By John Erardi
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Veteran baseball writer Hal McCoy throws out the first pitch at Fifth Third Field, home of the Dayton Dragons, in Dayton Thursday. (Craig Ruttle photo) | ZOOM |

DAYTON - The young lady in the peach-colored shirt tells Hal McCoy he won't be allowed to ascend the perfectly prepared, game-ready mound to throw his ceremonial first pitch at a Dayton Dragons game that will honor him for his election to the writers' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

"I have to," McCoy tells her with a smile. "I won't hear the end of it if I throw from the grass in front of it."

1st inning

McCoy, who has covered the same major-league team longer than anyone in the country, is in his 31st year chronicling the Cincinnati Reds for the Dayton Daily News.

In December, he was voted by his peers the winner of the J.G. Taylor Spink award for meritorious baseball writing, and on July 27, he will be inducted into Cooperstown.

Nobody except radio broadcaster Joe Nuxhall has seen more Reds baseball in the last three decades than McCoy, who never has missed a road game since starting on the beat in 1973.

McCoy is a man very much defined by his profession.

But he also is now a man facing obstacles in performing his job each day.

As with most everybody, McCoy has climbed some hills in his time. His latest, though, is a doozie. He's a baseball writer who no longer can follow the flight of a fly ball.

Because of a stroke in each eye (the second suffered six months ago), McCoy is legally blind - although he doesn't like that phrase.

"I can see," he says. "I just can't see as much."

McCoy, 62, has no peripheral vision, no sight upward or downward, only dead-straight ahead. He can't see clearly beyond 10 feet.

Try that on for size when half of your job requires moving through clubhouses and press boxes, up and down dugout steps and - worst of all - through airports. And consider that stress serves only to worsen your eyesight.

Now think about this: The other half of your job is watching and reporting on ballgames.

2nd inning

McCoy knew it as soon as he woke up bleary-eyed on the morning of Jan. 23. The love of his professional life, covering baseball, was all but over.

"When Hal showed me the results of his eye threshold test - the black color indicating where he'd lost all his vision, the gray some of it and the white none of it - my first thought was, 'Oh my God,' " recalls Dayton Daily News sports editor Frank Corsoe.

The optic nerve in McCoy's left eye basically had exploded overnight.

When he woke up, "everything was dark and fuzzy."

The same thing had happened two years earlier to his right eye, while he was on the way to his seat in the press box in St. Louis.

With time, he had been able to adjust by relying on his good eye, continuing to drive and play tennis.

Doctors told him there was only a 15 percent chance the same thing would happen to his good eye.

"I've hit the lottery," McCoy thought, when the second stroke hit.

He picked up the morning paper, just to be sure. Yup. Blurry. Couldn't read a word.

"Honey, it's here," he told his wife, Nadine, while trying to remain calm, which, of course, he couldn't.

"What's here?"

"I can't see; I can't read."

Then came the tears.

"Let's not panic," Nadine said, her own eyes welling. "Maybe it's something else. We'll go see the ophthalmologist."

McCoy could decipher enough of the look on the ophthalmologist's face to know what it meant.

3rd inning

The beauty of baseball always has been in the defense and the bang-bang plays on the bases, all of which Hal McCoy no longer can see live.

Which means that some of the joy of the game is missing for McCoy, who swung at his first pitch when he was 4, began playing organized baseball at 11, and played first base at Kent State University - whose shortstop was Gene Michael, later of the New York Yankees.

"The triples," McCoy says. "I miss the triples. It's all a blur now. By watching the hitter's head and the movement of the fielders - something I'd never been aware of until this year - I'm able to tell the general vicinity of where the ball is in the outfield. As the batter becomes a baserunner, that's just a blur to me, as is the slide into third base and the tag."

What McCoy has, though, is his imagination - and the TV monitor next to his seat in the press box at Great American Ball Park. All the front-row writers have TV sets at Great American, on which to watch replays.

And one thing McCoy has always been is a front-row writer.

McCoy walks with his wife Nadine as he heads out to the field at Fifth Third Stadium to be recognized for his induction into the Hall of Fame. (Craig Ruttle photo) | ZOOM |

4th inning

This is not the story of a husband or a father, although McCoy is both.

This is the story of a baseball writer, a species of individual who always has been especially important to the readers who love to follow the Cincinnati Reds.

It is the story of one man's battle to prove something to himself - and to those who have buoyed him with their love and affection: his wife, Nadine; his sons, Brian and Brent; his fellow baseball writers, his boss at the paper, the scouts and general managers and other baseball insiders who inhabit his daily world, the players who told him not to quit but still chide him (in typical ballplayer humor), "Hey, Hal, over here!" and the strangers who have e-mailed him and told him to "hang in there."

"Turns out I couldn't quit; I couldn't just walk away," says McCoy, who actually could have: the opening was there.

He could have opted off the beat and into column writing, or accepted a long-standing offer to opine in his favorite vacationing spot (Key West), where a former Daily News sports editor now runs the paper there.

But McCoy knows what he loves. Through the support of others, and looks inward, he realized he could not - he would not - go gently.

"I thought I'd be able to do it," he says. "Not that I wanted to. But the end has to come sooner or later. I just thought my time was up. After I got past feeling sorry for myself, and began to see all the support I had, I felt I had something to prove - 'Hey, at least you gotta try.' "

5th inning

McCoy's biggest source of support, his anchor and his beacon, is his wife, Nadine.

When she told him he needed to go to spring training ("what are you going to do if you don't go - sit around the house and sulk?" she asked), it was a good thing Hal couldn't see her eyes. He no longer can distinguish people's facial features clearly, not even close up.

"He was tripping and bumping into things at home, and this is a place he knows," Nadine says. "I thought he'd be home in a week."

McCoy had a car accident on his way from his Dayton home to have some things shipped to spring training (he hasn't driven since). He bloodied his knee (getting off the escalator at Denver airport), ripped a hole in his favorite jeans (angering him even more than the smashed knee in the same Denver incident), gashed his head (in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on the rental car trunk of Cincinnati Post beat writer Tony Jackson, who also chauffeured him to the ballpark in spring training) and experienced the ignominy of more than one header down an unseen stair in a dimly lit restaurant.

"For a while there, I was Chevy Chase doing President Ford," says McCoy, with a laugh. "Only I wasn't acting."

He can laugh now. He wasn't laughing in spring training.

6th inning

As soon as McCoy walked into the Reds clubhouse in Sarasota, he was certain he was through. It was much darker than he remembered, and he couldn't see a thing. He felt his way to the clubhouse, where Reds third baseman Aaron Boone saw him for the first time since the end of last season.

"Hey, Hal, they'll let anyone in the Hall of Fame, won't they?" Boone said.

McCoy managed a grin, but not the pants-slapping one Boone was used to. He knew something was up.

"This is the last time you're going to see me," McCoy told him. "I can't do this anymore."

Boone pulled up a chair and invited McCoy to sit down. Boone heard him out, then said:

"No. That's not good enough, Hal. That's not reason enough to quit. You love this job too much to quit."

It was the turning point.

"It was just one guy talking to another guy," says Boone, embarrassed by the attention. "Hal has just come to realize how strong his support group is, his friends, people he works with, guys in this clubhouse."

But it didn't keep Boone from laughing out loud when he saw McCoy in the trainer's room in San Juan, getting his head wound swabbed by Reds trainer Mark Mann.

"It means a lot to me when I see somebody who loves what they're doing," Boone says. "When I go to a restaurant and see a waiter being the best he or she can be, that's great. It's awesome when people love what they're doing and take a lot of pride in it. It shines through."

7th inning

He's "Three-Bag Hal" now.

Most baseball scribes are two-baggers - laptop in one, work materials in the other - but the third bag contains, for McCoy, his oversized scorebook, magnifying glass, yellow-tinted transparent paper and ruler (to read the Reds' pre-game notes handout and post-game summary), flashlight (to find stuff that he drops on the floor), and binoculars (to read the scoreboard). He also has subbed new, yellow-tinted eyeglasses for his old ones, to help reduce glare (although nothing helps during bright, sunny day games at Great American Ball Park).

Maybe if McCoy had been cut-throat in his earlier days to young competitors from other newspapers, there'd be a feeling of "let him fend for himself - what goes around comes around."

Nobody has dropped any stories in McCoy's lap, but neither is anybody about to let him walk into a Coke machine - or interview one. (Another of McCoy's favorite lines.) Over the years, he always has been good to new guys on the beat.

The late Cincinnati Post reporter Earl Lawson, a fellow Hall of Famer who died in early January, showed McCoy the way through his actions: One day, you, too, are going to know the lay of the land. There's no need to keep some kid mired in base camp while you're starting every day halfway up the mountain.

"It's the one regret I have - that Earl won't be in Cooperstown (for McCoy's induction)," McCoy says. "He wanted to be there; he said he would be there. But he knew how I felt about him. When he came out to the ballpark in San Francisco last year - the last time I saw him - every time I introduced him to somebody, I said, 'Without this man, I wouldn't be where I am today.' "

8th inning

Early this season, a foul ball smacked off the concrete facing of the press box at Great American Ball Park, just below McCoy's laptop.

"I never saw it," McCoy admits.

This is not why sports editor Corsoe subbed intern-sportswriter Kyle Nagel for the editorial clerks who were chauffeuring McCoy from his Dayton home to the Reds' ballpark and back.

Corsoe - his awareness heightened one night by a car accident that significantly snarled traffic on southbound I-75 and would have greatly delayed McCoy's pickup time had not a fellow scribe been able to take him partway home - figured that if somebody was going to chauffeur McCoy back and forth to Great American Ball Park, they might as well be somebody who could handle a pen and a notebook and a laptop.

He chose Nagel for that job. Several years ago, Nagel, who is from Centerville, won a college-long summer internship named in honor of Si Burick (another Dayton member of the writers' wing at the Baseball Hall of Fame).

Nagel knows there is more to his job than learning by watching and doing. He knows there was a time when if the pressbox regulars had to pick somebody to make a play on a foul-ball smash, they'd have chosen McCoy. He had the good hands of a first baseman, and the reflexes of a polished amateur tennis player.

McCoy can still duck with the best of them, so he isn't likely to be in any danger from foul balls. All that is probably needed is an emphatic "Head's up, Hal!" But if more is needed - if somebody is going to have to knock down a line drive - it is going to have to be Nagel, who sits right next to McCoy.

"Once my driving is done, Hal doesn't need me at the ballpark," Nagel says. "He's in his element. I follow him around, not vice versa. He's the one writing three or four stories a day."

Translated: A foul-ball smash into the press box isn't about McCoy. A foul-ball into the press box is about the guy sitting next to him. No intern wants to go down in history as the guy who let Hal take a ball off the coconut.

"I kind of keep an extra eye out for that, I really do," Nagel admits.

Perfect.

Drive the car, take the bullet, make deadline.

9th inning

McCoy has more than proven that he can still handle the beat. But the question was whether the road trips - something he used to love so much - might take a toll on him.

Few people doubted that if McCoy could find a way to cover the beat with his eyes as they were, he'd make it through the entire season. Adrenalin alone could carry a man to the time of his induction ceremony - and the headiness of that moment could carry a man through the rest of the year.

But McCoy is already taking the longer view. He still enjoys the chase of a good story, the crafting of a grabber lead on deadline, the boisterous camaraderie of the press box.

He plans to continue doing all of the above in 2004.

"It won't be as traumatic next year at spring training," he says. "Until this year, I had always enjoyed spring training. I'm looking forward to being able to enjoy it again, now that I've made some adjustments.

"I'm convinced that if things don't get any worse - if something else doesn't happen to my eyes - that I can keep doing the job.

"There won't be any more strokes in my eyes - I've already had those. The doctor says my eyes have stabilized. He said in six months I'd be adjusting to it, which I have. What I've got is enough."

Last Sunday night in Phoenix, McCoy and two Cincinnati beat writers went to a dimly lit Mexican restaurant for dinner.

McCoy was walking at the lead of the party, just behind the hostess, who tipped him, "One step up; be careful." McCoy dragged his left foot until he could feel the step and then climbed up it. Another one of the beat writers didn't hear the tip and tripped. And after they had sat down at their table, they saw another diner fall in the same spot.

Sometimes, even the sighted stumble.

McCoy has learned to rely more on his ears, and to gradually develop a patience he never had before. ("He's not quite there yet," says Nadine. "That's a big adjustment for Hal. But he's getting there.")

Epilogue

"I have to," McCoy tells the young lady in the peach-colored shirt in Dayton.

And he does. He ascends the game-ready mound at Fifth Third Field in Dayton.

From 60-feet-6-inches away, Donnie Scott - a former Reds catcher and now the Dayton Dragons manager - is a blurry silhouette to McCoy. But upon releasing the ball, McCoy can distinguish the outline of Scott's glove receiving the ball on the outside corner of the plate. Strike! Scott shakes his fist in tribute. Yes!

Now the young lady in the peach-colored shirt knows what McCoy had to learn all over again.

These hills, they aren't about sight.

They're about heart.

The Hal McCoy file

Who: Hal McCoy, 62, winner, J.G. Taylor Spink award for meritorious baseball writing.

What: Induction into the writer's wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Where: Cooperstown, N.Y.

When: July 27

Birthplace: Akron

College: Kent State (where he was a first baseman for future New York Yankees shortstop Gene Michael.)

Profession: Covering the Reds for Dayton Daily News since 1972.

Games covered: 6,000

Stories written: 20,000

Miles driven round-trip, home games: 360,000

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E-mail jerardi@enquirer.com