As long as I can remember I’ve played baseball. I began playing sometime when I was five or six in t-ball and played every year up through high school. I stopped playing after part of a year in college when my attention turned to other topics, like girls, friends, girls, school work, girls working on girls, and girls. Also, girls. Since college I’ve played a few years in adult leagues as well.

I was never a great baseball player, but I did have some good seasons interspersed among the mediocre. I made the All Star team in Babe Ruth league a few years, one year when I hit .400 and batted second. Recently in an adult league here in Portland I hit .400 again. How I missed out on the All Star team I’ll never know. Then last year I hit somewhere around .200. I can’t be sure of the exact figure because I stopped updating my spreadsheet. Personal failure isn’t nearly as interesting to chronicle.

Two of the very best seasons I ever had came in high school. My junior and senior years I had finally talked my coach into letting me try pitching. Surprise, ya old jackass, I was actually pretty good at it. I could throw kinda hard, I had a side arm curve ball which, when not twenty feet behind the batter’s head, was unhittable, and I had pretty good fastball control. I was so good, in fact, that I became the star pitcher. I was the number one starter on my team my senior year and was good enough to win First Team, All District, which was kinda insulting as I’d been hoping for First Team, All Conference. Apparently I’m doomed to a life lacking recognition.

And yet, unhittable sidearm curve aside, I shouldn’t have been the best pitcher on my high school team. That would be Andrew Bailey, or Andy, was the best pitcher on my team. Andy did win First Team, All Conference, but he did it my junior year which was his sophomore. I think he won Some Team All State too, but I could be wrong about that.

Either way, dude could pitch. Good pitchers strike out hitters and don’t walk them. Andy did a lot of both. He had this wind-up where he’d kinda rear back and launch the ball from a standing position. I don’t know how he got so much speed by throwing that way but it worked. He also had about the best curveball I’d seen up to that point. It was a 12-to-6 type with a sharp bite, and Andy could buckle your knee for a strike or make it look like a strike when it was really about to dive into the dirt leaving you swinging at air. It wasn’t unusual for our fielders to leave the field after three hitters without taking a step.

So why was I the best pitcher my senior year? Andy got cancer. He couldn’t pitch my senior year, though he was there on the bench when I got twelve strikeouts against Wakefield. (It probably would have been a shutout if my team could field the ball.) In fact, he was the first one to congratulate me coming off the field, and it was he who presented me with the game ball in front of the team after the coach said we’d won the game because of my “great” pitching in the team’s post-game huddle.

I tried to return the favor by visiting him in the hospital. I went a number of times. I don’t recall how those visits went exactly, but I remember being nervous, I remember he had no hair left from the chemo and I remember his smile seemed completely devoid of fear.

Andy and I weren’t exactly friends, which is maybe why I don’t remember crying when he died. I remember thinking that Andy could have been a really good pitcher. I doubt he would have made the majors or anything (he wasn’t very tall) but his curveball could make a batter look drunk, scared, or both. I think the most impressive thing about Andy though was his calm; his calm on the mound, but mostly his calm in the face of his illness. It wasn’t hard to picture the guy saying “OK, well, what can we do about that?” when told he had cancer and was probably going to die.

After Andy had gone, I pitched one more great game. I got the game ball for that too. The coach just handed it to me. I gave that one to my mom.

Matt Kory is a former Urban Planner turned stay-at-home dad. He exists in a whirling vortex of crying, poopy diapers, and sports, punctuated by daily columns at Over The Monster. He also writes for the online magazine Splice Today (www.splicetoday.com). He hopes to one day make a living from doing this stuff, so feel free to contact him at  and tell him what a genius he is. In his spare time he does not enjoy jogging, sleeping, crying, or being scratched by his cat. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two three year old boys. Follow Matt on Twitter, @MattyMatty2000