By John Klima
Staff Writer

His high school baseball coach was a groundskeeper who didn’t know a pitchfork from a fork ball. His town lived for high school football, but Noah Lowry was a country boy who played baseball and saw it as a path away from the honorable labor of the land, the trade of his father.

He broke his pitching hand in high school and threw with it for two months. There’s always a job for a left-hander, so he pitched at Ventura College and then at Pepperdine.

When he arrived in San Francisco in 2003, Lowry became the first player from Ojai, a town founded a century ago, to set foot on a major league diamond. It is still a ranching town after all these years, a place that has the feel that time never bothered to get caught up with it, and a population that wouldn’t have it any other way. There’s still a trace of cowboy in Lowry, but he understood that to fulfill his own ambition, he would have to leave the land. Little did he anticipate that he would travel from a town time ignores to the heart of the home run chase, baseball’s historical spectacle. Lowry went from the middle of nowhere to the middle of history, a front-row spectator to the years of Barry Bonds’ pursuit.

These are days, Lowry says, when it feels like there is more media crammed into the Giants’ clubhouse than there were fans at the Nordhoff High football games. He refused to wear shoulder pads then. He could probably use them now.

He was gifted with the ability to throw a change-up from a rubber shoulder that never gve him pain. He remembers pitching 12-innings of American Legion playoff games at UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium, working nine innings in the first game of a double header. After a break for pizza and soda, he’d pitch the first three frames of the second game, burn up a week’s worth of innings in an afternoon, and wonder where this road might take him.

Ten years later, Lowry was in the dugout before he pitched Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium. There wasn’t enough room in the antiquated clubhouse for him to sit alone. Inside, a swarm of about 70 reporters awaited Bonds, so Lowry went into the heat to escape the friction.

As the sun beat down on him, his thoughts drifted back to a different time, in the days before he knew that he would become the only son of Ojai to play in the major leagues.

“I came from this little area, did this growing up, and who would have ever thought it would lead to this?” he said. “Everyone has that dream growing up, but how many actually get a chance?”

Lowry recognized that his small-town kid career would unfold in the wings of baseball history. He wasn’t much of a student until former Giant pitcher Kirk Reuter took care of him, showed him his memorabilia collection, and turned Lowry into a tad of a historian.

“It’s been a double-edged sword,” Lowry explained. “With the whole Barry chase and history thing, there’s only going to be a handful of players who are going to get to see that. I’ve been fortunate to be one of them.”

“But then again, over the last couple of years, we haven’t been in the race. That’s frustrating. As a ballplayer, you want to win. On one side you got this record and, of course, being pumped to see it. We’re all fans of the game, I would imagine. At the same time, there’s a level of frustration. However many games we’re out this year, we were out last year.”

Lowry beat Jake Peavy on September 17, 2004, the day Bonds hit his 700th career home run. It is a memory Lowry, 26, will take with him long after he and baseball are through with each other.

“Peavy threw him a good backdoor slider and he took it for a strike,” Lowry recalled. “Peavy tried it again, and Barry went opposite field into the gap for a home run. I’ll never forget that.”

Lowry makes it a point not to forget where he came from. Though he’s been with the Giants for four years, in pensive moments, the magnitude of this still seems to swamp his senses. This is what he wanted, the good and the bad.

“Once you step on the mound, that’s the game,” he said. “Everything else outside of it, you can have all that, man. I don’t necessarily hate it. I deal with it because it’s part of what we do. I love the game and I love to play. As a kid, it’s having fun and eating pizza and playing ballgames and doing what you do as a kid. The one time I can really connect with that feeling again is on the mound. And when I come off, I want to get back up.”

Off the mound and into the fray, the price of being a part of history is looking for that which you feel you have sometimes lost.