“Can you teach me to throw?”

Kevin West is a divorced father of three children: Becky, 24, who married in June; Emily, 22, who lives with her husband and newborn daughter in Fort Belvoir, Ky.; and Kyle (pictured above left, with Kevin). Kevin is news director of the Citadel Broadcasting radio stations in Chattanooga (Talk Radio 102.3 FM, NewsRadio 1150, KZ-106 and 107.9 The Duke) and co-hosts “The Morning Press” with Jeff and JR weekdays from 6 to 9 a.m. on WGOW-FM/AM. He is also a public affairs officer in the US Navy Reserve.

By Kevin West

Photo by Julie Hogue

I just got back from the North River Y. I worked out with my now 17-year-old (very soon to be 18-year-old) son, Kyle. And we threw a baseball.
Kyle is starting his senior year at CSAS. We’ve thrown a baseball together thousands of times. He has been playing organized ball since he was 5. Tonight the ball stung against my palm as I snapped it out of the air with my old glove. His throws were straight and true and hard. Not that they were always that way.
I remembered back to our first throwing session when Kyle was only 4 years old. I didn’t introduce the idea; he did. And anyone my age who grew up listening to Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s In The Cradle” knows that when your young son asks, “Can you teach me to throw?” you don’t say, “Not today,” lest later in life, when he’s grown and you want to see him, he can’t find the time because his new job’s a hassle and the kids have the flu. I did not want to be responsible for creating job hassles for him and giving his kids the flu, as Harry’s song strongly implied I might if I declined my boy’s invitation to throw with him.
Actually, I was excited that Kyle had developed an interest in baseball. I loved baseball when I was a kid growing up in the Detroit area. I played it. I watched it. I studied it. The numbers 714 (Babe Ruth’s career home run total), 56 (Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive-game hitting streak), 4,189 (Ty Cobb’s hit total) and 2,130 (Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak) were holy and sacred. Tiger Stadium was a cathedral, and the gods I worshipped were named Kaline, Freehan, Cash, Stanley, Horton and Northrup.
To me, baseball was the perfect game, mixing athleticism and mental quickness with common sense, instinct and emotion. The smell of fresh-cut grass and the crack of wood against horsehide in the spring always meant a new season with new hope and optimism. Everything and everybody started all over again and started from the same place. Nobody was ahead of anybody, and you always had a chance.
Kyle must sense that, too, I reasoned, even though I had never talked to him about it. He was only 4. But if he was asking me to play, I was sure there was something inherent about those feelings that came with the start of a new baseball season—something primal, something that transcended the need for verbal communication.
Reality smacked us both in the face about the time the very first ball I threw smacked him in the head. There’s nothing inherent to a 4-year-old about using the heavy, over-sized softball glove your dad has jammed onto your left hand to protect yourself from the hard, five-inch sphere he just tossed at you. If only Harry Chapin had said something about teaching him to catch, rather than just teaching him to throw.
Tonight I watched him move with grace and sureness to settle under the pop-ups I threw, pulling them in time after time, running to his left, to his right, back a little and in a lot. When the opposing team is hitting, Kyle believes anything in the air to the outfield is an out. He played six Dizzy Dean All-Star seasons at Hixson, was Rookie of the Year his first season at CSLA and all-county the next two years, and just this past season at CSAS he earned the Offensive Player of the Year award.

Maybe my coaching had something to do with it. Maybe it all came in spite of my coaching. Thirteen years have passed since the first time Kyle and I went out into the yard to throw a baseball. That’s a lot of time, I guess, but it sure doesn’t feel like it tonight. I can still see the 4-year-old in his eyes and in his smile, the Little Boy Blue and the Man in the Moon.
I don’t know why I didn’t start Kyle’s baseball “career” bare-handed with the plastic ball, as my wife suggested, but I didn’t. It certainly seems logical now, looking backward. What is it they say about hindsight being 20/20?
You make lots of mistakes as a parent. Lord knows, I have. You make little mistakes and big mistakes. Some hurt a little and some hurt a lot. Sometimes you think you’ve made so many that they’ll give up on you, but they don’t. They always want to be like you, dad.
They want to be just like you.