The Bash Brothers: Kyle Nihart Caught Me at Twelve and Again at Thirty-Nine

Most friendships don't get a second act. This one got three.

The Bash Brothers

Kyle Nihart is one of my best friends from growing up, and he was my catcher.

People called us the Bash Brothers, and we did absolutely nothing to discourage it. That's who we were — the two of them, joined at the hip, one throwing and one catching, convinced the whole thing revolved around us.

He went on to play at Cameron in Oklahoma. I went the road I went. That's usually where a story like this ends: two kids who were inseparable at fifteen, a Christmas text at thirty.

The referral

In 2004 Kyle had a shoulder that needed surgery.

He got it done in Phoenix by a young orthopedic surgeon named Dr. Michael Wilmink. He liked him enough to say so out loud, and he told me I should go see him.

I was nineteen, home from my first semester at Washington State, sitting on a hip that had been failing since I was seven, and quietly certain I still wanted to play.

So I went. And Wilmink is the doctor who told me I was a candidate for a total hip replacement at nineteen, and who — unlike almost everybody else — wouldn't tell me I couldn't come back.

I've written about Wilmink. I've written about Paul Laxalt, who talked me into getting a second opinion in the first place. I've written about Tom Novak pushing me the rest of the way.

But the actual chain starts earlier than any of that. It starts with my catcher blowing out his shoulder and liking his surgeon.

That's the thing about the decisions that turn out to matter. They almost never announce themselves. A friend says hey, my guy was good, you should see him — and thirty-four years of a hip condition and seven professional seasons hinge on it.

2024

Here's the part I still can't quite get over.

In 2024 I was with the Party Animals. Part of my job on that tour was finding a bullpen catcher in every city we rolled into — you show up somewhere new, you need somebody who can receive, and you have a few hours to find them.

So in one of those cities, I called Kyle.

Twenty-some years after he caught me as a kid, he crouched behind the plate and caught me again. Same guy. Same glove-side. Grown men now, one of us throwing on a replaced hip in front of a stadium full of people who'd come to watch a show.

I don't have a clever way to say what that felt like. I just remember thinking: this is the same as it was. Not nostalgic-same. Actually the same. The ball still went where it was supposed to go and he still knew what was coming.

Why I'm writing this down

I've been writing about the people who built this thing — Doc, Wilmink, Novak. I sent Doc his and he cried, and that landed on me harder than I expected.

We're not good at this, men in baseball. We say it by showing up with a glove. We assume the other guy knows.

He probably does know. I'd still rather write it down.

Kyle: you caught me when we were kids. You sent me to the doctor who gave me the rest of my career and you had no idea that's what you were doing. And you caught me again at thirty-nine, on a hip that shouldn't have made it, in front of a crowd.

Bash Brothers. Still.