Chapter 9

I looked up Bill Bowman as soon as we arrived back in St. Paul. Before doing so, however, I researched him thoroughly -- not only in the Baseball Encyclopedia, but on the Internet.

I'd had only a vague idea of his past career in the major leagues. I'd heard of him, even though his career had ended several years before I had even been born, but I wanted to know something about him before we talked.

Bill Bowman had never been the ace of the Twins' staff, but for about four years, he'd been a solid number two or three starter in the Club's regular rotation. After four years as a starter, he'd hung around for two and a fraction more as a reasonably successful middle reliever -- also for the Twins.

I looked over his career stats with great interest. Not many strikeouts, compared to innings pitched. As I had already heard, Bowman hadn't been a hard thrower. He was what is known as a finesse pitcher, relying on guile and his command of a nice variety of pitches. I noted that he had been a left-hander, but he had consistently demonstrated an ability to handle righty hitters almost as well as he did the lefties. That fact, alone, was convincing evidence of his skills.

Bowman seemed to have been kind of a poor man's Greg Maddux. At least, that's what his stats suggested. His career had been neither as dominating nor as long-lived as that of Maddux, but there were signs he was the same sort of crafty professional. His history suggested that he had been a guy who pitched as much with his brain as with his good left arm.

I wondered how a junk-balling left-handed former pitcher was going to serve as a teacher for somebody whose essential gift -- if he had any -- was so different from his own. All I had heard, on the positive side, about myself as a pitcher had been about how hard I could throw the ball. Certainly my future as a pitcher would continue in no small measure to depend on my being a hard thrower. Even the people who had already told me that I needed to develop a variety of pitches had never suggested that the fastball wasn't going to remain my bread and butter pitch. These other pitches I so badly needed to develop were just going to be the necessary add-ons to afford me essential additional weapons. They were going to make my fastball look faster than it was; they were intended to put hitters off balance, so they couldn't just dig in and wait for the hard stuff.

The Question of the Day was, could Bill Bowman teach me how to throw them?

The fastball, I knew, was the most important pitch in most professional hurlers' arsenal. Bill Bowman's career was the exception, not the rule. He'd lacked a dominating fastball, but had managed to be successful without one. Still, everybody who played the game knew that having the big Hummer was damned near vital to one's long-term success. The fastball was the baseball equivalent of being a porn star with a big schlong. Maybe having one wasn't essential to doing the job, but it was an enormous advantage!

Granted, a fastball by itself was seldom enough. It was conventional wisdom that a big-league hitter could catch up with almost anyone's fastball if the hitter could only predict, with some certainty, when it was coming.

There were exceptions, perhaps. In a few rare cases, the fastball alone might indeed be enough. Bob Gibson, the old Cardinals' ace, was so intimidating, and so god-awful fast, that he might have been a success in the major leagues with nothing except a fastball -- combined with his opponents' abject fear that he might come in tight and hit them with it. Farther back in baseball history, Cleveland's great Bob Feller had been similarly gifted.

But we'll never know for sure, because these men both had become complete pitchers, with a rich variety of out-pitches.

Anyway, nothing could be more irrelevant than what Bob Gibson could or could not do. I didn't think I was, or ever would be, as fast as Gibson, and I knew I was never going to be as intimidating a figure, standing out there on the mound trying to stare down opposing hitters.

Bob Gibson had looked like a monster out there. What I had been told was that I was "pretty fucking fast." Well, that was fine -- for openers. Now I had to learn how to be a little something more than that.

So I worried, plenty, about whether Bill Bowman was the right guy to teach me how to be a real pitcher. But he was, almost literally, the only game in town. Rather than worry about whether he could help me, I decided to focus on whether he was going to be willing to. If he was, he was the one who'd be doing me the favor. So certainly I would give it a shot.

All the phone calls were made, to soften Bill Bowman up, to try to arouse his interest in taking on a thankless (and possibly profitless) task of becoming a one-on-one pitching instructor.

Josie called him -- twice. Josie's father, Bill Bowman's old college-days catcher, called him, too, even though he had nothing to go on except his daughter's word that I was a prospect. The Saints' front-office guy called him, just as Josie had asked him to.

After all this advance tenderizing, I called him myself.

As soon as I identified myself, Bowman took over the conversation. "You're the shortstop who wants to be a pitcher."

"I want to be a ballplayer," I told him. "I've been told I haven't got the bat to be a shortstop in the Bigs."

"So, you're figuring, anybody can be a pitcher, right?"

"No, sir. Nothing like that. Some people -- some baseball people who know me, think that I can do it. Can make it, with my arm. The way I look at it, I want to play ball. I'll play any position they want me to play."

"I can't believe the Saints gave you a shot, with you having no experience as a pitcher at all!"

"You talked to Josie Fitzgerald, right?" I asked him.

"Oh, yeah! She was the first one to call me, about you. And then she was the third one to call me, too."

"When I was in Baltimore, she called the Saints' brass for me, too -- to get me my chance with them. She can be pretty persuasive."

"God knows that's true," Bowman said, with some irony.

We talked on the telephone at length about my experience so far as a pitcher with the Saints. The experience wasn't at all extensive, but Bowman's questions were detailed, all the same. He wanted to know what Carlos Ortega thought about me, and what he'd said to me about each of my appearances on the mound. He wanted to know about Clint Curtis' appraisal of my abilities.

I tried to answer all his questions truthfully and without embellishment. I volunteered some of the negative comments I'd been hearing from Clint -- even some of the remarks from Ben Parton, my Saints' battery mate and sometime detractor.

The one thing Bill Bowman didn't ask me about was money. I had prepared a speech about how I'd like him to take me on as a contingent-fee project. If I made it back to Organized Baseball as a pitcher -- even as a salaried minor-league pitcher -- I was prepared to pay him over time for his previously provided services as my instructor.

I didn't get to give my speech because Bowman never asked.

He did ask me to have Carlos Ortega call him. "I want to discuss with Carlos how he feels about your starting this with me before the season even ends. There's going to be a problem, if you work out extensively for me, and then get called upon to pitch for the Saints as well."

"I'll have him call you," I said. "I'll do whatever the two of you decide is best."

"This is all still just tentative, you know," Bowman said before he hung up. "I'm interested, and I want to help, but I'll still have to see for myself whether I think you've got the goods."

"I appreciate your willingness to at least take that look," I said.

Carlos made the call to Bowman the very next afternoon, and after their discussion, my manager called me in before that night's game. "Here's what you do," Ortega told me. "Every day -- every day -- you come to me, couple hours before game time, you tell me what you did, working out with Bowman. You didn't do nothing that day, fine, you come by, and you tell me that. You throw for him, for like, forty-five minutes, well -- fine again. You just keep me up, you know? And once in awhile, you tell me all over again, what you and him been up to, the past few days. And, like, when we go on the road, you remind me again, the day we're leaving -- or maybe on the bus, on the way to wherever we're going -- what you've done, how much you've thrown and when. Like that. OK?

"What I'm saying, here, is me and Bowman want you to develop. You're not gonna get called on, too much, to pitch here in town. Maybe a little, but not much. When we're on the road, maybe you'll get into games a little more. When we're on the road, maybe Clint will have you pitching on the sidelines more. Not so much, in St. Paul, if you're throwing for Bowman. You understand?"

"I don't want the Saints to have to sacrifice the good of the team, for my workout schedule," I said.

Ortega laughed. "So far, the good of the Saints hasn't depended much on what you do, one way or the other," he said.

It wasn't exactly a high compliment, but Ortega's words weren't intended to be mean-spirited or deflating. He was simply reminding me that I remained very much an afterthought on the Saints' pitching staff.

"Anyway," Ortega continued, tempering his earlier remark somewhat, "Bill Bowman and I understand each other. He's not going to work you so hard that you can't contribute to the Club. Long as you keep me posted, how much you've done with Bowman, I'll be happy."

"There's still a chance Bowman won't like me enough to do this," I reminded Ortega. "I haven't even actually met the man in person yet."

"Oh, he'll do it," Carlos told me. "He's kind of excited about it. I can tell. And I know you've got enough going for you, he'll be interested."

I finally met Bill Bowman on the Friday in early July when we had only two more days in St. Paul before another eight-day road trip. As he requested, I met him at his home, just a few miles west of Minneapolis, at ten a.m. The Saints were playing that night, but I already had clearance from Carlos Ortega to throw as much for Bowman as he might ask.

Bowman, I knew, was sixty-four years old. He looked considerably younger. He was tall and rangy, and looked as if he could still toss a couple of innings of middle relief, if called upon.

He had a semi-rural old clapboard house that looked like it might once have been a farmhouse. There was a nice stretch of prairie behind it, and a couple of handsome oak trees providing shade on either side. No farm, though. There were other dwellings, reasonably close by. What had once perhaps been a farm was now a gentrified area of Twin Cities exurbia.