By Sridhar Pappu
“Hey Matt,” Kittle said. “You tell that scorekeeper, you tell him that that play last night was a hit not an error.”
“He’s got it out of his system,” Grossman says. “I hope.”
Most lives change incrementally. There’s rarely that singular theatrical moment that allows us to say, “Chapter’s over, next chapter.” Kittle, though, has led a life full of dramatic watersheds. The first came at a tryout camp run by Dodgers’ scout Glen Van Proyen at LaPorte High School in July 1976.
“You know,” he says, “I couldn’t zip my zipper.”
“I think I first heard about him in a conversation with Billy Pierce,” says Daily Southtown columnist Bill Gleason. “He was driving on one of those expressways in northwest Indiana and he saw a ball land in the expressway. He didn’t stop to inquire right away, but he knew something had happened, somebody had hit the ball a long way–so he checked it out. He found out it was this fellow by the name of Ron Kittle.”
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The fact of the matter is that in 1978 Pierce–who’d won 186 games for the Sox between 1949 and 1961–heard about a kid who’d been released by the Dodgers and was playing semipro ball. Pierce had lunch with the kid and saw him play, wrote down that he had “awesome strength” and could “run a little,” and called Sox general manager Roland Hemond.
