"Keep Throwin'" — What I Wrote at Twenty, Eleven Months After They Replaced My Hip

I've been going through old notebooks. In one of them there's a page titled "Keep throwin'", dated 7/9/06 @ 11:30.

July 2006. I was twenty years old. My hip had been replaced eleven months earlier. Both my parents had been dead less than two years. The University of Arizona had not yet formally refused to clear me, but I could feel it coming.

So at half past eleven at night I sat down and wrote this.

Still playin ball is like a dream to me But so far away is what it seems to be I still keep throwin just ta keep it alive Because I always taught to continue ta strive For them bigger better things In this world I know Cuz its my heart + my soul that helps me keep it in "go"

There are two crossed-out lines after that. He tried something, didn't like it, and moved on. Then:

It's like it was yesterday when it all turned around Let me tell you bout my story, this is how it sounds...

The date in the second verse

Here's the part that stopped me cold.

It was August 17 the year 2K4 When the doc said I couldn't play ball no more Then I felt my heart fall straight to the floor He said my hip was messed up too much to ignore

17 August 2004. That's the exact date of my team physical at Washington State — the day they told me to stop playing competitive baseball altogether.

I've written that date on this website recently, reconstructing it from documents. And here it is, in a notebook, written by a twenty-year-old two years after it happened, in rhyme, at eleven-thirty at night.

He remembered the date. Of course he did.

The conversation

As my brain was runnin laps all around my head I looked straight at the doc and this what I said I said, doc — I don't believe what you're sayin I know my hip sucks but I can still keep playin He said, no son, I'm sorry but it what it is Oh, and by the way I think ya need a new hip kid

That last line is the whole thing.

Oh, and by the way I think ya need a new hip kid. Delivered as an afterthought, in the poem, because that's how it landed on an eighteen-year-old who had driven twenty-two hours to play college baseball. Your career is over — oh, and also, you need a new hip.

I don't remember whether the doctor actually said it that offhandedly. I do know that's how it felt, and the poem is the only record I have of how it felt rather than what happened.

What the kid who wrote this didn't know

He didn't know that seven months later he'd top out at 87 at an open tryout in Tucson and get a professional contract out of it.

He didn't know he'd win a championship in his rookie season and be named MVP of the series.

He didn't know about the no-hitter, or Mexico, or the Atlantic League, or that a Hall of Famer would one day write his name on a lineup card.

He also didn't know that four organisations would sign him or try to and none would be allowed to keep him, that the Padres would un-sign him five hours after he signed, or that the reason would be an insurance calculation rather than anything to do with how he threw.

He knew none of it. He was twenty, he'd been told no, and he wrote I still keep throwin just ta keep it alive.

Twenty years on

I'm forty-one. I threw a hundred pitches in Florida heat this season, on that same hip.

I titled it "Keep throwin'" before I had any evidence that I would.

That's not a lesson I'm going to dress up. A kid wrote himself an instruction in a notebook at eleven-thirty at night, in verse, because he had no other way to say it — and then spent the next twenty years doing what it said.

There's more poetry in those notebooks. I'm going to go and read it.