Riley Risdon’s the name. Never met you, and if I did, I would have remembered. Now if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it s that the greatest discoveries are always made by accident. I don’t have it in front of me, but I know for sure that the first time a human being saw a spark of fire ignite, that they were not trying to find a better way to see in the dark. It wasn’t planned, it was random, and it just happened. Later, of course, the brains of the time got together and tried to recreate that accidental moment, and then at some point came the great and wonderful revelation that if you rubbed a pair of sticks together fast enough, and you had some nice dry grass, you could make yourself a pretty good little campfire. Then, along came another guy, and he figured out that if you kept putting grass on the fire, it would grow like wildfire! And there you have it, a celebration of the great achievement of the accident.

This, of course, was not the last time that man met mistake. The thing about it is that if you can hit upon one of those great and monumental accidental discoveries, then you have hit the jackpot of legacies. This is because no one will ever remember you for your screw-ups. They’ll only remember you for that one accident that you got right.

You can take Thomas Edison or Da Vinci. I know each of those guys had a lot of talent and I know that they invented a lot of stuff. But for example, let’s take what they are best known for. Edison, of course, had the light bulb. That was such a good idea that in Sunday funny strips for the rest of eternity, a great idea would come to be symbolized in the shape of a light bulb. And of course Da Vinci, who, if he had played baseball, would have probably been known as one of the most versatile players in the history of the game, is best known for painting the Mona Lisa.

Now, let’s get some things straight here. First of all, Edison had no idea what he needed to use for the filament of the light bulb. This was no different than the Old World neo-humans crouching in the tall grass so they didn’t get eaten alive. Edison pumped all sorts of stuff into his light bulbs until he finally got it right. And when he did, he was so surprised he could hardly celebrate, because he was so surprised in the first place!

Da Vinci is an even more accidental thing. The guy paints the Mona Lisa, right? My wife loves it. Do you know how many years that woman has begged me to take her to the Louve? I don’t make that kind of money. Anyhow, the Mona Lisa should really be called the Mona Leroy. He was painting a dude! A guy! And by accident, he made this Leroy guy, or whatever his real name was, look like this 14th century woman. It was a mistake! But that twist of the brush, the little painting my wife wants me to take her to see so badly, that’s what Da Vinci is loved for. It was all by accident.

I became who I am by accident. No, really, it’s not a sick joke about my parents. See, I used to be a baseball player. Not a very good one, but I used to play in the minor leagues. I’m not going to sit here and bombard you with some tales of a guy who wasn’t good enough to get to the big leagues. What most former minor league players fail to tell you is that they know very well that they are lucky to have been paid to play in the first place.

The last time I wore a minor league uniform was in 1965. I was catching for Miami when Leroy Paige pitched his last professional game. You might know him better as Satchel. We drew 65,000 people that night to see this old guy. And I’ll tell you, he could still do some crazy things with the baseball. I knew he was cheating, but I also knew he was so good at it that he would never get caught. I went out to the mound to talk to him. I don’t think he was too happy to see me.

“What you doin’ here?” Leroy said.

“I just want to know what you’re puttin’ on the ball,” I said.

“You think that after all these years of baseball that I’m gonna tell you, some catcher I ain’t never met, what it is that I throw?”

“I was hoping,” I said.

“Get back there, son,” he said. (Mind you, I was 30 years old.) “I’ll show you what Leroy Satchel Paige can do with a little sandpaper.”

I swear he cheated on every pitch. He was ignoring the signals I put down, so eventually I just stopped flashing them. When the cleanup hitter came up to the plate and took Leroy’s first pitch for a strike, the batter was as confused as the rest of us. I caught him glancing down to steal my signs.

“There ain’t any,” I said.

Then Leory threw some pitch, I don t know where it came from, but it looked like the baseball fell apart on the way to the plate, and the strings unwound behind the ball. I caught it, didn’t know how, the cleanup hitter took it for strike two, and he again looked back at me.

“I told you, I ain’t got a clue what he’s throwin,’” I said. “He’s just makin’ it up.”

Then Leroy reared back and threw a fastball, and I kid you not, the guy found the old velocity. Maybe it hardly touched 90 miles per hour, maybe it was 87 or 88, but what a radar gun won’t tell you is how fast a pitch really looks. The cleanup hitter hacked and missed. “That guy just threw 100 miles per hour,” he said. And then, like so many men before him, he walked back to the dugout.

When the game ended, my manager asked me to describe what kind of pitches Paige was throwing. They were thinking that they could take those descriptions and teach those pitches to the youngsters coming up through the farm system. Paige went on to become a pitching coach, but a lot of the young pitchers couldn t stand how brash and cocky he was. “When Satch speaks, you listen,” he’d say, “Or Satch don’t waste his time with you.” Then he’d make the rookies carry his fishing poles.

He might have been the first jock in the 20th century to constantly refer to himself in the third person. I always called him Leroy, not Satchel, because Leroy was his name. After the game, I wrote my report and sent it in to the organization. I knew I was at the end of the line as a ballplayer, and my wife wanted me to come home and be an ordinary husband.

A week later, I got a call after coming back home from a fishing trip. My organization said my reports were the most perceptive that they had read in years. Where I got this talent, I don t know, but they said it was a skill they couldn’t teach. They said, “You know what, we think you would make a great baseball scout.”

And I discovered I could do this all because of an accident, and yes, that chance encounter with Mr. Leroy Paige. You can call him Satchel now, mostly, I suppose, because he’s dead.

That’s what I’ve been now for the last 40 years of my life. I drive my wife Deb crazy, but she supports me. We have three children, two girls and a boy, but I can’t say that I’ve been around to see them grow up. Instead, I’ve seen a generation of baseball players grow up, from the sandlots to the major leagues. I’ve signed a number of guys who have made it to the big leagues, but I don’t like to go around bragging to people about what I’ve done. But I’ve never found a kid by accident. Not once. I always knew where to look. I knew lots of people in lots of places, and I came to believe that as a baseball scout, I could never find the greatest discovery of my life by accident. There would be no crouching in the tall grass for me, no filament in the light bulb, and the only Leroy I ever met was Satchel Paige. I’m no Da Vinci, but I’m a good baseball scout. And I came to believe that there was no luck involved.

I’m almost 70 years old, and when you get to be my age, everything hurts. You start to believe that accidental discoveries can’t happen to you. And then it did -- of course, by mistake.

I can remember exactly what it was about this boy. It wasn’t the way he threw the baseball. It was the sound the ball made when he threw it. You could sit there in the first row of the bleachers and you could swear that this kid was throwing the threads off the ball. You ever heard a bullwhip snap? That’s the sound this kid’s fastball made. He had no talent around him on his terrible little high school team. He must have broken all his catcher s fingers. But the best part was -- unlike most boys his age and just like Satchel -- he could throw the ball exactly where he wanted. If you filled a shot glass with whiskey and placed it on a stool 60-feet-and-six inches away, and then asked him to skim a little off the top without knocking the glass over, why I imagine you could have your whiskey and drink it, too.

The boy’s name was Chance, and that was his first name, not his last. With a name like that I figured he ought to become a scout, but that’s also a fine name for a pitcher. I would have never found him had it not been for my wonderful sense of direction. I was heading East towards Spokane when I lost my bearings, wound up on a country road that wasn’t on no maps, and found my way to this hole-in-the-hills high school named after some Indian hunter I never heard of.

A good scout can smell a ballgame, and so knowing that I wasn’t going to see the kid in Spokane that I really wanted to see I settled for this backwoods baseball field that wasn’t on any maps, with this funny looking pitcher named Chance I found by accident.

I tell you what, I caught a lot of fastballs in my day, but Chance s ball was something else. I watched him throw all seven innings of his high school game, and I didn’t need no radar gun to tell me that he was throwing in the three digits. Everything about him was unique, from the way he wore his hat slanted to one side of his face, drawn down to cover his eyes, to the kind of hokey little walk he had that reminded me of a duck lookin’ out for potholes. When he sat on the bench between innings, he kept a baseball moving through his fingers, and I was amazed at how long his fingers were. I made sure I was the only scout watching this boy, and I knew by the looks I was getting from all the townsfolk, I was not only the lone scout, but that Riley Risdon was the only man at this game from parts unknown.

I lost track of all the strikeouts Chance had, and by the way that nobody was making much of a big deal over this game, I figured that he must have done this sort of thing before. I couldn’t understand why nobody else had ever seen this boy pitch a baseball, but then again, I wasn’t about to ask why. I was happy as that cave man making fire. I thought this was the sweetest accident in the history of scouting.

When the game was over, the boy walked out of the dugout and met his old man. There was a teenage girl there, and I couldn’t tell if that was his girlfriend or if that was his sister. Chance walked like he was lookin’ out for cars crossing the road, even though he was in the middle of nowhere. I introduced myself as baseball scout Riley Risdon, but something funny happened. Usually, when you tell a boy that you’re a baseball scout and you like the way he plays the game, his eyes light up. But Chance’s eyes didn’t light up. He looked up from beneath that sweat-stained baseball cap and pulled his hat off. His eyes didn’t light up.

He didn’t have any eyes. Born without them, I swear.

I suppose age helped me not to react to this. He was a normal-looking boy, but, somehow, in the place of his eyes was a permanent squint. He didn’t walk like a duck because he wanted to; he walked like a duck because he had to use caution when he walked. He wore his hat funny to shield his face. He rolled the baseball through his fingers because it helped him find the feel on his fastball.

“Son,” I said, “You have a god-given gift.”

“Baseballs, yes,” Chance said. “Eyeballs, he forgot to give me.”

Right there, I knew it was going to be hard to get him to leave that little slice of nowhere. But I also knew I couldn’t give up on a fastball like that. When you’re scouting, that’s all it is -- numbers. How fast he throws, how far he can hit it, how much does he want, what round do you draft him? It’s all a great big jigsaw puzzle and you got to be the one to fit it all together. But in all my years, I had never seen anything like this. I guess that s a bad way of saying it, now that I think about it.

“You ever heard of Leroy, well, he’s dead now, so you can call him Satchel - Paige? I caught him a long time ago,” I said. “You remind me a whole lot of him.”

“I don’t know why you’re here,” Chance said. “Nobody has ever heard of me.”

“I’m here by accident,” I said. “I got lost on my way to Spokane.”

I remember the amused look on that young man’s face. “Wow,” he said. “I thought I was the blind one.”

That made things easier. I talked to Chance and his family. I thought they were very nice people. That young lady, it turns out, was his teacher. She helped him with the Brail and all that stuff. His folks were nice enough and invited me back to their home. They cooked me a nice dinner. Chance was a real pleasant boy. He didn’t seem angry one bit that he had been one of the few to be born with that birth defect.

After supper, I knew it was time to ask this boy and his family the million-dollar question (or hopefully, the a-lot-less-money-than-a-million-dollar question). What would it take for him to leave this little parcel of nowhere and come play minor league baseball so that one day, hopefully, he could pitch in the big show?

Now this is where things got interesting. Usually, it’s the Father that wants to tell you how much the boy is worth. This time, the boy wanted to tell me what was important.

“You want to sign me because I throw hard,” Chance said. “What do I get out of that?”

“What do you want out of it?” I said.

“I want the chance to be looked at as a normal person,” he said. “And I know that if I go pitch professionally, everyone’s going to look at me funny. And the second I don’t pitch well, they’re going to say it’s because I can’t see. You tell me, Mr. Risdon, how do I stand to gain from that?”

What would happen if I sent this kid to the minor league instructors? They wouldn’t understand him. It wouldn’t be like he could be Satchel and just explain to people that this is the way he does it because this is the way it is. I’ve been around the game a long time. I know it don’t work that way.

“Let me ask you a question,” I said. “How do you throw with such control despite the fact that you can’t see? You got better command than most guys with 20-20 vision.”

What followed, I never forgot.

“It’s all in the touch,” he said. “If my front leg lands like a feather and I can drive my arm down, I can feel how smooth that works. If the sound the ball makes when it hits the catcher’s glove, and I feel so badly that I’ve hurt so many catchers, is just right, I know that I’m right where the ball needs to be, not off by an inch or two. I can visualize what my body looks like when I pitch, even though, of course, I’ve never seen a video of myself pitching.”

This only made me want to sign him more, but sure enough, I had been through this before. Suddenly I was the catcher. He was Satchel.

“What you’re talking about, only a very few pitchers posses that,” I said. “You have a chance to be something special.”

“Let me ask you something,” Chance said, and I didn’t like how serious the boy suddenly sounded. “What if I told you that you couldn’t go to baseball games anymore? If you couldn’t pursue what, in your heart, makes you who you are?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’d just find something else.”

“See,” Chance said, “My whole life, I’ve always had to find that something else. That something else is not feeling sorry for myself. The only way to do that is to help other people. Did you pay attention to that other team?

“No,” I said. “They didn’t have anyone who could play. They didn’t look like they belonged on a baseball field.”

“Then you are a good scout,” Chance said. “Those kids belong to an Institutional school. They got nowhere else to play baseball. Compared to them, I’m the normal one. See, I don’t want to use the fact that I have no eyes to limit what I can do in my life. I like to teach them. When I’m done with school, I’m going to college to learn how to help all kinds of kids with special needs. They got no clue I got no eyes. They just know someone likes them and wants to help them. That’s what I like.”

“But I can give you that opportunity!” I pleaded. “The club can pay for your education when you sign and you can make a lot of money, bring it back here, and help them! You can pitch in the big leagues and be a role model.”

“They don’t know what money is,” Chance said. “I appreciate the opportunity you want to give me, Mr. Risdon, but I want to tell you something: I’m already a role model. And there’s nothing playing professional baseball can do to change that. I can teach them more playing baseball here than I can in the big leagues. Seeing me on TV, they don’t respond to that. They respond to someone who can see them, feel them and connect with them. Do you understand what I’m saying? Baseball is not about money or how fast I can throw a fastball. It’s about what they can learn from it.”

I knew right there I was not getting this boy. I vowed never to tell a soul about him. If my club knew I found a kid who threw in the three digits and I did not sign him, they’d take my job away. I figured there was no point in staying. His father agreed to lead me back to the road to Spokane. Maybe the kid there could still be signed.

I shook Chance’s hand and wished him luck in his life. He certainly earned my respect. But I just had to ask him one final question.

“Chance,” I said. “Why do you throw so hard if you know they can’t hit you?”

“Oh, I never do that to them,” he said. “I just felt good today and decided to let loose.”

“Why today?” I asked.

“No reason,” Chance said, rolling a baseball through his long fingers with a little smirk on his face. “It was just an accident.”

-end-