By Katherine Manz

“Catch,” he yells, and then “throw,” and at finality he points at the first baseman like a grand conductor and tells him to catch the ball and end the World Series, and so he does.

1974 finds him in sawdust.

The hands jerk, crone-like, up over the head, as they always have, the body drops to the right-angled knee, and the shoulders pivot to facilitate the long diagonal sling of the arm. He pitches with his eyes shut, open, narrowed; from second base, from the outfield, halfway to home. He paints the corners out-of-hand for hours. And then again the moment the man steps into the batter’s box the ball becomes obstinate and awful, a screamer for blood.

Steve Blass learned to throw like any kid. He went to the park or he threw at a wall or at his friend, trying for the ever-faster dip and dive that makes a perfect pitch.

Today, twenty or a hundred wild pitches later, the coach says I don’t think this is working. Steve drives home, sits on the porch for two hours next to a warm beer. Then he goes to sleep and dreams a long dream.

The dream finds him childish again, a tall kid in baggy stockings throwing on instinct. The ball like a pureblood dove in his hand, flying home. Then everything shifts and the boy is a beaming young man in yellow and black, transplanted a decade to October 1971, where he’ll pitch the Pittsburgh Pirates to a World Series Championship.

To play baseball is to believe in oneself. More specifically, to play baseball is to believe you are better than him (the batter or pitcher), that motherfucker, and the infielders too, that you can poke a rolling single through the gap or con the batter into swinging through a high fastball, not just once, but again and again.

It takes 27 outs to win a baseball game. In Game 7, with 26 down, Blass wafts a slider outside that is hit hard down the middle to the shortstop. “Catch,” he yells, and then “throw,” and at finality he points at the first baseman like a grand conductor and tells him to catch the ball and end the World Series, and so he does.

For several weeks he doesn’t stop smiling. He goes back to his hometown in rural Connecticut, where the leaves are vivid yellows and oranges. He smiles through the stage, the hand-shaking, the parade (just for him!), the huge unclouded sky above, and the delighted laughter of children.

He is near-perfect the next season, winning 19 games and dropping eight, allowing under 2.5 runs per nine innings. Blass’s skill is not in throwing hard. Under his tutelage, the ball will dip suddenly to draw the swing-and-miss, swerve toward the strike zone, or seem to slow as it approaches the batter, who can’t keep up. He swings too quickly; his bat goes flying. On the mound, the boy-pitcher turns and shakes out his legs, holding glove over face to mask a ridiculous smile.

The alarm goes off. The dream ends.

Steve turns his face into the pillow. It feels like a good day, arm beautifully unsore from the previous day’s beating. On a perfect day just like this, two years ago, he woke up and found that the pinpoint control he had built his pitching career on was gone.

In between that time and now are countless items thrown and broken, batters hit. Hypnotists, therapists, transcendental meditation, looser underwear, tipped and untipped baseball caps. Grief counseling. Nights at the bar. None of it explaining what people now delicately call his “condition”: the overnight transformation from nine spectacular innings to win the World Series into a pitcher no one writes about except to pity, afflicted with the absolute and incurable inability to throw a strike.

“Bad day,” he said the first week, and then “bad month,” and then eventually he stopped talking at all, except to cut short any suggestion of giving up: “I love baseball,” he says, “It’s my life; I don’t know what I’d do without it.”

So it’s to the field again. Another 40 pitches to get the arm loose. He knows what a baseball looks like, has seen one every day since the genesis of his memory, and this is a good one —  beat-up just enough to take a good grip. When he’s throwing it, he remembers what pitching used to feel like, and he’s in the prime of his life still, and he feels it in the clear ease of his joints. If he can figure it out, he can be a major-leaguer for another decade.

He always feels good at the start of the session. Tunnel vision, straight and true, the pitches bounding playfully into the catcher’s mitt. Today the coach turns to this kid Miguel, who’s trying to make it up in Pittsburgh, and tells him to get in there. He used to hide behind trees to get off Blass duty, but he’s here now in his uniform and helmet with his jaw set, a bruise barely visible past the tape on his wrist. Steve, who has just now thrown 40 major-league quality pitches, winds up and lets the ball go. He can tell before it leaves his hand that it’s going to get the kid on the ribs.

There is a dark pinhole you might peer into when a loved one is getting old and losing the function of their fingers or when a football player has taken too many collisions — a space where knowledge used to be. Here, 93 miles an hour skids sideways or down, exploding more dust into the air. The much-loved baseball looks curiously like a black hole.

At the end of the session, Miguel lets out a long breath and gets out of there. Steve sits in the bullpen for a long time, turning a too-big baseball in his hand, suppressing the childish urge to say IT’S NOT FAIR.

In February of 1975, two years after his pitching first betrayed him, Steve starts a spring training game against the Chicago White Sox. After he walks eight batters in three innings, after the manager comes to take him out, after the Sox manager calls it the saddest thing he’s ever seen in baseball, Steve will head to the manager’s office, and there he will give it up for good.

He will walk out of the ballpark hand-in-hand with his family, but he’ll drive to the cabin alone. That is where he’ll stay and drink and keep drinking, thinking about a major leaguer’s life and throwing a complete game and useless memories-become-dreams of winning the World Series, a leap of exultation, history. He’ll consider and reconsider his mechanics. He’ll never quit doing it; a year later he’s a class ring salesman, but he can’t help sometimes calling his high school pitching coach and saying, “Do you mind if I come over and try again?”

He’s just 33. The catcher’s mitt retains the ball’s hollow like a fond smile — I remember you — the smell of leather — the crisp spring sunset. With the same mechanics as he had at 15, Steve reaches back, steps forward, and throws.

The ball hits the high-school bat boy, crumples him, cradling his wrist. He yelps, “I’m okay!”

Jesus fucking Christ. The kid pities him.

Steve doesn’t wait until it’s dark this time. He hands the ball over, the motion now practiced, and he says, “I’m done.”

These five years of agony, of course, mean nothing; baseball isn’t done with him. Steve becomes an announcer, learns to work in media boxes and talk baseball in broad strokes. Three decades on, a short, friendly man trots across the field towards him and says, “Hi. I’m Richard Crowley. I’m a sports psychologist.”

It takes 90 minutes of replacing bad images with the good — red awful hushed silence batter jumping out of the way, screaming — becomes daffodil, becomes children tossing underhand — it takes 90 minutes, and he can throw again. He can’t stand how easy it is. At 56, he considers trying out for an Independent League team. He doesn’t. But he could.

But someday he is in his rocking chair in sunnier weather in clean Arizona. The paint is flaking. The picture they still look at — Steve Blass, winning pitcher, in absolute inexplicable clean-nosed jubilation — is up on the wall, and these days he can even stand it.

All the years pouring by like dirty water. Today, at 83, he stands up to pitch. His mind’s eye finds it again: the single dandelion, yellow sunshine, wilting a little in the wind. Steve opens his eyes, and he sets, and he throws. ■