On this morning, a 25-year-old Venezuelan shortstop named Cesar Izturis was in front of his locker. He sat on a metal chair that faced the center of the room, which was empty except for a reporter waiting for someone else. Cesar was a so-so hitter, but didn’t strike out much, and had the able hands of a young man whose way to the big leagues had seen few perfect infields.

When he spoke, the words came out soft and shaded in practiced English. He smiled with his whole face, his shoulders too. And so he was likable and easy to root for on a Dodgers team that seemed determined to finish in last place or close to it.

It’s not uncommon for reporters to stand in clubhouses doing nothing but shifting their eyes from the clock to the door. Most everybody gets used to it. The day’s story rests somewhere between time and opportunity, which explains the obsession with clock and door.

Cesar pounded on a new glove. Someday it’d be his gamer. That morning it’d have to endure the early rigors of being broken in, a process that is as varied among ballplayers as batter’s box tics. Cesar wielded a small, heavy club, the head of which landed in the pocket with steady, violent, loving thumps.

Meanwhile, the clock. The door. The clock. The door.

“Cesar?” I said, time to kill, boredom having overtaken me.

He looked up.

I nodded at the glove.

“Remember your first one?”

He said nothing but pulled a nearby chair closer to his, inviting me to sit, against the rules of reporter clubhouse decorum. I sat.

“My father …,” he began.

And this was the story.

Cesar was born and raised in Barquisimeto, an agricultural hub near the northern tip of the Andes mountain range. His father, also Cesar, ferried fruit and vegetables from local markets to small mountain towns, some of which were a day’s drive away. He could be gone for most of a week, then return home before starting the route again.

The elder Cesar drove a blue 1954 Chevy pickup, which sagged in places and rusted in others, had flared fenders, two droopy headlights and a flat, grimacing front bumper. Young Cesar and his five brothers took to calling their father’s truck “Cara de Cabra Vieja.”

Old Goat Face.

Cesar, the son, was closest to his younger half-brother, Maicer. They shared bunk beds and a love for baseball. They took turns with a wood bat, counting swings at a tire their father hung from a mango tree in the yard.

“One hundred a day,” he’d instructed.

Their father worked hard, but the money only went so far.

The Izturis boys wore shabbier clothes than their classmates. Their only baseball gear was the bat; during neighborhood or recreation league games, they taped their shoes so they’d last another season and borrowed gloves from the other boys.

Smaller than most, Cesar and Maicer proved to be unusually adept at the sport. They were fast and smart, playing intuitively in the middle of the infield, drawing comparisons in the neighborhood to a young Aparicio, a young Concepcion, a young Vizquel, countrymen who’d become baseball heroes.

When he went to the market or to church, their father would hear about his sons, still in grade school, how they were so good at baseball, that they were destined for greatness, how proud he must be.

One afternoon the boys returned home from school. Old Goat Face was not in the driveway. They assumed their father was again on his route in the mountains, that he’d be home again in a few days. Except when they opened the front door, he was in the living room, sitting in a chair, as if he’d been waiting for them.

“I have a surprise,” he told them.

He reached behind the chair and in each hand he held a brand new baseball glove. He’d sold Old Goat Face for $60, made up the rest with money he’d saved and arranged to go to work with his brother, who ran the same mountain route.

Cesar still remembered the details of that glove, but mostly, he said 16 years later, “The smell.”

I smiled and began to rise from the chair. “Great story,” I said.

“There’s more,” Cesar said.

When he was 16, Cesar signed a professional contract with the Toronto Blue Jays. Two years later, Maicer signed with the Cleveland Indians.

In 2001, when he was 21, Cesar debuted in the major leagues, playing in 46 games at second base and shortstop for the Blue Jays. He returned home that winter as a big leaguer, with big league money in his pocket.

On a warm afternoon soon after he’d arrived in Barquisimeto, he asked his father to accompany him on an errand. They drove together into the city. Cesar steered into a car dealership, then led his father to a row of new pickup trucks. He pointed to a blue one.

“There’s your car,” he said. “There’s Old Goat Face.”

He’d bought it for his father.

Cesar played in the major leagues for 13 seasons. He was an All-Star once and won a Gold Glove at shortstop. Maicer was a major leaguer for 11 seasons. Together they had nearly 2,000 hits.

Weeks after Cesar told me his story, I met the elder, Cesar. He was built lean with strong wrists. He smiled as Cesar did. I asked him about Old Goat Face and the new gloves and the day his son replaced that old pickup truck, repaying the debt.

He raised his hands to his head, making his fingers into horns, like a goat, and laughed.

“The real payoff,” he said through a translator, “was not that they made it to the big leagues. The real payoff was that day. Even if they never made it, I’d do it again.”

Today, it’s time to write the first page of a new book.

Today, I’m not so sure.

Of all the worries I hold about growing older, and there are enough of those to fill an aqua aerobics class, that’s the one I think most about. When I’m trudging to the bathroom at 2 a.m. Also at 4 a.m. That is, do I still have time?

A friend recently recommended This is Happiness, by Niall Williams. To be that great? Before that, Theo of Golden, by Allen Levi. That great? Anything by Colson Whitehead. By Patrick Radden Keefe. Amor Towles. Joan Didion. George Saunders. Hemingway, of course. By Percival Everett. Adam Higginbotham. Larry McMurtry. And now I’m just going through my library, writing down names, and there are so many and at the same time so few. Geraldine Brooks is another. Stephen King, obviously. Zora Neale Hurston. The Tolstoys I can follow, if I were smarter. Fredrik Backman.

I had an epiphany about a decade ago. Time was, if I started a book, I finished it. That was the deal. Especially the classics, because there had to be a reason they were classics, and it’s not their fault if I didn’t get it, and I owed it to the world to keep going, and maybe at the end I’d get it. I am so pleased I did, so I know what happened to Frankenstein’s monster. To the whale. To Winston Smith. To Celie Harris. To the Santiagos of Hemingway and Coelho.

I can’t recall the particular book, and I probably wouldn’t mention it anyway, but I was a third of the way through it, and a thought arose: “If all of these characters die on the next page, will I care?” So I closed the book, said goodbye to the men and women mid-plot, wished them well, and moved on. I do that with some frequency now. It’s liberating. I only have so much time, see, and so much to learn.

Here’s another: I’ve never taken an IQ test, for the same reason someone who can’t swim doesn’t jump off a dock into a river. I do know those numbers exist, because we all have that friend. Well, one summer I decided to read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which is excellent right up to the point it isn’t, which is at the precise sentence where you realize that in order to understand this concept you’d have to have understood the last concept, and the one before that, and now these are just words strewn on a page. The book is 256 pages long. Here’s my idea: Instead of giving people an IQ score, we give them the page number of A Brief History of Time where they lost hope. I’m a 135. Though, to be fair, I’m probably closer to a 110, but at the time I also wasn’t a quitter, until I was. Also, in A Brief History of Time I sensed that everybody dies in the end anyway.

I’ll turn 64 this summer, which isn’t old old, but I can see it from here if I’m wearing the readers and my arms are still long enough. At this point, well into the third quarter, I’ve forged a better relationship with humility, with acceptance, with recognizing what’s important and what’s not, all in the quiet that comes at the end of the day. And if I’m ever in danger of forgetting any of that, there’ll be a reminder that it’ll have to be enough to show up and try. Just the other day, in fact, one arrived by text message, bearing a request and, in the end, a wicked (and possibly unintentional) ego check.

The context is this: I wrote a book about Nolan Ryan, which was released two months ago. For that, I spoke to many of Nolan’s former teammates and opponents. One of them, whose name is unimportant, but I liked him very much, sent the text.

Him: This is (name of former teammate). Would you please send an item from Nolan for my foundation?’

Ah, I thought, this is awkward.

Me: Good morning, (name of former teammate). I hope you are well. As I don’t work for Nolan, I am not in a position to make a request of him. I can, however, send my recent book about him and sign it myself. Would that help? Best, Tim

A massive downgrade, I grant. Like, so massive.

Him: OK. Sorry. Don’t worry.

Because I loved that response, because it was barely this side of, “Uh, pass,” I sent it out to my friends. They all responded with some version of HAHA, because that’s what we do for each other.

What it did, other than make me laugh aloud and immediately show it to my wife, was remind me that I am me. That I have work to do. That I’ll have to make the time. That I’ve always admired the donkeys of the world, those who carry the heavy stuff without complaint and back up the No. 1 catcher, while believing in more.

Someday, maybe, I’ll find my own Santiago, or he’ll find me, and we’ll make each other great. Or, maybe, it’s not greatness I’m after at all, but the desire to inch toward it. I suspect I’m not alone, in that place where so little is quite good enough. It’s probably why some writers actually do become great, while others go a little crazy and a few go into PR.

So I’ll write that first page. And then another. I’ve got the time, right? Right? I mean, what else would I be doing?

This is a story about hope. And probably excessive watering. Or not enough.

The rose bush creature, which has come to resemble a sinister, bony gargoyle, has been relocated to the side of the house, where my wife and I no longer have to look at it, though we know it’s there. Like the refrigerator's hourly rattle, it haunts us. This, one day, not today, perhaps soon, will have to be dealt with.

I consulted an expert. My AI chirped, “This looks like a rose bush that’s in serious distress – possibly dead or dying.” Also, “Contact next of kin.”

The forced migration was part of our biannual assessment of the backyard. When “Well, nobody ever sees it anyway,” becomes “Well, what if somebody does see it. Like, people have drones now.” When, “The dogs will just wreck it,” becomes, “The dogs are about to put themselves up for re-adoption to a family with a working drip system.” I do wonder if that squatting, over-the-shoulder glance is dog for, “I can’t believe you expect me to poop here. Now, go fetch the bags, I’m nearly done.”

So, one afternoon we considered the work that must be done, rolled up our sleeves, wiped the sweat from our brows, and called a guy. His name is Sam. The next afternoon Sam gazed upon our Seussian stick figure, considered our plan, and sighed. I could read Sam’s mind.

“I would not like it here or there. I would not like it anywhere.”

Sam, I am certain, continued, “I do not like this tree, not for you, not for me, it has no green legs, it will never be.”

Anyway.

Sam dutifully exhumed the bush, dug a new hole, plopped it in there and covered the roots with dirt. I dutifully promised to actually water it. Next, he planted two new shrubs. They had green leaves and everything. He told me they were hydrangeas and that they were deciduous, meaning, I think, they would themselves choose to live or die. They looked fine. Alive. Healthy, even. For, like, a day. Then they looked depressed. Had they decided already?

Three days later, a friend took a look.

“Dude, your plants are dead,” he said. “Were those hydrangeas?”

“Yeah,” I said, sadly. “Darkly deciduous ones. But I’m going to save them from themselves.”

For a very long time, plants and I had an arrangement: I don’t bother them, and they turn brown and die. We don’t talk. We don’t affirm. We don’t co-exist. Once a month my wife says, “Did you water the plants?” and I answer, “The what?” She rarely finds me funny.

But this was different. If I had to get on my hands and knees, pump their tiny hearts, breathe into their wilted leaves, shout “Stay away from the light! Unless you need light! Is this too much light?”, then this was my life now. If I didn’t have a green thumb, I could have a green soul.

Do you want to know what changed? A $3,000 landscaping bill, that’s what. Also, the half-dozen, cold-hearted alleged friends who’ve told me it’s time to move on from my hydrangeas, who only just got here.

(An aside. This sudden empathy for plants has arrived at about the same time as a preoccupation with birds. They tell me it’s possibly age-related. “Look how red that one is,” I’ll say. “Yes,” my wife will answer, “cardinals usually are.” “But that one’s very red,” I’ll point out. “And plump!”)

(Second aside. I have installed a bird feeder and a birdhouse.)

Caring for plants is difficult, mainly because they’re so needy. I am, however, a committed botanophile and therefore an ally. To that end, I embarked on a mission of floral reanimation. I learned there are ways.

I sent Sam a photo of my hydrangeas. As he’d already advised that I soak them morning and evening, he added an afternoon soaking, and I browsed various articles of the Geneva Convention. Also, he said, I should keep the leaves dry, as water would magnify the sun’s effects. I began to wonder if planting hydrangeas in 100-degree heat during a drought was ill-advised.

Sam added, “Would you? Could you? In a yard? Heat them! Heat them! Here they are.”

Anyway.

Next, I turned to the internet.

The first bit of advice was to move the hydrangeas, which I dismissed, as it was defeatist. Also, a lot of work.

Then, I could add coffee grounds to the soil. Or Epsom salt. Or baking soda. Or vinegar. Or tea bags. Lipton and English Breakfast are recommended. Presumably I would do tea in the late afternoon. And I do love a good finger sandwich. I’ll bet birds love finger sandwiches. Perfect for their tiny beaks.

So, twice a day, sometimes three times a day, I drag out the hose and encourage my deciduous friends to hang in there, to believe in the process, to drink fully. I remind myself that nature is fickle, that there are things in the world I cannot control, that the circle of life sometimes means I must tug and yank and haul a hose around and around the house, which is sort of a circle.

Then, on a Monday evening at the end of another long, hot day spent at the kitchen window, wondering if I was alone in my quest, alone in my hope for tomorrow and the next day and a big, puffy flowery season, it happened. The skies darkened and crackled. The wind shifted and smelled clean and fresh and of new life. Rain began to fall.

It’s going to be OK, I thought. Maybe. But probably not for the rose bush.

The first fraternity party, 46 years ago. I awoke the morning after in the shrubs outside my dorm, me wearing a borrowed corduroy blazer and being strafed by an oscillating sprinkler. Seeing as somebody cared enough to drive me home, open a car door and shove me into the bushes, I of course pledged the fraternity. I’m pretty sure I received special treatment during hell week, given two weeks before I’d nearly drowned in a hedge.

Years passed. There’d been an occasional margarita on a beach in Cancun and alongside enchiladas in L.A., I think, but I’d long before resolved that any drink requiring foul weather gear was not for me.

Everyone has a tequila story, and I’m guessing mine, seeing as it lacks tattoos, Vegas weddings, piercings, mosh pits or prison time, is one of the tamer ones. That’s why a whisper of tequila causes one out of three Americans to endure a tiny, involuntary retch. Two out of three of those Americans then order a second spicy margarita, this according to my rigorous research at the bar at El Cholo in Santa Monica.

Anyway, my wife and I live in North Carolina now. Friends were coming in from L.A. for the Fourth of July weekend. One of those friends drinks tequila. Like, only tequila. I, a consumer of Coors Light and other non-alcoholic beers, was naturally sent to procure the tequila. This is not the simplest of expeditions. Supermarkets here do not carry liquor. Also, it turns out, beer and wine stores, of which there are plenty, absolutely carry alcoholic beverages, and do not carry liquor. This I learned on the first stop of my journey.

“No, not here,” said the kind, elegantly bearded man standing in a large store whose shelves were filled – so close! – with beer and wine. “You have to go to an ABC store.”

“Ah,” I said. “And where’s one of those? Nearby?”

I thought, please don’t say Georgia.

“Well,” he said with practiced restraint, “if you type ABC into your phone…”

I’d earned that, I thought. And off I went.

Here’s the deal in North Carolina, as I understand it. The state runs the Alcoholic Beverage System, which sells the tequila, among other serious-looking brown and golden and buff liquids. This, I believe, is to keep as many North Carolinians as possible out of hedges. Kudos to the ABC and the monopolistic state; I have not seen a single Tar Heeler ensnared amid the flora. Though the drought, I suspect, is also contributing.

The rules here are fairly simple. ABC stores may open at 9 a.m. from Monday through Saturday, though some open at 10 a.m. and others at 11 a.m. All ABC stores must close by 9 p.m. The stores are closed on Sundays because of lingering so-called “blue laws,” which further research explained as “statutes designed to enforce morality as some lawmakers understand it.” These, of course, would be the lawmakers who remember the ABC stores close at 9 on Saturday nights. Also, nine years ago our then-governor, Roy Cooper, signed what is known as the “brunch bill,” which allowed restaurants to sell alcohol on Sundays beginning at 10 a.m., rather than at noon, this for the lawmakers who forgot the ABC stores closed at 9 on Saturday nights. Forty-six years ago, I could have gone for some morality, preferably the enforced kind.

So, on the eve of my friend the tequila slave arriving, I was well within the parameters of my state and local bylaws as I set out to purchase one bottle of tequila. My phone guided me into the parking lot of a strip mall, crowded with small shops that offered smoke and vape products, tattoos and cell phone repairs. Also, liquor. I opened the car door and nearly stepped on many spent plastic bottles.

The man at the wine and beer shop might’ve mentioned, “Yeah, and then just follow the trail of Fireball Cinnamon Whisky vials.”

In the ABC store, there were large signs over shelves stacked with large bottles, small bottles, tiny bottles, brown bottles, blue bottles, porcelain bottles, round, square, pentagon and octagon bottles, bottles with dogs and dragons and women and horses on them. I found the section marked TEQUILA and, oh man, I had no idea. I took two steps backward. To take it all in. A woman breaking up boxes nearby must have noted my bewilderment.

“Sir?”

“Uh, so…”

And I explained what I needed. She was very patient.

“I like this friend, I want a good tequila, I also don’t want to be weird about it,” I said.

She handed me a bottle.

“Oh, uh-uh,” said a man in dreadlocks, his pants sagged, “go slow on that one! I’m just tellin’ ya! Go slow!”

A fellow denizen of hedges, I assumed.

“OK,” I said to the woman, “if you had all the money in the world,” and I immediately regretted that phrasing, as it was clear neither one of us qualified, “which would you get?”

She handed me a bottle. It was $60.

“And,” she said, “it comes in this nice box.”

I went with the expert, laid the package gently on my passenger seat, drove home and walked into the house. Triumphantly. I withdrew the bottle that was in a box and in a paper bag in order to show it to my wife. I’d done it. I’d figured it out. I’d sorted through the system, skirted the blue and brunch laws, abided by lawmakers’ understanding of my morality, inadvertently crushed a bottle of Fireball, got a nice little contact high from the smoke and vape store and returned safely, victoriously, productively.

My wife smiled.

“Oh,” she said, “she won’t drink that.”

They were strangers to me, though I knew the man’s name. It’s Rod. Some call him Roddy. Others, Rod the Bod.

I don’t normally do parades, especially not on a hot day when a third of the town’s populace is going to lean and squirm for square footage on a sidewalk. But how often does the Stanley Cup putter through the streets, 15 feet off the ground, this far south of the Mason-Dixon Line?

So I parked in a shady spot and walked a half-mile and stood beside folks who might have been neighbors and hummed along when a marching band drifted past, oompah-ing Rock You Like a Hurricane. The air was filled with, along with Scorpions anthems, honks from plastic horns, brip-brips from motorcycle cops, a whiff of herbal smoke, a breeze of beer breath from the guy next to me, and a jab of something unpleasant, which I decided was my contribution, seeing as I’d come directly from the gym.

Little boys and girls shrieked the names of players as they motored by. They held up trophies made of tin foil and Styrofoam, and signs I imagined, colored on kitchen tables, while counting the hours before one more sleep. For this, they’d miss soccer games and pool parties and Mario Kart, and however kids would while away the first hours of summer vacation. They’d go tarps off, helicoptering their T-shirts with arms slightly thicker than Silly String and, as the day wore on, about as pink.

I’d seen parades in New York, for the Yankees, and in L.A., for the Lakers and Dodgers. This wasn’t those, and I was grateful. This was along the lines of, “Gosh, look what we did.” This was a high five with the bartender at Teets. If somebody set a cop car on fire, I missed it. Someone did leave a plastic cup near the corner of St. Mary’s and Hillsborough, so, just saying, it wasn’t perfect.

But it was all so wonderfully sweet.

Through the chanting, the smiles, the stray confetti bombs, the car horns, the crankable sirens that are a hockey staple, across the sea of cell phones held overhead, amid the sound of mobile coolers bumping across sidewalk seams, I thought about the woman in the bed of the pickup truck.

The silver truck rolled by at the pace of a fast walk. Or a toddler on a tricycle. The coach of the local hockey team sat on the rear gate or he stood and waved and pointed to his heart and smiled. He bowed to the crowds, thanking them for all the sellouts and tumult, for turning a sleepy college town into the kind of place that calls helmets “buckets” and hockey sticks “twigs,” that appreciates a deft poke check, that will never forget the right hand that knocked Brady Tkachuk off his skates.

Maybe it was nothing. A gnat. A scrap of confetti. A chunk of humidity. But as the silver pickup truck turned the corner and entered the red-and-black passage that would lead it downtown, when the people here recognized the man’s jawline, the face misshapen by pucks and sticks and fists, the broad shoulders, the cap pulled hard over his forehead, when they began to cheer and shout his name and jump up and down, when they thanked him for being fierce and unyielding and humble and today’s champion, the woman wiped from her face what I can only believe was a tear.

This, all of this – the happiness, the relief, the love – offered to the man beside her. How proud she must have been. How personal it must have felt.

That’s what I’d waited in the sun for. It’s why I went to all of those games. And why I put up with 8:18 p.m. puck drops all spring. And why I paced my living room for the hours that followed. And why I woke up my wife when they won.

That’s why, and I never saw it coming, it got so intimate. Because there were people under those buckets, and people behind the bench, and there were thousands of hours I didn’t see, and there were people waiting for the people to get home from those hours – moms and dads and brothers and sisters and sons and daughters and friends and dogs and neighbors and a wife who, late one morning in June, would find it overwhelming. And perfect.

Man, sports can be frustrating. They can be disappointing. They’re also a reminder that the strongest among us are fragile. And imperfect. And so what chance do the rest of us have? As good as any, I suppose.

It’s not easy out there. Some days, everybody seems to hate everybody, and the best you can do is find a place to breathe, to hope it passes, and to wish for an hour in the sun that is dopey and funny and does no harm and sounds a little like Scorpions. Maybe in there somewhere, there’s a sign that it’s all going to be OK. And you can look over the tops of children’s heads, their shirts whipping against the sky, and find the real meaning of it in the back of a pickup truck.

If there could be a collision of body parts and movement and art and elasticity and ligament durability and seam height and cow skin and mud coating and, I don’t know, tailwind and Advil and humidity and, maybe, finger calluses and crowd noise and sweat to produce the one fastball that seemed launched by the hand of God himself. (And also, I’m assuming God is ambidextrous, so there would be no matchup advantages.)

If he – Nolan – ever thought to himself, “That’s the one. I’ve never thrown a better one and I never will.”

Hitters describe contact so pure, so precise, so magical that it barely registers in their hands. The perfect swing. The perfect result. Is there a fastball equivalent?

We were in his office on the second floor of a bank building in Round Rock, Texas. He’d be 79 years old in a few weeks, but before that, he’d undergo back surgery, and before that, he’d endure more sleepless nights spent in search of relief. A fastball of any kind seemed a long way away.

For a couple of hours on a cool, rainy day, I’d asked him to look over his shoulder, to the seasons of his youth, the ones that had crept into his middle age, that resonate in the game decades later. And I asked him about the fastball. Actually, that fastball. The one.

The perfect one.

He raised his eyebrows and grinned.

Six months later, Jacob Misiorowski became a big leaguer.

Twenty-eight starts into his career, the most frequent small-sample, eye-test, pick-a-famous-guy-with-a-fastball comparison has been Nolan Ryan, which isn’t fair to Misiorowski or Ryan, but does affirm our love for (and memories of) fastballs and the men who throw them. And, as starting pitchers go, if you had to pick a perfect fastball or guess that one was in there somewhere, Misiorowski’s 95-pitch, 15-strikeout shutout of the Philadelphia Phillies on Friday would be a good place to look. (Let’s also agree that cramming 15 strikeouts into 95 pitches is the clown car of starts.)

Of Miz’s 95 pitches, 58 were fastballs of at least 100 mph. Thirty-one topped 102. He breached 104 more than once.

Aroldis Chapman, Ben Joyce, and Jordan Hicks, all relievers, have clipped 105. (There perhaps were pitchers who did the same, or came close, before we could measure velocity without the use of a police motorcycle.) But this, sustained across two hours and four minutes, is different from that. This is a working man’s 104.5, which wouldn’t make it any more or less effective than another 104.5, though we can agree that seven, eight, or nine innings of velocity like that puts a lot of miles on a lineup’s soul.

(An aside: What if the perfect fastball happens to get hit by the perfect swing into the left-field bleachers? Does that make it less perfect? So, like the perfect margarita, there could be a time and place element – life context – that is part of the calculation.)

Fastball velocities are rising. From that turbulence, a new star emerges. He seems embarrassed by the attention, because 153 career innings is hardly the time to hold him up against men who toiled for years. For decades. That’s what we do, however, and we push a dozen great starts into a season’s worth, through a player’s prime, into his graying years, and we root for sound ligaments and good decisions, and we wonder if this could be the next one.

It won’t be perfect. That we know. Maybe there’s no such thing.

In the meantime, the Misiorowski story got me thinking about that question to Nolan Ryan, about a flash of perfection, about working so hard for something that may or may not ever come, and then there it was.

So, had he thrown the perfect pitch? The eyebrows. The smile. Like he was back there again. It was on his fingers again. And then it was gone.

He paused.

“I knew,” he said, “that was as good a pitch as you can make.”

That’s close to perfect. Also, I may have overthought this.

We’ve never met. I have no feelings about the Rangers either way. I was at Globe Life Field recently, however. When Evan Carter came up to bat the crowd was encouraged by drum effects and cartoon hands to chant, “EV-an CAR-ter! EV-an CAR-ter!” Some of the fans went along. If I hadn’t been sitting in the press box, I’d have gone along.

See, Evan Carter is, as of this morning, batting .168.

The reason I know that is because I have a tendency to look for players like Evan Carter. I’ll summon a page of Major League Baseball statistics, glance at the gaudy .332s and .325s and .318s, the leaders in batting average, then click AVG, which reverses the order. So that, say, .168 is at the top.

I take no joy from this. I do, though, find the .168s much more relatable than the .332s, which I consider a gift from old age and raising children and living in a world where, day to day, batting even .168 is a reasonable feat.

I watched baseball for a living once, a job that lasted thirty-some years. I wrote about a lot of great players. Hall of Fame players. Icons. And that was fine.

But the players who intrigued me were almost always struggling with the game. They weren’t hitting. Or they were hitting just fine, except straight at people who caught it. Or they couldn’t throw strikes. Or they threw strikes that ended up in the bleachers.

These mostly grown men were some of the finest athletes on the planet. They’d made their high school teams and college teams and survived the minor leagues and then advanced to three-tiered stadiums and massive paychecks and somebody at a control panel begging tens of thousands of people to chant their name one syllable at a time. Some probably had streets named after them in their hometown. A sign near the bank. Welcome to Elizabethton. Home of Evan Carter, World Series champion. It could exist.

And then they’d look out at the scoreboards, bigger every year, and there’d be a picture of them and maybe a fun fact – “Evan studied to be a dentist!” – and then next to “BA”, 10 feet tall, in what must seem like very, very bright lights, “.168.”

Fortunately, few people view batting average as a statistic that accurately reflects the value of a batter. Unfortunately, most of those who do tend to be batters. The rest make the decisions on who gets to keep batting.

To be clear, I don’t feel sorry for Evan Carter and those like him. Maybe a little. The stronger emotion is respect for the fight to make a hard game simpler, to summon the stroke and confidence and good fortune just to hit, for example, .300, which Evan Carter once did across an entire postseason, only 2 ½ years ago.

I don’t want you to think I’m singling out Evan Carter, so I’ll offer Manny Machado (.175), Dansby Swanson (.180), Cedric Mullins (.188) and a handful of others toddling along this side of .200. In June. Some are surely enduring minor injuries and terrible luck or trouble at home or otherwise decent seasons. Some would tell you they don’t bother looking at their batting average, though you probably shouldn’t believe them.

Shawn Green, who hit more than 300 home runs and made two All-Star teams and hit four home runs in a single game, told me once that if his batting average stunk it felt like it was tattooed on his forehead. That if he walked into a room and every head turned to see the famous Dodgers right fielder, they’d all hold the thought, “That’s the guy hitting .208.”

They say, “Baseball is life,” and I don’t believe them. Baseball, rather, is a great place to practice life. There are plenty of days spent at .168. The challenge is the day after.

Take, for instance, Aaron Judge, arguably the best hitter in the game. Last season, he was American League MVP for the third time. He led the league in batting, on-base percentage and slugging. He hit 53 home runs. He also went hitless in 44 games. That’s coming up on two months’ worth of baseball games. And you know what he found upon arriving at the ballpark the next day?

A field that looked like it had never been played on before. It’d be mowed, edged, raked and the foul lines redrawn. The dugouts would be swept and scoured. His uniform would be even whiter (or grayer) than he remembered. On plenty of those days the sky would be blue, the sun warm, his teammates freshly bathed and shaved, almost like the day before had never happened. So he could start over. So he had an opportunity to be great again, or whatever the day would hold.

And then he’d hit two home runs or something.

If that sounds pretty good, well, the same goes for Evan Carter. The same kind of goes for all of us, except maybe for the part about two home runs. But, you’d keep swinging anyway, wouldn’t you?

That’s why I think about baseball so much, and that’s why today I was thinking about Evan Carter, because the game is hard, because not everybody is going to be good at it all the time, because the struggle at the bottom is just as real as the glory at the top and very human and very relatable.

So, go Evan Carter. Clap-clap, clap-clap.

Nolan Ryan was absent from the big, new ballpark last weekend. But, he was here in most other ways, in the blood-stained replica jerseys worn by folks who watched him from the bleachers and whose families took vacations to see him and who met him once at Joe’s Bar-B-Q in Alvin and who have his autograph on a ticket stub and who have decorated their dens with posters of him and who wonder where all the Nolan Ryans have gone.

On a night when the corridors and bleachers and beer lines were alive with the man they called Nolie or Tex or The Express, I sat in an alcove behind the Rangers team store at Globe Life Field and signed the book I’d written, “NOLAN: The Singular Life of an American Original.”

This is a slightly awkward experience, being alone in a room with those TSA-style, zig-zagging belt stanchions that were set up just in case, I don’t know, someone announces that I’m actually Nolan Ryan.

Which apparently happened, or something like it, because if there’s an emotion humans can’t hide, it’s deep, deep disappointment. It’s in the eyes. And the shoulders.

“Where is he?” a lady holding a $30 book asked, and I thought she was joking.

“Here!” I said, jovially.

“No really,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“They told me Nolan was signing in here,” she said.

“They did?” I said.

“Yeah, that’s why I bought the book,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Just me.”

At that point we both wanted to get the coming transaction over with as fast as possible. She looked away, placed the book in front of me and I signed it.

“Thank you,” she said when she sensed I had finished.

“I hope you enjoy it,” I said.

“So Nolan’s not coming?” she said.

“Uh-uh,” I said.

“Hmph,” she said.

And what I thought then was one of the team store cashiers heard it or read it wrong and this was going to keep happening, and people were going to turn the corner and see me – clearly not Nolan Ryan – and wonder what I’d done to him. Also, once they sorted it out, how they might gracefully back out of the room while checking their pockets for the receipt.

I could see into the team store, to stacks of blue books that represented three years of my life, and beyond them lines of people holding jerseys and bobbleheads and hats and objects made of foam. I didn’t want to look pathetic, or any more pathetic than usual, so I busied myself staring at very interesting things like my pen or my shoes.

Then they’d appear at the door and wind their way through the empty maze or army crawl toward me, the blue book in their hand. When they arrived, I asked, “Tell me a Nolan story.”

There was the man from Virginia who has a Nolan Ryan room, unless that’s actually a Nolan Ryan Room. Wall to wall Nolan, he said, posters and cards and jerseys, “And now,” he said, “another book.”

There was the woman from near Arlington, whose parents were teachers and therefore didn’t have money for extravagant vacations, so once a year they’d put the kids in the car for one day of Six Flags and one day of Nolan Ryan.

“Because,” she said, “you never know.”

There was the man from Dallas who’d raced to the courthouse on the summer night in 2010 when Nolan Ryan and his partners bought the Rangers out of bankruptcy. He’d brought his camera, and now those photos are on his phone, Ryan and the rest raising their glasses in celebration.

Some watched him notch his 5,000th strikeout. Some, his seventh no-hitter. Some saw him get shelled on a random afternoon in one July or another, and that was OK, too. It was enough to be there, because like the lady said, like they all said, you never know.

At a dugout rail earlier in the day, Chris Young, the former Major League pitcher and the Rangers president of baseball operations, lit up at the mention of Nolan Ryan. He’d been raised in Dallas when Ryan was a Ranger. He’d become a Ranger himself. He’d known the standard.

So when a line drive hit him in the face in 2008, he’d sat in the grass in front of the mound, more blood in his lap than he’d ever seen, thinking he had to stand up, had to get back on the mound, had to take the ball, had to keep going.

“Because Nolan would,” he said.

So when he traded haymakers with Derrek Lee in Chicago that afternoon in 2007, when the benches emptied and piles of men formed and the crowd booed, he’d tried to slow his breathing, compose himself, thinking there were five innings to go, that he had to pitch, that he had to show up.

“Because Nolan would,” he said.

They came wearing the evidence that he was here, that he’d bled for a cause as minimal as a ballgame, for all that is a ballgame, but they believed he’d bled for them, too. And not just on that one day, either, but every day, and that was the best part about sitting in a room and not being Nolan Ryan.

That was, hearing all of the stories about Nolan Ryan and knowing another generation would hear them too.

At 60, I moved across the country to a place I barely knew, driving several days with two 75-pound dogs in the backseat. From California, I swung through Florida to bury my mother.

I’d left home, family, and people who at least pretended to like me. I had no job (I’d been a sportswriter, primarily covering baseball, for 35 years) and no prospects for one. I wasn’t even sure I wanted one anymore, which seemed to be working out just fine. Something new, I thought, might be good.

Raleigh, N.C., is either a big small town or a small big town. The backstory is that my wife has a twin sister here. We’d visited together maybe a dozen times. If I wasn’t going to be tied to a baseball city like L.A., she said, maybe Raleigh and her family. I said OK.

I grew up in New York, then spent most of four decades in L.A. When my wife—her name is Kelly—suggested we look at houses downtown here, I said, “Oh, I don’t think I’ve ever been to downtown Raleigh.” She looked at me funny. Then we got there. I hadn’t ever realized that was downtown. Like, all of it.

The people are really nice. Spring is beautiful. Fall is even better. The other two seasons, well, they can be uncomfortable, but there’s a charm in the meteorologically unknown. If you find sweat charming. Or sleet. Or so much pollen on your car that it looks like a parade float.

The point is, I like it here well enough. I sit in my home office, look out at Carolina pine trees, and write books or proposals for books—instead of a daily deadline, I have one or two a year. The guys on my block and I saunter over to the neighborhood pub every few weeks. The driving range is never crowded. The gym keeps me young or at least I think so until a mirror says otherwise. I avoid those when possible.

There’s a small movement to bring Major League Baseball here. I told them I’d volunteer to help and never heard back. There’s an NFL team a few hours away. Same with the NBA. I like college sports, and there’s plenty of it, but who can keep track of that anymore?

That left hockey.

Huh.

I was a Rangers fan once, when my favorite player was Eddie Giacomin. That was 50 years ago. I sort of paid attention when they won the Cup in 1994. I could name you Mark Messier and Brian Leetch and Mike Richter, and that’s it.

After all that time, could I go back? Could I start over, having missed two generations of games, players, news, rules changes, name pronunciations, and whatever else might have happened?

I could try.

Three years ago, a few weeks after settling into Raleigh, I bought a ticket to see the Carolina Hurricanes at a place called PNC Arena (now Lenovo Center), in a town the blue bloods refer to as a “non-traditional market.” It was 10 minutes from my house. I found the beer line and then my seat next to my brother-in-law. Somebody sang the anthem. The lights went up. A guy dropped the puck.

And then … it was breathtaking.

I couldn’t name three players in the entire NHL, and I didn’t care. The game had changed. It was faster. Sleeker. Everybody was wearing helmets.

The local team was good, too. And the people here loved them. The Quiznos logo on the jersey momentarily confused me until I realized it was a hurricane, which made sense.

Also, I vaguely remember the Hurricanes winning the Stanley Cup, along with my reaction to it, which was, “There’s a hockey team in North Carolina?”

I went to more games. I learned about the players. Where they were from. What they sounded like. What hand they shot with. Why they suddenly were allowed to make a two-line pass.

Everyone has a friend who didn’t grow up with baseball or American football, who, while watching a game, asks why a lot, and after a while it gets very complicated, and finally you advise him just to watch, and it’ll become clear. Or not. I was that guy in a hockey arena.

“What’s the whistle for?”

“Ah, of course.”

“What’s he so mad about?”

“Ah, I would be, too, then.”

“Why are we booing him?”

“He did? Well, damn.”

Fandom, I think, requires believing in something that you cannot see. There’s a word for that. Faith or hope or something. Existence.

For most of my life, I’d sat in press boxes thinking only about things I could see. That I could verify. People would ask who I rooted for, and I’d tell them, “Fast games and good stories.” Deadlines and clicks. Air and water.

Now, suddenly, I had nowhere else to be, and what I wanted was a good game. Maybe a win. Overtime? Cool.

Wait, did I actually start to care? Did I feel a little better in the morning when it occurred to me the Canes had won the night before? Did I wear a lucky hat during playoff games?

Turned out, I did.

Am I a little embarrassed about the hat?

Turns out, I am.

Do I know what the Corsi advanced stats mean?

Nope.

But then, I could walk you through only about half of Fangraphs’ stuff for baseball, and I still managed to watch and enjoy a baseball game here and there.

I’d forgotten what it was like to be a fan. I’d forgotten waking up on a game day, happy that the last few hours of that day would be spent with 20,000 strangers with whom I had something in commo

n, that I’d gladly high-five. I’d forgotten about the lines of cars to get into the parking lot and not being bothered by it.

The walk across the parking lot, curling around street hockey games, threading through a crowd with a full beer, feeling the chill in the arena, the crack of a puck hitting a stick, I’m 10 years old again (other than the beer) and it’s new and I don’t know what’s going to happen (or, sometimes, why) and I’m not being paid to make any sense of it.

I’m just there to have fun.

As a fan.

I’ve written a book called NOLAN: The Singular Life of an American Original, in part because the man was still throwing no-hitters at 44. In fact, he threw two complete games in 1991, which might not seem like much until you consider he would have tied for the Major League lead in that category in 2025.

Can you recall the pitchers who had two complete games last season? Framber Valdez, Nick Lodolo and Tanner Bibee. So there you go.

Times change, though Ryan never really did. He got old later than most. He rode his fastball longer than most. People in Texas believed in forever, at least as it related to Nolan Ryan, fastballs, gas station barbecue, and Willie Nelson.

For a lot of nights in Arlington, they got it, too. Ol’ Nolie out there, doing what he does, reminding them that age was irrelevant, that maybe they could all keep doing this for a while.

Here’s an excerpt from the book about the last time they put Nolan Ryan on their shoulders and carried him from a baseball field:

No-hitter No. 7
May 1, 1991
Toronto Blue Jays at Texas Rangers, 3–0
16 strikeouts, 2 walks
Catcher: Mike Stanley

This was one of those games they talk about, how the stadium was at maybe three-quarters capacity for the first pitch, how word spread about the non-televised game going on across town, how radio and word of mouth sent people to their cars and onto the highways and into the parking lot, now in full gallop through the gates, how empty rows filled in just for a chance to see him throw a few more pitches.

Just for a chance to see him throw another one.

The announced crowd was 33,439, though no one really had an idea by the end. More, they’d say. More than that.

“By the end of the game, it was completely full,” said Jeff Huson, who played shortstop that night. “I think everybody in Dallas and Fort Worth had heard about it and were, like, ‘Oh, we gotta get down there.’”

Ryan was forty- four.

On a warm Wednesday night in the spring of 1991, eighteen years after his first, Ryan threw his seventh. That it was here, in the old ballpark that smelled of— among many, many other things—baseball, in front of those who loved him, those who’d leave the dinner dishes in the sink and rush out the door and take their chances at a bloop hit between the driveway and the exit ramp, seemed fated.

There’d be one more ride from the mound for Ryan, on the shoulders of the franchise, rather than it on his.

Pitching in his fourth decade, his fastball reached 96 mph in the early innings, and he rode that to the very end, a fastball away that beat Roberto Alomar.

Ryan pumped his fist. He smiled. He offered his hand to his catcher, who shook it and looped his arm across Ryan’s shoulder. He turned and there were his teammates and coaches, all having rushed the field, the crowd beside itself.

Ruth was there. Nolan’s sister, Lynda, was there. Ruth’s father, Larry, too. Eddie Chiles, the former owner of the Rangers, was there. And Red Murff. Reid, a freshman at the University of Texas, followed along from Austin, a Louis L’Amour novel open on his lap. L’Amour wrote Westerns. Nolan Ryan, in his own way, lived them.

He was the new oldest pitcher to ever throw a no-hitter, same as the last to do it, building momentum as he went, having thrown the 185th no-hitter in history, the 186th, the 191st, the 192nd, the 208th, the 220th, and the 225th. While he was accumulating his seven, only one man—Bob Forsch—threw two. He’d thrown them to seven different catchers in six different ballparks, on every day of the week but a Thursday and a Friday, in day games and night games, in both leagues, in three separate decades.

He tipped his cap and waved to the people who cheered him and grinned humbly and put up with it when his teammates lifted him to their shoulders, and he toasted not what he’d done but what

they’d done. They’d won a baseball game and he’d helped some, and he’d hope the fans got their money’s worth because he, across all those seasons, for sure had gotten his.

On this evening, Arlington Stadium creaking under the weight of all those people and the drama of Nolan in the seventh, in the eighth, into the ninth, Ryan also threw his sixtieth career shutout.

He’d strike out fifteen or more for the twenty- sixth time.

At an age where a typical being takes a few minutes to swing his legs out of bed, then a few more minutes to stand fully upright, then a few more to get rolling downhill into the day, Ryan… actually . . .felt the same way. He’d taken his share of Advil that day.

The second hitter he’d face that evening—and the last, Alomar—was a former teammate’s son. When Alomar was in first grade, he’d tag along to Anaheim Stadium with his dad, Sandy, and when they got there, Roberto would look for the number 30. That was the number of the nice man who’d teach him how to grip a baseball so he could properly throw a pitch. Eighteen years later, that man would strike him out three times.

He’d creaked and sighed through his preparation, his stretching, his warm- up pitches, even his walk from the bullpen to the dugout to the pitcher’s mound. He checked his hand. The callus on the end of his right middle finger had cracked open in the bullpen. “It was one of those days when I knew how old I was when I woke up,” he said after the last of his 122 pitches. “I could feel every minute of these forty- four years.”

Then he went out and pitched nine more innings, throwing harder than he had for two years, five days after he’d thrown 131 pitches. “This is the best,” he’d say of the last of his no- hitters. “This is my most overpowering night.”

Ryan went home, set the alarm, and got back to the park the next morning. Murff visited and sipped a cup of coffee as they talked over the game. Ryan showered up, attended a midday news conference at a downtown hotel, then a charity event for a charter school. He returned to the ballpark to catch a bus that would take him to a plane that would take him to Detroit.

Behind him, the stadium was empty. The city was breathless and wrung out. They were sure he’d done it for them. He’d reached back and rediscovered the Express, just so they could say they were there. They’d come for the baseball, some just for the party, and what they’d received in return was a reminder of who they are, where they’re from, and why it’s important.

I argued, softly. And lost, convincingly.

Ten thousand words is a lot of words. Over several days, across 400 pages, I started with one or two words at a time. That got me to, oh, 300 fewer words. I went back to the beginning, went through the manuscript again, and by the end had cleaved another 300 words. That’s as tight as it can get, I announced.

OK, Picasso, my agent said.

Meaning, don’t be so damned delicate.

The thing about writing a book, it’s so personal. It takes a lot of time, most of it spent alone and trying to believe that what’s taking shape is any good at all. The job, really, is to fall in love with the subject matter. Not necessarily with the character or characters (though it helps), but with the notion that this thing you’re doing is important or worthwhile or that someone other than your mother is going to like it.

The other part, especially with a book about someone as well-known and accessible as Nolan Ryan, is that you have to talk to a lot of people. Dozens. Hundreds. You’re taking up their time, and they’re feeling like they’re contributing. You try to include as many of those people in the book as you can, because you owe that to the product and to them.

What I’m getting to, an entire chapter from Nolan had to go. And when I sought advice on that, I was told to lose the chapter about his catchers. I sighed. My last book was about catchers (The Tao of the Backup Catcher: Playing Baseball for the Love of the Game). My favorite people on the planet are catchers, or used to be, or if they aren’t catchers, have bent fingers.

I was heartbroken. I refined, and deleted, and went for a walk, because, well, settle down, Picasso.

Months later, when it was suggested that I start a Substack in the lead-up to publication date, my first thought was, “Ha! The catcher chapter lives!”

So thank you to Troy Afenir, in particular, and to Art Kusnyer and Pudge Rodriguez and Jeff Torborg and the rest, for spending a part of a morning or afternoon with me, and I’m sorry it’s not in the book. I really am.

Here, then, is the lost chapter, Chapter 13, cleverly titled “His Catchers,” which, when the reviews come in and say they only wish the book had been longer, I’ll try very hard to get into the paperback version.

Chapter 13: Nolan’s Catchers

In the final hours of the Astros’ 1987 season, Troy Afenir, who’d turned 24 a couple weeks earlier, might have been the only man in the clubhouse who wished the season would go on forever.

The Astros would lose 20 more games than they had the season before, turning their second division title in franchise history into a third-place slog. Nolan Ryan had one of the best seasons of his career, but, owing to one of the worst offenses in the league, lost 16 games.

So atrocious was the offense, in fact, by the end it had become comical.

On a Tuesday afternoon in September, Astros manager Hal Lanier lamented what he believed to be a real problem in the game, that being the abundance of hitters who cheated by corking their bats. Just a shame, Lanier said, that professionals would stoop so low.

That very evening against the Chicago Cubs, the Astros’ leading hitter, Billy Hatcher, broke his bat on a pitch. The head of the bat flew to the left side of the infield, where it was picked up by Cubs third baseman Keith Moreland, who discovered the bat had been hollowed and stuffed with … cork. Irony doesn’t often work that fast. Nor does it usually land at the feet of the opposing third baseman.

Hatcher claimed ignorance, saying he’d chosen the bat at random from the dugout rack when he’d run out of his own bats. The bat was discovered to belong to Dave Smith, a relief pitcher who had three plate appearances all season and none since June. Smith first said he didn’t know why one of his bats might be corked, then admitted he’d arranged to alter the bat in order to win batting practice contests against his fellow pitchers.

Cubs manager Gene Michael, a patriot, was incensed.

“You don’t want young people around the country emulating players who cheat,” he said. “It’s not good for the country.”

“I don’t give a [bleep] what Gene Michael thinks,” Hal Lanier said.

“Hal’s a nice guy. He shouldn’t say those things,” Gene Michael said.

Hatcher was suspended for 10 days.

It is unclear whether Dave Smith was allowed to participate in further batting practice contests.

Unrelatedly, the president and general manager of the Astros, Dick Wagner, resigned the following month, at which point he revealed he’d had his problems with both his boss – owner John McMullen – and, in particular, his subordinate – Lanier.

So, Ryan’s eighth season with the Astros probably wasn’t what he’d hoped for, between the lousy run support and the office politics and the fall-off on the field, a year after the team was two wins from the World Series.

Very little of which would have mattered much to Troy Afenir, who arrived from Osceola, Florida, where the Astros kept their A-ball team, in mid-September. Afenir was a catcher, which the Astros were short of, due to injuries to their top three catchers.

“They said, ‘You got it for the rest of the year,’” Afenir remembered. “So I started for the rest of the year and the last game of the season was against Cincinnati. And I got to catch Nolan.”

What he thought was what all 23-year-olds think when they pull into big cities that surround big ballparks, where inside those ballparks are the best baseball players in the world, and now you’re wearing the same uniform and riding the same airplanes and laughing at the same jokes and drinking at the same watering holes and, occasionally even, playing in the same games.

That is, this is the start of something they’d dreamed of since their dads first loosened their ties and flipped plastic balls and shouted, a second too late probably, “Swing!” This is how a long career begins, when injuries provide opportunities, when all the work – in Afenir’s case, at Escondido High School and Palomar College in Southern California, inside minor-league parks in Upstate New York and western North Carolina and southern Florida and beyond – delivers him to the rest of his life.

“I think you always hoped that,” Afenir said.

He played in 45 Major League games. He started in 20 of them.

Afenir became a very solid minor-league catcher. He was what a team would call organizational depth. And a few did call him that. He was professional, dedicated to whatever the day put in front of him, didn’t complain and caught a good game. Give him at-bats in bunches, he’d settle into his swing and hit you some home runs.

He did not hit a Major League home run. He threw out three of 20 base stealers. He had as many as two hits in a game three times.

But, he was a big leaguer. On September 14, 1987, officially, the 15,419th ever. He retired before he turned 30, then rethought it and four years later played a season with the Chinatrust Whales in the Chinese Professional Baseball League. He hit four home runs for them. He became a scout. Working for the New York Yankees, he signed Aaron Judge. His son, Audie, also a catcher, was drafted by the Yankees. His brother and two nephews played pro ball.

And of the 36 men who caught a pitch from Nolan Ryan, who squatted 63-or-so feet away and raised a mitt and felt the fastball in their palm and tracked the curveball where the visual cortex of their brain meets their retina, Troy Afenir was one.

When a good portion of your whole life is baseball, that’s something. Thirty-five years later, pushing 60, Afenir viewed it all through the lens of a glorious period in his life, of the people he met and the places he saw and the trials that granted him context for everything that happened from there. He’d played alongside Harold Baines and Barry Larkin, he’d been a non-roster but present Oakland A when they went to the World Series against the Reds in 1990, he’d gotten some big hits and won some games and had a wonderful time doing it.

“But the one to me,” he said, “the highlight in my career, was being able to catch … him.”

On October 4, 1987, Ryan was 40, 16 years older than Afenir. Drafted by the Astros four years before, Afenir had caught Ryan in spring training and in the bullpen, but never when it counted. He joined the club in Los Angeles, then tagged along through San Francisco before the team returned to Houston and the Astrodome.

“There’s no lockers that are available,” Afenir said. “There’s one locker between Nolan Ryan and Bob Knepper. And it was a locker that had all their stuff in it – mail and shoes and all their extra stuff. They had that cleared out so that I could have that locker between those two veterans. And it’s something that I’ll never forget because they could have said, ‘Hey, don’t put that kid between us.’”

Afenir tucked in his elbows, spoke when spoken to, attended meetings when invited, waited his turn in the batting cage, cleaned up his own messes and in the early afternoon on a Sunday kicked the dirt from his spikes, pulled his mask over his face and lifted his mitt toward the mound.

Had he read the papers that morning, he might have wondered what kind of mood Ryan was in. Astros owner John McMullen had told reporters he intended to discuss a contract for 1988 with Ryan, saying, “Obviously, we’d like to have him back. Is Nolan overcompensated? I think based on his record, probably the answer is yes. … I’d like to have some [contract] modifications if possible, but in the nicest sort of way.”

(Ryan led the National League in ERA and strikeouts, was fifth in the Cy Young Award balloting, and had his pay cut.)

Regardless, Ryan would make one last start in 1987, against the Reds of Paul O’Neill, Barry Larkin, Buddy Bell and, at first base, Terry Francona.

The Reds stole no bases that day against the battery of Ryan and Afenir, but they’d swiped six in the two previous games against Afenir, who, as a result, was mindful of the fact he was supposed to be a defense-first catcher. So, too, was Ryan.

“Af,” Ryan said, “I know you’re really disappointed that you’re not throwing out guys.”

“Well,” Afenir said, “I’m kind of known for that,” meaning not for that, but actually for throwing out guys.

“Hey, they still need to get a hit off me to score,” Ryan said.

The Reds bunched a few together in the fifth inning. Ryan allowed two runs in seven innings. He struck out 10 and walked one, and lost for the 16th, and last, time in 1987. There’d be no more baseball for him or Afenir or the Astros until spring, when Ryan would be back in Houston and Afenir in Columbus, Georgia of the Southern League.

“I thought I had to prove myself the whole way in my career, even though I was a high draft pick,” Afenir said. “You know, I felt like I always had to scramble to try and get playing time at the big league level. Didn’t matter who I was with. And then I walked away from it saying that I have something that nobody could ever take away from me no matter what happens the rest of my career.”

Three years later, almost to the day, they met again in Arlington, Texas. Ryan was pitching against the A’s. Afenir watched from the visitors’ bullpen, where he warmed up relief pitchers. In the third inning, Ryan hit A’s leadoff hitter Doug Jennings in the calf with a fastball. Jennings shouted at Ryan. Ryan shouted at Jennings. Players from both sides milled around outside their dugouts, mixing on the fringes. The bullpen doors flung open.

Afenir was out there with the rest, watching and listening, wondering if someone or something would incite a more serious episode.

From over his shoulder: “Hey, Af.”

Afenir turned.

“Hi, Nolie.”

“When’d you get traded over here?”

“I’ve been here a little while now.”

“OK, Af.”

“OK, Nolie.”

And that was it.

“He was the best,” Afenir said. “Probably the most professional man that I ever played with.”

There were 35 others a lot like Afenir, catchers young and old and in their career’s sweet spot. They hit left-handed or right-handed or not at all. Two were Hall of Famers. More than a few were just passing through. His catchers were Pudge and Beetle and Cave and Duffy. One was a Killer B. Some were offense first, though not many. Catchers generally aren’t.

One, Adrian Garrett, caught a strike three from Nolan Ryan to Paul Blair in the summer of 1976. It was the last Major League pitch he ever received. Bob Allietta caught Ryan once, for nine innings, and it was a shutout. Seven different catchers caught his no-hitters. Some became coaches or managers or scouts as catchers generally hang around the game for a while. Craig Biggio, one of the B’s, became a second baseman, an All Star and a Hall of Famer. Brian Downing became an outfielder. Alan Ashby, who caught Ryan more than anybody, became a minor-league manager and a TV broadcaster. John Russell, the future manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, caught Ryan for the first time on June 11, 1990. Ryan no-hit the Oakland A’s that day. In fact, when Russell was catching Ryan, 40 batters came and went before Russell saw a hit against Ryan. Luis Pujols managed the Tigers for a season. Jim Sundberg called Rangers games on TV. Along with Ryan, J.C. Martin caught the Hall of Famers Early Wynn, Hoyt Wilhelm, Tom Seaver and Ferguson Jenkins.

On a cold and dark January afternoon in Arlington, Ivan Rodriguez, 52 years old, was in town to honor another former Ranger, Adrian Beltre, who’d been voted into the Hall of Fame. Beltre, overwhelmed, recited the names of some of his heroes, ballplayers such as Pedro Martinez, Willie Mays, Ken Griffey Jr. and, yes, sitting directly in front of him, Pudge Rodriguez.

“I don’t see myself like those guys,” he said softly, humbly. “I don’t belong.”

Rodriguez smiled often at the sight of the affable Beltre that day, at the many old friends who’d gathered to remember and honor an outstanding career in a game they all understood to be difficult. To be demanding. To have drawn something from within them they might not have been sure existed until someone telephoned and said, “You were among the best of the best.”

Sometimes they were on the field together, one career overlapping another, if only just barely.

On the day Rodriguez was born in Manati, Puerto Rico, Ryan already had won 29 Major League games, struck out nearly 500 Major League hitters and won a World Series.

When Rodriguez debuted in the Major Leagues (at 19 years, 205 days, 18 days younger than Ryan was when he’d made his debut a quarter of a century before), Ryan had six weeks before thrown his seventh – and last – no-hitter. Rodriguez would catch him 45 times, through more than a thousand hitters. Initially, he’d keep his ears open and his mouth shut, nodding along at game plans, keeping up with routines, raising his mitt and beginning to learn what was expected of him and who he would become.

Rodriguez made his second big-league start on June 21, 1991. He drew Ryan, the 44-year-old man who’d expect him to man the position with, if not authority, then competence. Rodriguez was nine innings into his career. By that night at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Ryan was about to command his 752nd game, pitch his 5,068th inning and face his 21,230th batter.

“I do remember that day,” Rodriguez said three decades later.

He batted ninth. He got his first hit the day before, the first of 2,844, in the early hours of a career that would end in Cooperstown, New York, in the Hall of Fame.

“Everything started in the clubhouse,” he said. “We didn’t really do a hitters meeting. He just sat down with [pitching coach] Tom House and me and he said to me, ‘Look, we don’t have to go through this. What I want you to do is make sure you’re behind the plate and put the fingers down – fastball, curve, slider and change. I’ll throw it to you.’ Basically, that was the report. Just be me behind the plate and be in the right place.”

In the beginning he was intimidated by Ryan, who was so sure of himself and so sure of how the next three hours would go.

“But,” he said, “by the end it was just like another game.”

It wasn’t long before Rodriguez became Ryan’s preferred catcher, not surprising given Rodriguez started winning Gold Gloves at 20 and kept winning them into his mid-30’s, part of that defense being a powerful arm that helped cover for Ryan’s famous disregard for baserunners.

In those three seasons in Texas, Rodriguez said, he called mostly fastballs and curveballs and in return got a pitcher, particularly in that first season, who’d turned a quarter-century’s worth of innings into a unique feel for the game. If he’d lost a few inches on the fastball, he’d regained the ground with his new-ish precision and an instinct for where hitters were vulnerable.

By that afternoon that honored the retired Beltre, not only had Ryan’s time come and gone, so had his own. He’d caught hundreds of pitchers, encouraging them through bad days, riding along on the good ones, and it had started, basically, with the aging Texan who’d be the standard by which Rodriguez gauged those who followed.

In a hallway away from Beltre, Rodriguez leaned against the wall and summoned those nights of his youth, before he knew exactly what he was or what he would become. The old guy with the nasally twang. Sweltering Texas nights. The battles that would be commonplace, the catcher knowing that in the scrap between pitcher and hitter, he had the better man.

“Well, a lot of memories, obviously,” he said. “The best memories I have is when we sat down before he pitched, going through the scouting report and basically having those conversations, with the pitching coach talking about how we’re going to face the guy. I had the privilege to catch him. As his catcher for three years, I was not taking a day off when he pitched. I’ll take a day off with somebody else, but not with him.”

Though he doesn’t see much of Ryan anymore, they do occasionally find themselves in the same room, at the same event. Separated by an entire generation, united once in the shared purpose of the next pitch, along with that pitch’s outcome, and then in the pitch after that, they still wear those victories and bear those scars. Together.

“He’s back home a lot, stays home a lot,” Rodriguez said. “But when he’s here, when I see him here, we’re still talking as good friends. He’s always going to be a good friend.”

They called Art Kusnyer “Cave,” short for “Caveman,” because one day when a 30-year-old Kusnyer was playing in Triple-A Spokane, between big-league assignments, an infielder named Lenn Sakata announced to the rest of the team, “Hey, everybody, look at Kush. This guy looks like a caveman when he’s catching.”

Nobody could really say what that would look like, a caveman catching, not having seen it before. But it didn’t have to make sense to stick, not in a baseball clubhouse. Besides, no one knew how to pronounce “Kusnyer.” (KUSH-ner.)

“And I’m going, ‘What do you mean, ‘a caveman?’” Kusnyer said. “I guess I was kind of a red-ass when I played.”

Frank Howard, the manager in Spokane, a 6-foot-7 Goliath who’d hit 383 big-league home runs, called him, “Hard Art.” Always did. Hawk Harrelson, a former player who did Chicago White Sox games on TV, called him, “Hard Art,” too, which Kusnyer figured he got from Howard but never asked.

“I’d have people come down and say, ‘Hey, how come he calls you Hard Art? Are you a badass? You go to the bar?” Kusnyer recalled. “I’d go, no, I’m not a fighter, you know, unless I actually have to, otherwise I just avoid all that stuff. I says, but it’s because of the way I play, because you played the game hard, you played the game right. And no bullshit. And that was just the way I looked at it.”

Kusnyer was the catcher at Kent State University ahead of Thurman Munson. He was drafted by the White Sox in the 37th round in 1966. Two years later, Munson went fourth overall to the New York Yankees.

He played until he was 33 years old – 139 games in the Major Leagues and 1,086 in the minors. For nearly 30 years after that he coached with the White Sox and Oakland A’s, mostly under manager Tony La Russa.

He’s 79 now, living in Florida with his wife, Judy. They met in Akron, Ohio when they were in high school. He called her, “my stone,” on account of Judy putting up with a baseball life for all those decades, but also because Kusnyer can hardly see anymore.

“I’m blind,” he said, before modifying it slightly. “Legally blind.”

He hasn’t driven a car in 14 years. Sometimes he can see the television, though not during the day, because it’s too light. Reading is out. He doesn’t have the patience for audio books.

Torn retinas, he said. Seven surgeries on each eye. They never really took.

“The doctor asked me, ‘You ever go through a car windshield?” Kusnyer said. “I says, ‘No, but I worked as a crash dummy for Ford for three years.’”

When the doctor wasn’t sure whether to laugh, Kusnyer added, “They didn’t even have airbags back then.”

The doctor winced.

“Do you think that was the problem?” Kusnyer asked.

When the doctor opened his mouth to answer, Kusnyer laughed.

“No,” he told him, “I’ve never been in a real bad car wreck.”

Boxers tear their retinas, as do people who aren’t boxers but get hit in the face for one reason or another. Near as he can guess, Kusnyer got it from taking foul tips, taking collisions, taking whatever the catcher position dished out. But maybe, he allowed, he just got unlucky.

Art and Judy rescued a puppy and they go to the dog park or walk the dog around the block, Art conscious of picking up his feet so he isn’t surprised by an uneven sidewalk. He lost 15 pounds just walking that puppy until they both tired out, sometimes three or four times a day. He misses running to the market, picking up a prescription at the drugstore, the things Judy has no help with anymore. He does what he can around the house.

“I just deal with it, you know?” he said.

They were roommates for a time, him and Nolan, and got along fine. They didn’t talk about anything in particular, Kusnyer said, though he admitted to doing most of the talking. That probably suited Ryan just fine, Kusnyer filling an otherwise quiet room. Ryan did talk about his family, who was doing what, and also about that ranch he wanted one day and how much cattle he’d put on it. They’d talk about baseball, of course, and the next team Ryan was going to pitch against, which of their hitters gave him problems and what he was going to do about that. Kusnyer never asked him about hitting, given Ryan would retire a .110 hitter, not even about what Ryan thought pitchers were doing to get Kusnyer out so much.

“No,” Kusnyer said. “I talked about hitting with guys who could hit.”

His batting average was almost 70 points higher than Ryan’s.

Of Ryan’s 5,386 innings, Kusnyer caught 137 of them, including the nine innings that were Ryan’s second no-hitter. They were teammates in 1972 and 1973, when Ryan arrived in California from New York and soon became the best strikeout pitcher in the game. Fighting the usual backup catcher frailties of sporadic playing time and limited at-bats, which left him prone to hitting slumps, Kusnyer rather called a good game, caught a good game and saw to it that pitchers were getting what they needed. He caught Ryan’s Angels debut, a four-hit, 10-strikeout shutout of the Minnesota Twins at Anaheim Stadium, the first of nine shutouts and 329 strikeouts that season. Barely 5,000 people were there, in a ballpark that held 43,000, the folks of Orange County not sure yet what they had in Ryan. Rod Carew struck out three times. Rich Reese pinch hit with two out in the ninth and grounded out to second base.

Kusnyer was Ryan’s catcher 14 times that season.

Share an apartment in spring training with a guy, then 155 days at the ballpark, and airplane flights and late dinners and bullpen sessions in the soupy air of summer afternoons, you get to know him pretty well.

“A lot of times I’d give him a pitch and if he didn’t want it he’d just stare,” Kusnyer said, “and then I’d quickly give him another one. I didn’t really go to the corners too much because on certain days, you know, you go to the outside corner and he might not even be close. But, as time went on in his career, he became better and better at it.”

He wasn’t there at the beginning, back when they were calling Ryan a myth and deciding they’d be better off with four other pitchers and what they really needed was a shortstop, but he was there when a fastball that was a novelty became something like legendary. He was there when the mechanics were ironed out, when the pitching coach risked a broken nose or worse by standing alongside Ryan on the pitcher’s mound. He was there when complete games became more common than not.

What he thinks about all these years later is what the game became after Ryan left it, how it used to be something else. Like a lot of the old timers Kusnyer doesn’t entirely approve, though he wouldn’t make a fuss about it either. When he turns on the TV for a ballgame, even at night, when the images are as good as they are going to be, the game’s a bit fuzzy. Like he doesn’t know it the way he once did. On that he and his old roommate probably agree.

Across the innings when Ryan and Kusnyer were paired, batters hit .160. Ryan was that good. He also was that, well, mean. Maybe not even mean, exactly, but determined to command the part of the world that existed between the strike zone and the batter’s body. The batter’s sense of self-preservation was in that area. Nobody wanted to go home with a lump on them that hadn’t been there three hours before.

A half-century later, Kusnyer turns down the lights and turns on the television and marvels at how comfortable hitters look in the batter’s box. How they dive for outside pitches. How they glare at the mound after an inside pitch that may or may not have been a strike. Ryan wouldn’t have put up with that.

“They don’t have that little bit of fear in them, you know, because back then guys would get knocked on their asses,” he said. “You felt that in the back of your head. Good hitters would stay in there. The rest, you’d watch ‘em, and they’d be bailing out. So Nolie used that to his advantage, like a lot of the guys, or some of them, did back then.

“Especially if you were a diver. I’d be like, ‘Man, don’t do that.’ It makes it look like you’re getting the signs. We used to set guys up. If we thought they were giving the signs from second base, I’m gonna call for a fastball away and you’re gonna throw this thing right under his chin. The guy would be doing the moonwalk out there. Not just me, but other catchers, we’d say, ‘You know what? You keep looking out there and getting location and you might end up meeting Jesus.’”

It’s a club. Like the 10 who caught Koufax. The 25 who caught Greg Maddux. The 25 who caught Seaver. The 19 who caught Pedro Martinez. The 17 who caught Bob Gibson.

There’s a large poster of the seven who caught Nolan Ryan no-hitters. The main graphic is a collage of Ryan during key moments of his career. In one he’s holding four baseballs with zeroes marked on them, for the one Ellie Rodriguez caught in 1975, his fourth no-hitter. There’s one of him being carried from a field in Oakland, that being John Russell’s. On the bottom of the artwork, mugshots of Torborg, Kusnyer, Egan, Rodriguez and Ashby. Russell is pictured with his back to the camera, hugging Ryan after the final out. In the last, Stanley has arrived at the mound late one night in 1991, Ryan grinning. The pitcher and his catchers have autographed the poster under their pictures. There are at least eight of those, set behind glass, framed in dark brown wood and matted in black.

They received them in Chicago, none of them could remember the year exactly, at a memorabilia show. And now the posters hang in dens or living rooms, or they’re under a tarp in an attic. They are the club within the club, the men who were good enough or lucky enough or thorough enough or determined enough to see one night through to the end, one out of who knows how many. Too many to count, probably, go back far enough.

In the photo of him, Hard Art is smiling, wearing an Angels cap, a halo over the A.

“You did a nice job,” Ryan told him late that night.

“Well,” Kusnyer replied, “congratulations, brother.”

What they had in common, Kusnyer figured, were those special nights, of course. But, more, all the games that led up to them and all the games that led away from them and the ability to make them about somebody else.

“He wanted somebody that cared about him, you know?” Kusnyer said. “Who cared about what was going on.”

He chuckled.

“Because if he didn’t like it, he’d probably tell you.”

This was about a year ago. He was nearing 78 years old. His back hurt, he said, but his knee was better. At a certain point, you’re happy for the tie.

We were in his second-floor office in Round Rock, Texas, down the block from the Round Rock Express, a minor-league team he owns. Outside was gray, wet, and ugly. He wore comfortable shoes. I was writing a book, which became NOLAN: The Singular Life of an American Original, out May 19.

I told Nolan that it occurred to me on the drive from my hotel that he’d been born in the perfect time and place. His generation of ballplayers saw the vestiges of four-man rotations. Pitch counts were the day’s advanced analytics, and only press-box nerds and curious coaches kept track. Starters were invited to pitch nine innings if they were up to it, or more. That all sounds like a different sport. Also, his generation was the earliest to make any money playing baseball.

Nolan was the first to make $1 million in a season. By his mid-40s, he was making more than $4 million. That was more than 30 years ago.

He was raised by parents in a Texas town that believed hard work was a way of life and led to the certainties of a place to live, food to eat, and a furnace that worked. There were more churches than bars in Alvin, which suited most. Everyone fanned themselves against the same heat, swatted at the same mosquitoes, farmed the same soil, scrubbed the same crude from their jeans, drew paychecks from the same moody economy, and drank black coffee at the same counter. Places like that tend to turn out folks who are grounded or have a half chance of being. The sweat earned in an oil field, on a cattle ranch, on a hundred acres of corn, or, say, on a dusty baseball diamond could hardly be wrung out. Sometimes it stayed with a man all the way into the Hall of Fame.

Nolan thought that was probably right, that he’d been lucky in that way and, besides, he didn’t have any choice in the matter.

If he’d had any shot at all at a foundation of kindness, integrity, spirituality, and loyalty, then Lynn and Martha Ryan were as good as any to demand it, he said, and Alvin was as good a place as any to practice it.

“You believe certain things,” he told me, “and you live by those principles.”

I can’t really define what a virtuous life is. Nobody, probably, gets it quite right or quite wrong. I can also say that I don’t often have these sorts of conversations, but there we were, and if we were going to be there anyway, I might as well ask.

“So, Nolan, looking back,” I said, “how’d you do on that front?”

He smiled and told me a story.

One December afternoon, somewhere in the mid 1980s, he drove from his Alvin ranch to Houston for a team event at the Astrodome. He was told there’d be advertisers and sponsors there. He’d say hello, sign autographs, and be home for dinner.

There, he met a NASA astronaut, whose name he couldn’t recall. The man had brought his son, who Nolan guessed was 6. Nolan shook the little boy’s hand and, seeing as it was close to Christmas, asked him, “So have you been a good boy this year?”

The little boy looked Nolan in the eye.

As earnestly as he could, he replied, “The Lord knows I’m trying.”

Forty years later, Nolan leaned back in his chair and laughed at the ceiling. When he stopped, he spread his arms and said, “There’s your answer.”

They were the curbside voters.

For the past few election days at an elementary school in Raleigh, North Carolina, these were my people. For 10 or 15 minutes, I’d be their provider of ballot and pen (and, at the end, “I Voted” sticker), their legs, their energy, their conduit to the political system.

Wheelchairs were strapped to the backs of the cars. Walkers were wedged into the backseats. Sometimes a cane slid between themselves and the car door.

They were my neighbors or close enough. They were grandmothers and grandfathers, great- and, maybe, great-great. They were in the passenger seat or in the back with their spouse, chauffeured by a granddaughter or a nephew or, sometimes, an Uber driver. Once, there were eight of them in a small bus, ferried from a nearby retirement home, everybody strapped in and happy, a field trip to their brick-and-steel polling place.

The women were mostly tiny. Their husbands, if they were with them, were not much larger. Many were connected to oxygen machines, small transparent tubes puckering their cheeks. The ladies had done up their hair and put on makeup and worn flowery blouses, and I liked to think that afterward they were going to lunch at the place with the patio and the good salads.

They kept their driver’s licenses in pink or black or blue pouches inside their purses, their fingers wobbling across insurance cards and credit cards and school pictures of children who call them Grandma or Gram or Nana. Most of my curbsiders were women. The men grunted and squirmed sideways to reach their back pockets, producing wallets the size of bricks, all they needed in the world that close, cinched by doubled-over rubber bands.

They smiled, my curbsiders. Every one of them.

About half the states in America, including North Carolina, allow for or require curbside voting, according to Movement Advancement Project. In the rest, there is no law, except in Alabama, which prohibits it. I’m sure there’s a reason, but I can’t think of one. Twenty-six percent of North Carolina voters are 65 or older, and most of them tend to vote. Based on what I saw and counted in my head, fewer than 5 percent of voters require curbside help, though that’s just in my neighborhood.

I had no idea it existed until three years ago, when, upon moving from California to North Carolina, I volunteered in my polling place. Well, volunteered. We’re paid. Not a lot, but just enough so when a nice person turns as he’s leaving to say, “Hey, thanks for doing this,” I feel a little guilty. Not that I wouldn’t do it for free, but I’m not.

I did an afternoon of training – how to distribute ballots, count them, what to say and what not to say, how to be professional about it, but mostly how to be helpful and not foul up the vote. Funny, too, as I’d just been telling my wife how odd it felt to suddenly be the oldest person in every room. Then I went to election training.

“Solved it,” I texted her.

(All the jobs greeting at Walmart, marshaling at the golf course and scolding random teenagers were taken.)

The elementary school is on a hill and surrounded by Carolina pines. The driveway leads past the school’s entrance, around the side and into the back, where there is a small parking lot. On my first day, the chief judge – she’s the one in charge – gave assignments. I got the one nobody wanted, probably because it was supposed to rain and I wasn’t the oldest person in the room.

The way it works, a person who wishes to vote curbside parks in one of two handicapped spots. There’s a button on a sign that, when pushed, rings a bell inside the polling place and then everybody looks at me. Not a lot of people see the sign or the bell. What happens more often, a person walks in and says, “Hey, there’s somebody out there wants to vote.”

The election day assistant – that’d be me – takes a clipboard, an authorization to vote (ATV) form and a pen from the polling room, down a flight of stairs, across the parking lot and to the waiting car. By the end of this process, without getting into too much detail, there will be four of these trips, out and back. It’s enough to know that by the end of the day the flight of stairs has gotten longer and steeper. Also, in any other setting I’d look like a particularly forgetful carhop.

More than one curbsider apologized.

“I’m sorry you have to do this for me,” they’d say.

“Psh,” I’d say, “better out here than cooped up in there.”

One lady and I made plans to walk our dogs together. Another handed over her driver’s license and said, “Ninety-three,” as if to spare me the shock.

It all takes about 15 minutes, end to end, longer if the pen is fumbled under the car seat.

When the ballot is delivered, which is step three of four, the assistant is supposed to stand about 10 feet away, ensuring privacy for the voter. I don’t know how often you’ve stood in the middle of a parking lot doing nothing, but it’s not unawkward. It did give me time to think.

Some of my curbsiders were well into their 90’s. They were frail. So frail.

I imagined them thinking about this Tuesday all day Monday. What they would wear. The effort it would take to leave wherever they were from, away from homes and rooms where everything was angled toward them, where they knew the ripple in the carpet that might trip them up and had just the right pillow to soothe their back. Then on a drive where they would feel the wind and see the first signs of spring, to a crowded place with people hurrying past, children out of school for election day bouncing behind their moms and dads, 18-year-olds in god knows what get-up voting for the first time.

So they could vote, I thought, they strayed from the safety of their lives, untangled the lines of their oxygen machines, straightened themselves the best they could, and shuffled out the door, someone they trusted with a hand on their elbow.

So they could vote.

The last of the trips was to deliver the sticker. Red, white and blue. “I voted.” They’d accept with their biggest smile and a trembling hand, proof that there was more, that they were still contributing, that somewhere they’d be counted again. I wondered how many would see the end of a term of the candidate they’d voted for and if they thought about that, if they were participating in the process not for themselves, necessarily, but for the young man behind the wheel that day, to ensure we keep doing this, that it matters, that if we all stopped because it’s hard to get off the couch and the oxygen machine isn’t charged, then what would be left? I admired them.

“Thank you,” they’d say.

“Happy to,” I’d say.

And as they rolled up their window, I’d wave and add, “See you in November?”

“Oh, yes,” they’d say. “I’ll be here.”

Then so will I.

So they can vote, my curbsiders.

One particular man, and he happened to be a baseball player, was nearing the end of an astonishing career. He’d traveled farther than most and become what no other had, persisting in the labor to be exactly who he was yesterday and the day before that. It’d soon be out of reach, but not today. Never today.

By then his face was lined and tired, his hairline in retreat, his body thinning and thickening in odd places, irritatingly counter to his wishes.

From a distance, I wondered why it was Nolan Ryan who carried the greatness, if it was granted or taken, gifted or earned. I wondered how the answers might reveal themselves, explaining how all of this – the good part of a lifetime – happened.

The last time I saw him pitch in person was in the summer of 1991, a Sunday night at Arlington Stadium, home of Ryan’s Texas Rangers. The pregame debate was over which would be higher, the temperature – 96 degrees at first pitch – or the velocity of Ryan’s best fastball.

It was, alas, too close to call. He was 44 years old.

The visitors were the California Angels. They were managed by Doug Rader, who had a reputation for being a hard-ass, which was mostly true. (He also was intellectually curious, once fingering his place in a paperback book and asking a reporter, “Hey, what’s ‘Machiavellian’ mean?”) Pregame, during batting practice, when something like the 10th Angels player trudged into the dugout, moaned and said, “Geez, it’s hot,” or the equivalent, Rader had had enough.

“Next guy who complains about the heat gets fined,” he’d snapped.

Not 20 minutes later, when one of those players returned to the dugout with a soaked jersey and crimson face and absent-mindedly uttered, “Sooo hot,” Rader’s head turned in anger.

The player looked over at Rader, realized what he’d said, smiled thinly and continued, “Just the way I like it?”

Even Rader laughed.

So, yeah, it was July in Texas and delaying the start of the game until after the sun went down still had it July in Texas, only a little darker.

These were the Angels of Wally Joyner, Dave Winfield, Dave Parker, Lance Parrish and Gary Gaetti. They were ordinary, nonetheless. The Rangers were only slightly better than ordinary, except they were growing into the team that a few years later would win the franchise’s first division title.

Also, they had Nolan Ryan.

Still, the heat. His age. The miles. His back was sore. So was his shoulder. Four days earlier, he’d suffered chest pains and checked himself into a hospital. And, then, a decent Angels lineup. Left-hander Chuck Finley, 28 years old, the Angels’ ace and an exceedingly tough guy, would wilt after three innings.

So what could any of the nearly 38,000 fans in the ballpark reasonably expect from Ryan?

Well, when Joyner grounded into a double play to end the seventh inning, the Angels didn’t yet have a hit. Two months earlier, on that same mound, pitching against the Toronto Blue Jays, Ryan had thrown his seventh career no-hitter, and his second as a Ranger. No one else had more than four.

By the eighth inning, then, Rangers fans believed.

In baseball, there are degrees of faith.

There’s the hope one feels in the parking lot, a new day, a fresh field, an orange-yellow sun, the sort of optimism that rinses away the traffic, the bills, the news and, if need be, the standings.

There’s the cleanup hitter at the plate with the bases loaded, the confidence that something good will happen, that of course it will happen, because you’ve committed to this team and been a reasonably good person and raised your children to wear the same colors.

There’s three outs from a win, then two, then one, and you’re in your lucky shirsey and praying to the proper god and knowing – just knowing – you’ve earned this.

Then there’s Nolan Ryan on a pitcher’s mound in Texas with a no-hitter going in the eighth inning, foot-stomping, hand-clapping, song-singing, hyperventilating-into-a-peanuts-bag belief.

And then Winfield led off the eighth with a ground ball into center field, a whole day’s anticipation, drama and hope gone, then, in the second or two it takes a baseball to whip past the pitcher and through the crossing infielders.

Because that’s baseball, too.

Ryan lasted into the ninth, struck out 14 Angels, walked one and threw 110 pitches. He waved to the fans on his way from the field and they hollered their approval of not just the previous 2 ½ hours, but of the pitcher he was, the Texan he was and, probably, the man he was.

I hadn’t thought much about that game, one of thousands I’d witnessed in a career spent clumping into and out of ballparks, until 30 years later, until I asked myself what kind of story I wanted to tell about Nolan Ryan. What, exactly, made him special?

I walked into the Rangers’ clubhouse that night. Like everyone, my shirt was stuck to my chest from the sweat, and I’d done nothing more than keep score. I was looking for Nolan, for the one who, 15 years older than I, had taken the ball and not given it back until the manager demanded it. Even that had come with some reluctance.

But he was not there. I turned to the Rangers’ public relations director and said, “Where is he?”

“Where he always is after he pitches,” John Blake said, and pointed toward a doorway.

I entered and found an arc of reporters armed with pads and pens and questions. Nolan faced them. He rode an old stationary bike, rusted, if I remember it right, but that sounds too perfect now, from the years and the sweat. His tinny drawl carried just above the hum of the pedals that moved the chain that spun the wheel that prepared him for his next start, another hundred-and-some pitches against another lineup on another pitcher’s mound.

It was in that moment that I understood.

This is how a man who was granted the most powerful, most resilient right arm the game had ever seen repaid the favor. This is how he held himself accountable to what he’d been gifted. A middle-aged man on a bike, going nowhere, having been everywhere, headed toward one more day, and he’d just have to see where that led him.

The arm, by itself, wasn’t enough. We all have a gift. I’m not sure about the origins of these gifts, as I haven’t worked out the particulars. The game isn’t about how far the gift takes us, because that might be a short trip, but how diligent we are in our service to it. What we are willing to sacrifice for it. How many miles we’ll put toward who we are and who we could be. The gift would be plenty, generally. We’d get by on that, maybe, for a while. But, then, we wouldn’t be Nolan Ryan, or anything like him, wherever it was we were headed.

Nolan Ryan answered to his gift, just as he’d answered to his father, Lynn Nolan, Sr., who’d held two jobs in order to put Nolan’s four sisters through college. Just as he’d answered to his brother, Bobby, who’d flown airplanes in Vietnam. Just as he’d answered to his wife, Ruth, who’d tended to three children and the challenges that came with being married to the man and the game.

So, when the day was over, when they’d turned off the scoreboard and sent everybody home, the day wasn’t over for one of them. There were more miles to cover in the saddle of that old, familiar bike, which didn’t much care if he stayed or went home. After a long day that beat almost everybody, he could decide. So, he rode.

And then in the end, you come to understand, the gift didn’t find him, he found it. That is, the arm didn’t make Nolan Ryan. Every day, over and over, it was he who made the arm.

NOLAN: The Singular Life of an American Original by Tim Brown, will be released on May 19, 2026.