Baseball, brothers make for memories

I no longer have a telephone at the office. I have a telephone line. I’m like Jeff Lynne from Electric Light Orchestra.

Cellphones and email and Twitter and Facebook accounts and instant messaging pretty much have rendered a land-line telephone as useless as the Lakers’ Dwight Howard.

During the past week, I received more than 700 work-related email messages, and one that said Russian girls could be sent directly to my room, for a reasonable fee. Nothing against Russian girls, but I really should set my spam filter to 11. One of these days, I might.

Conversely, I received just three phone messages: One that said Jerry Tarkanian was a lousy coach because he never picked up a tab, one that said I could get 25 percent off on my dry cleaning (and 30 percent off if I had a comforter that needed a good fluffing) and one from Bob from Portland, Ore.

From the sound of his voice, Bob from Portland is an older gentleman. He has a deep tone, like a lumberjack. Sort of gravelly. Unlike the Russian girls, it seemed we had spoken before.

Bob confirmed he was not a first-time caller. “I’ve talked to you a few times,” his message began. “You’re from Chicago, Ron. I hope everything is good with you.’’

Bob said he liked my story on Matt Cutler, the young man with Down syndrome who has found a home with the College of Southern Nevada baseball team. Bob said he was a huge baseball fan. That he loved this time of year, the beginning of another baseball season, when everybody except a Marlins fan is optimistic.

“Life is good because baseball season is upon us again.”

Bob’s strident voice was coming over loud and clear.

He said that he had seen the new Jackie Robinson movie, that he would give it a strong C. “Terrible time for him to have to go through,” Bob from Portland said. “You get 25 guys going together playing baseball, as a team, they can accomplish most anything.”

And then Bob said he wanted to share one last anecdote:

“My older brother, who I lost a few years back — he was a couple of years older than me — but I can remember when we were growing up in Portland, and he would say, ‘OK, Bobby, I think we’ve gotta get up 15 minutes earlier tomorrow morning.’ And I asked him ‘Why is that, Billy?’

“And he said we had to get up early so we could read the baseball scores in the paper. I still do that.”

Bob’s voice no longer was strident. It began to quiver. And then he began to cry.

There was a moment of silence on the line. A few moments of silence. You could almost hear Bob putting his hand over the mouthpiece as he tried to compose himself.

“Baseball is great,” he sobbed. “I’m tearing up now because of my brother. Have a great day, Ron. Keep writing those baseball stories.”

Click.

Maybe it was me, but the click sounded softer than most.

It was then I wished I had a telephone instead of a telephone line, and it was one of those fancy office phones, with caller ID that pops up on a little window.

I would have called Bob back. I would have told him that I had a younger brother who would get up early on Sunday, too, the day the batting averages of all the baseball players ran in the newspaper, not just the league leaders, so he could beat me to them.

I would have told him that my brother would cut his baseball stirrups and have our mom sew elastic into them, so he could pull them up real high, like Frank Robinson. That was the style then.

And I would have told him that when we were in college, kid brother was pitching a hell of a ballgame against New Mexico State — one out away from a complete game, in fact — until big brother and the catcher let a foul pop fly flutter to the ground between third base and home.

I would tell Bob from Portland, Ore., how my brother’s next pitch landed on the corrugated roof of a maintenance shack about 430 feet away from home plate, and how we lost that game because the Aggies had ducks on the pond. And how my brother loves to tell that story whenever we get together, which isn’t nearly often enough.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski