her
intestine. "Her heart kept beating," said the surgeon. "As long as she didn't give up, we wouldn't
either." But after that, she had no more strength to throw, no edge over viruses, weakening
kidneys, a surgical wound that obeyed the gravity of her heavy flesh and refused to close and heal.
If only she could catch her breath, maybe she'd see the game through, go out with the win safe in
the seventh or eighth. Through two weeks she fought the ventilator for that breath, until the
ventilator won. I stayed by her side as I had through the six weeks, cataloguing blood-oxygen
levels, calculating measures of kidney function, scribbling down times and pulse rates and
medications, recording tests and responses--the beautiful, sacred statistics, the sabermetrics of her
life, which might reveal some pattern, some secret, some training path toward health. But at the end,
this priceless trivia became, clearly, useless. Knowledge would make no difference in the length or
quality of the hospitalization remaining. I checked in with the nurses anyway, filed the latest
assessments, constructed chart after chart. "It just seems like somebody ought to pay attention.
Somebody ought to know everything that happened to her," I told the ICU nurse who'd befriended
my family. "Is it--it is something, isn't it? To know what happened? Isn't that something? Not,
though--not enough? Oh. . ."
"It's okay, honey," said the nurse. "You're absolutely right. All the way. We'll tell you what we
know."
Here's what I know now, about Nolan Ryan: He didn't know that pitch was going to be his last. It
ripped the ligament in his right elbow. There'd be no next pitch to anticipate, no final triumphal inning
to savor. He'd never pitch again. "It's a hell of a way to end a career," he said.
That last pitch. You prepare your whole life to throw it. You imagine it, visualize it, dream it--how it
will soar tight and lethal as a fighter jet, ice a scoreless inning, hold the lead in a fifth playoff game--
but like fans' cheers fading, your last pitch isn't yours to give and own. Even if you see it coming, and
judge it far away, it can just--happen.
She died on a home game Tuesday. The Rangers won that day, nowhere in the hunt for the
pennant. But we never thought that was the point of watching. You follow the team you love; you
declare your allegiance and hold it fast. Your loyalties don't change with your geography. They don't
change with fumbling management or with a strike or with your sister's death. Your loyalties go on.
You always want the Rangers to win, and you always want them to beat the Yankees--like tonight.
It's a cool evening, with dusk crawling up the sides of the stadium and the field lights glowing on the
thickening blue sky. There's almost no wind. The smells of leather and raked dirt sleep in the smells
of pretzels and mustard. Every sense on such a night is tuned to anticipate. Wait for it. Wait for it.
Swing!--and out there, the Rangers are starting Colby Lewis today. He's a twenty-three-year-old
right-hander. He has an ERA of 7.89 and has a 4-6 record in 16 starts this year. He's pitched 73
innings and allowed 102 hits, and he's up against Clemens, and I want him to win. So here it is. I'm
an imperfect fan. I don't know what it all means, his statistics, the team's statistics, the league's
statistics in the history of baseball statistics, the beating heart and vein map of the game. But I
want this guy to win. Isn't that enough to make my ignorant love real? I feel it, feel the electric
desire to win, feel it in the cool air swirling under the hot tungstens, in the tug on a brim and a seam
rolling against a thumb, and I know who I'm rooting for. The young, uncelebrated pitcher: I want
this guy to win.
My sister Joyce didn't speak to me for an entire summer when she found out I no longer knew the
Texas Rangers' starting lineup. "What do you mean, who's Ruben Sierra?" Through the telephone
line, her creaky voice leaped like a gloved hand at my throat. "How can you not know who Ruben
Sierra is? That's just... I don't... what do you mean, who's Ruben Sierra?"
"I guess I haven't paid attention for a while," I said.
In a fit of soundlessness, she worked this information through her calculus of ethics, balances of
loyalty and disgust. Her conclusions, however she assaulted them, proved airtight; she finally forced
them out. "Good grief," she said. "That's just pitiful."
"I might not know much," I said, "but I can still want the Rangers to win, right? Who is Ruben Sierra,
anyway?"
"I don't even know what to say to you," she said.
She didn't call me again for a full year, and when I called her she held the conversation firmly on the
monosyllabic rails of weather and our multifarious Texan aunts' and uncles' general health. I nibbled
these crumbs cheerfully, patiently. She'd forgive me eventually, or at least resign herself to the
indelible disappointment of my nonchalant ignorance.
That resignation never came. Toward the end, her hands strapped to the hospital bed and her
mouth, nose, and arms littered with tubes, tape, and needles, she still engineered a scoff and an
aggrieved roll of the eyes that I could, offending in my delusion, think myself a fan and yet not know
the starting rotation.
"Do you even know any of the Rangers," she wrote on her white board, one of three methods of
communication left her. The second was sign language, though to her dismay I remembered so few
whole words that she was reduced to spelling full sentences one letter at a time.
"Sure," I said. "Who's your favorite?"
"R," she signed with a twist of her right hand, and looked at me, and waited, then sighed and
winced. Clearly, I'd no idea who R might be, not even a guess. "R-a-f-a-e-l," she spelled quickly, her
fingers flashing each sign deliberately, but faster than mere cognition would grant me the answer.
I'd have to know the name to puzzle out the spelling. She shot me a look, a dare, and curled her
fingers under, rebuffing any request for repetition.
"Rafael Palmeiro," I said. She approved. Good. I knew at least one player's last name. But then
she cut a sharp glance at me, the long-time grade school teacher smelling a covert half-truth. I
opened my mouth to object, then drew up against her squint. "Right," I said, chastened. "Right.
What position does he play?"
"Arrrrg," she said through the tubes, and flapped her hands upward against the straps in
supplication.
- When you’re nineteen, the hard tremors of late adolescence are enough to keep you off-
balance. Never mind the major leagues. Nineteen, Nolan can’t be sure the Mets will put him on
the mound at all. Who’s thinking of records? He doesn’t know the records. But he knows his pitch,
and he’s ready for it. He’s here, and wants a chance to throw the first pitch, then the next, then
the next.
- It’s what you’ve got to do. If you’re going to throw the most strikeouts ever, and the most
walks ever, then you’ve got to throw the most pitches ever. Ninety-thousand pitches. That’s the
main thing--no matter what happens, you’ve got to keep finding the next pitch. And then you
throw it hard.
We'd started out together with the same indoctrination. My dad, a left-handed, semi-pro pitcher in
the 1950's Oklahoma leagues, made sure we knew the important things by the time we were in
grade school in Dallas. Swing at a good pitch. Stay behind the ball. Find the cutoff man. Cheer for
each other. Don't blame the equipment, the weather, the ump. Try your hardest. Hustle.
And we followed the Texas Rangers. We wore our fielder's gloves to Ranger Stadium, no matter how
improbable our seating, no matter how statistically discouraging the team's batting performance. We
didn't want to catch just any home run; we wanted a Ranger home run. We affixed the Rangers
pennant to our bedroom wall, the workaday cowboy hat atop a faceless baseball. By wordless
agreement it never was displaced by the clamoring competition of adolescent pop stars, coifed TV
motorcycle cops. The felt triangle claimed the crown position, cushioned by empty wall from passing
fantasy.
And earlier even than that--the summer I was five and frightened by distance from my mother--Joyce
towed me toward an autograph table. "If you cry and make us go home, I will mail you away in a
box," she said.
She held my hand firmly, and we sidled through the afternoon heat toward the blue-skirted table on
the shopping center plaza. Tom Grieve and Toby Harrah sat uniformed, giant, and grinning, signing
souvenir programs and baseball cards. Joyce, a compact, clear-eyed child, gamely held out her
program and grinned back at them. When she nudged me, I jabbed mine toward the table as well.
"What's your name, pretty?" Toby Harrah asked me.
"You don't put my name," I told him. "You only put yours." He laughed and said to Joyce, "Hey, she
knows the rules, huh?" Momentarily distressed, I looked up to see whether Joyce was angry at the
sudden notice paid me by the heroes she'd had to drag me toward. But she rolled her eyes and said
to Harrah, "You don't know the half of it." She beamed at Tom Grieve. Whichever fate had caught
me in the brief net of attention had also unrolled for her a carpet of time, where with an
uncontestable privilege, she kept standing next to Tom Grieve. She caressed the page under the
black marker of his name. "Thank you, Mr. Grieve," she said. "Say thank you," she hissed to me.
"Thank you," I said toward the table skirting, but the players had reached past us to the next copy of
their faces waiting in line.
On summer nights or Saturday afternoons, we watched the games, television volume down to
obliterate the parasitically babbling announcers, and the Texas Rangers Radio Network turned up
loud enough to hear the fan noise from Arlington Stadium behind the wooly AM signal. We watched
in 1974, mesmerized by the ominous pause as Ferguson Jenkins slowly lowered his glove before the
windup. We watched in 1976, as we unpacked boxes in our new home in rural, northeastern
Oklahoma, as the team dropped from an exhilarating 19-9 to hover around fifth place after the All-
Star break. Jumping and shouting, we watched the replays of the Harrah-Wills-Hargrove triple play
in '77 and the Harrah-Wills back-to-back home runs that same August. We watched the yearly
plummet, like a fledgling bird pinwheeling from the nest, to last place; our cornflakes wilted while we
folded the daily paper to the standings and grumbled various exhortations at its unfeeling ink. We
watched a parade of managers scowling and spitting at the haplessly salaried team through our
childhood and teens, through our overlapping college tenures.
- Nolan feels the pitch waiting deep in his back, in his rocked balance on the left foot, then
shooting like a bottle rocket through the deltoids and bicep and iron wrist and fingers. It’s a hard
one, ninety-seven miles an hour, hard enough to crack a helmet, fracture an arm. Wide of the
plate, it screams past Carter and slams the backstop. Nolan comes off the mound, but there’s no
getting the throw to second, and gold infield dust drifts down toward the basepath.
Wild pitches rattle in his statistics. They din in the ears of managers and coaches. But he
lets the sound fade. That last wild pitch is gone forever, done. He registers the trace shift in the
hitter’s feet. He checks the runner. He can wonder later what the walks, the losses, the crazy
flights of his fastball are doing to his prospects. Right now he digs and finds it: the next pitch.
In our adult separation, I stayed in Oklahoma, eking out graduate student life in a furnished one-
bedroom that sat nearly atop a set of train tracks. Joyce moved back to Dallas, to teach flotillas of
second graders to read, and to take various, impressionable second cousins to the grandstands
above first base. In those years, though I still swore loyalty to the Rangers, I stopped watching.
She didn't.
That is, I stopped making a point of watching. If I visited Mama and Daddy, and a game were on, I'd
sit and listen to Daddy's prescient commentary, his weirdly accurate foretelling of the next pitch.
("Watch this now. This fellow's gonna throw a low slider.") If I happened to read the sports page,
I'd look for a story about yesterday's game. But I had lost my grip on context. I checked the
standings weekly at first, then sporadically, then only once or twice throughout a season, then not at
all.
Joyce kept scorecards. She knew which reliever was likely to trot out in a given inning, against a
particular opponent. She knew every hitter's on-base percentage, could tell you whose bat was
hotter than the preseason reports had anticipated. Dearer to her still, though, was her privately
invented system of statistical greatness--her classifications of players as heroes. She respected the
players who said less, stood tall, and charted high numbers of assists. She rated players highly who
kept their peccadilloes private, who never let media paint them as small and normal and mean; she
liked players who shilled for community charities, who made appearances to kids' groups. A player
who didn't brag or badmouth, who played hard and praised his teammates, would shoot to the top
of her heroes roster, a list not governed but merely tempered by game performance. "They should
pay him more," she'd say. "He's worth having on the team." Or, of a player she loved whose
performance had slipped, "He's sure not having a good year. Wish he could be playing like his old
best." Of a green player whose comportment surpassed his ability: "Don't you tell me he stinks.
What if he does stink. You get out there and do better."
Nolan Ryan, forthright, just, and of iron fortitude, led the heroes roster in multiple categories. He
was Joyce's sterling standard, the hero against whom no measure of dignity would be altered to
account for the era in which he played. Joyce had watched his last game, then called me. "It was
just awful," she said.
"Yeah," I said, thinking it sounded like more than simple end-of-an-era wistfulness, and thinking I'd
look it up later. I had already destroyed her illusion that as sisters we shared an intricate identity, a
mosaic of stats and lore. I'd admitted my lie of omission, my pretense that the nine-inning, play-by-
play soundtrack still threaded through my weekday summer evenings. I couldn't bear, in addition, to
tell her that I'd had no clue that Nolan Ryan was planning to retire, much less that he'd already
thrown his final pitch. I couldn't bear to tell her she was that much alone.
- There it is again, and it’s only the third. The middle finger is going to burn clean off his right
hand. With every pitch, the friction of leather on sweat-moistened hand rubs the skin a little more
raw, separates its fine flesh layers a little farther. If he’s going to pitch his game, he can’t hold
back. He can’t let a blister slacken his grip, though it feels like a filet knife has ripped into his
hand. He can’t let searing pain shake his decision, his power. Until it starts to bleed, he’s throwing
the next pitch. That’s what he does.
She never resigned herself to my lapse. It never seemed right to her that I could simply drift away
from baseball, not make a public statement of some sort, not disavow my place in the game's
panorama. But she did forgive me. She called me one mid-July, Saturday afternoon. "If you wanted
to come down for the game when they retire Nolan Ryan's number," she said, "I suppose I could get
us tickets." It was 1996; the Rangers were going to win the division, and even a dilettante like me
had felt a spark of excitement catch on the fragile tinder of post All-Star wins.
"That'd be--yeah! Oh, hey. Thank you. That's wonderful." We chattered then, planning the visit,
comparing notes on our parents' calls to us, telling stories from our respective summers, into the
early evening.
That September, she waited in the white-hot sunshine on the walkway outside the Ballpark at
Arlington. The Ballpark was new, its brick still sharply pointed and glowing, its landscape materials
young and struggling in the north Texas summer. Families, kids' ball teams, and clutches of young
professionals milled across the wide concrete walks; souvenir hawkers yelled their gitchers and
howsabouts, waving Nolan Ryan's pose on programs and posters. The gates hadn't yet opened.
(Daddy taught us: if you're not going to be there for the warm-up, you might think twice about going
at all.)
I wandered up from the parking lot, searching the crowd for her. When I saw her, I nearly stumbled,
short-stepping in shock. She'd been standing right in front of me, scowling at my obtuseness--she
was as obvious and invisible as a billboard among blue highway signs. She was huge.
Always a thick-wristed, solidly-assembled girl, Joyce had started to gain weight after college. For
years, her weight had been no more than average in our family--she was round, fat, but no more so
than many aunts, uncles, cousins--no more than was considered inconvenient, perhaps someday
unhealthy. Her weight had not impeded, as far as we knew, her life. When had this happened to
her?
She stood, a mounded island in currents of people who swirled around, avoiding her. People
swerved by, looking back with a repulsed grimace, as though she were an overflowing trash can.
She looked like a face zipped into a stubby, domed camping tent. Her single-knit garments draped
like tarps, a white shirt and a full green skirt. The skirt's broad tube clung to the blocky, cascading
rolls of belly and buttock, flagged around the bowed columns of her calves. She stood with feet
posted wide, bracing. A frown danced across the pale balloon of her sweaty face. Her long, brown
hair hung limp, half-brushed in back, pulled away from the puffy forehead with an alice band.
"Oh, hi," I said. She rolled her eyes at me.
"Right," she said. "Standing right in front of you."
We scaled the grievous ascent to our seats, halfway down the third base line, behind a steel girder,
two rows from the upper rim, and in the sun. I followed Joyce as she heaved up step after step,
slowly tottering from foot to foot. She wore her tennis shoes untied; they busted outward like
warped plywood. Her ankles bulged like creamy soft serve cones over the padding. Twice she
stopped to rest. The second time she turned to me in irritation. "Just go on ahead," she said.
- First the elbow, then the hamstring, now this. He’d fought his way back after calcium
deposits had robbed his arm of flex, immobilized its extension. After the surgery, he’d disciplined
the arm again. The record-breaking fastball, maybe it was behind him. The four no-hitters, surely
his pinnacle. But he was pitching. He was back from the hamstring injury in under a month. But
now his breath burns like frostbite where his rib has pulled apart from the cartilage. He can’t bend
or twist around this meat cleaver in his chest. So Bavasi wants him gone, wants that salary back,
wants Ryan out of the Angels. All right, he thinks. I’ve got more pitches left, I know that. I’ll go
someplace where they want me to throw ‘em.
Joyce, sullen, seemed torn between embarrassment at having paid for rotten seats, pique at our
distance from the Ryan ceremonies, and defensive wrath at my discourteous mention of the
ballpark's imperfection. Perhaps, too, the distress weighed on her mind, as it has in the confessions
and tears of fat women numberless: "I am the fattest person in the room. In this whole stadium,
I'm the fattest one." But rampant physical discomfort overruled emotion. She spent the game
wedged backward into the plastic seat, unwilling to face the vertical expedition to concessions or the
bathroom. Sweat trickled down her face. She didn't cheer. She didn't clap. She didn't smile--not at
the home runs, not at the win.
"What's wrong?" I asked. She simply glowered, fanning herself with the program. "Come on, what's
wrong."
"Stop asking," she said. "If anything's wrong, I'll fix it." Then she relented and glanced sidelong at
me, relaxing her frown into an impassive blink. "It's all right," she said. "I'm just hot is all. It makes
me cranky."
People who are all right don't behave like you, I wanted to say. More than that, I wanted to shout
from the panic that grew in me as I sat stuffed next to her warmth, breathing the musty scent of her
body. I wanted to scream, Do something! Save yourself! That day, for the first time, I understood
the danger of her flesh and that she could die. It didn't matter to me what had caused her to be fat.
It didn't matter if it was a moral failing, willful bad habits, as some people think, or a genetic disorder,
as others do, or an uncooperative environment, as do still others--those answers might provide a
frisson of superiority to those for whom obesity is an academic discussion--all I cared was that she
get help, that she find a path toward a less lethal body. I would beg her to find help. But she stood
by her virtues. Don't ask the coach to take you out. Don't ask for favors. Hang tough. Don't let
them see it hurts.
- His boy lies broken, the life evaporating and coalescing, the kidney gone, the spleen gone. The
car collided with the boy. Metal and wheel crushed the seven-year-old body. The father has no way
to know his boy will pitch against him someday. The hospitalization, the body cast on that small
frame will last for months. Months. He goes back to his job, where he belongs, for his family’s
sake. He pitches.
Five years later, at age thirty-eight, Joyce was admitted to an emergency room. Her skin was
jaundiced. She couldn't eat. She weighed more than five hundred pounds, her five-foot frame
tortured in its heroic effort to carry the wobbling load. "I don't understand it," she'd said once. "I
don't eat any more than Mama or Daddy. I don't eat enough to weigh this much. I don't know what
to do."
"You could go to a doctor," I said.
"Ha. Right. Doctors just tell me I'm overweight. Like I don't already know that. Tell me to diet. Like
I don't already try. They don't know what's going on any more than I do. Besides," she said,
"doctors are expensive."
She lay in the hospital six weeks. Her kidneys were failing; she battled four separate bacterial and
viral infections, one of which resisted antibiotics and, virulently infectious, sent her into isolation. Her
pancreas began to fail. Her body defied diagnosis. Too large to slide into the MRI or CT scan
machines, she lay prey to escalating fevers and oxygen depletion as a team of doctors struggled to
discover the underlying cause of illness. At last they understood. Free air and internal bleeding
indicated the truth--her colon and small intestine were riddled with holes, advanced diverticulitis and
peritonitis. Her food storage system was ruptured; she had been leaking noxious waste into herself,
for how long, no one knew.
The pulmonologist gathered the family quickly, preparing us for the first of two surgeries. "Joyce," he
said, "I know you can understand me, so I'm going to explain this to you and then I need to know
what you want to do.
"We need to do a surgery," he said. "We need to put breathing tubes down your throat. We think
you're going to need another surgery, a colonostomy. And if that happens we won't have time to
intubate you then. It would be too dangerous to do quickly. So we need to put the tubes in now.
"You have to understand," he continued. "Once we put the tubes in, it'll be very hard to take them
out. You'll have to be able to breathe on your own again before we can do that. You understand?"
She nodded. On the white board, she formed tidy, grade-school lettering, asking him to explain the
colonostomy. He grinned, marveling at her calm, neat printing; he apologized for grinning, explained
the surgery, and said, "We have to ask you now. Do we have your permission?"
She nodded. In case it weren't enough, she used her third and final resort of communication. She
spoke, a barely audible, dry-throated croak. "Yes," she said.
"I have to ask you one more thing," he said. "We ask this of everybody with these types of
surgeries. If during surgery, you are in an emergency situation, do you want the Code Blue
procedures? That means things like the paddles, things that will keep you alive in extreme
circumstances. You need to understand that these procedures are themselves dangerous, and there
is no guarantee. Do you want Code Blue procedures?"
Joyce looked around the room at me, our father, our mother, and sucked in her lower lip in doubt.
"I'll give you a minute to think about it," said the doctor. "But don't take too long." He left the room.
Joyce surveyed our faces one by one. She looked away and shrugged. "This is your decision, Joyce,"
Daddy said, his voice musical and wet. "You know what I think about it. But this isn't for me to say
or for your mama to say. Only you know what you want to do."
Joyce narrowed her eyes. She wheezed in a long breath, then another. She filled her lungs and
locked her gaze on her targets. And she spoke. Three loud words, like three hot strikes slamming
into the mitt: "Keep. . . me. . . ALIVE," she said.
- He’s forty-six. A pitcher’s body should have been worn to a nub by now, the arm empty as a
squeezed orange. It’s not going to last much longer. Nobody’s supposed to throw 17,000 strikes.
Nobody’s supposed to throw 90,000 pitches. Nobody will again. This is it, the last season. So no
matter what, until it ends, he’s finding the next pitch. He knows for sure where it is by now. He’ll
throw it hard.
She survived two surgeries, the intubation and a brutal seven-hour harvest of the remnants of her
intestine. "Her heart kept beating," said the surgeon. "As long as she didn't give up, we wouldn't
either." But after that, she had no more strength to throw, no edge over viruses, weakening
kidneys, a surgical wound that obeyed the gravity of her heavy flesh and refused to close and heal.
If only she could catch her breath, maybe she'd see the game through, go out with the win safe in
the seventh or eighth. Through two weeks she fought the ventilator for that breath, until the
ventilator won. I stayed by her side as I had through the six weeks, cataloguing blood-oxygen
levels, calculating measures of kidney function, scribbling down times and pulse rates and
medications, recording tests and responses--the beautiful, sacred statistics, the sabermetrics of her
life, which might reveal some pattern, some secret, some training path toward health. But at the end,
this priceless trivia became, clearly, useless. Knowledge would make no difference in the length or
quality of the hospitalization remaining. I checked in with the nurses anyway, filed the latest
assessments, constructed chart after chart. "It just seems like somebody ought to pay attention.
Somebody ought to know everything that happened to her," I told the ICU nurse who'd befriended
my family. "Is it--it is something, isn't it? To know what happened? Isn't that something? Not,
though--not enough? Oh. . ."
"It's okay, honey," said the nurse. "You're absolutely right. All the way. We'll tell you what we
know."
Here's what I know now, about Nolan Ryan: He didn't know that pitch was going to be his last. It
ripped the ligament in his right elbow. There'd be no next pitch to anticipate, no final triumphal inning
to savor. He'd never pitch again. "It's a hell of a way to end a career," he said.
That last pitch. You prepare your whole life to throw it. You imagine it, visualize it, dream it--how it
will soar tight and lethal as a fighter jet, ice a scoreless inning, hold the lead in a fifth playoff game--
but like fans' cheers fading, your last pitch isn't yours to give and own. Even if you see it coming, and
judge it far away, it can just--happen.
She died on a home game Tuesday. The Rangers won that day, nowhere in the hunt for the
pennant. But we never thought that was the point of watching. You follow the team you love; you
declare your allegiance and hold it fast. Your loyalties don't change with your geography. They don't
change with fumbling management or with a strike or with your sister's death. Your loyalties go on.
You always want the Rangers to win, and you always want them to beat the Yankees--like tonight.
It's a cool evening, with dusk crawling up the sides of the stadium and the field lights glowing on the
thickening blue sky. There's almost no wind. The smells of leather and raked dirt sleep in the smells
of pretzels and mustard. Every sense on such a night is tuned to anticipate. Wait for it. Wait for it.
Swing!--and out there, the Rangers are starting Colby Lewis today. He's a twenty-three-year-old
right-hander. He has an ERA of 7.89 and has a 4-6 record in 16 starts this year. He's pitched 73
innings and allowed 102 hits, and he's up against Clemens, and I want him to win. So here it is. I'm
an imperfect fan. I don't know what it all means, his statistics, the team's statistics, the league's
statistics in the history of baseball statistics, the beating heart and vein map of the game. But I
want this guy to win. Isn't that enough to make my ignorant love real? I feel it, feel the electric
desire to win, feel it in the cool air swirling under the hot tungstens, in the tug on a brim and a seam
rolling against a thumb, and I know who I'm rooting for. The young, uncelebrated pitcher: I want
this guy to win.
This essay originally appeared in Sport Literate magazine.