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Terry Steinbach was behind the plate for Eric Milton's no-hitter in 1999, but he might have just caught a truly perfect game -- at age 43 and six years after his retirement. While wearing a Hanska Bullheads jersey.
Granted, it wasn't a no-hitter and it wasn't in the World Series. It was just the Minnesota senior men's wood bat league championship, where no one gets paid, games go only seven innings, and every batter starts with a 1-1 count to speed up the action. And no, Jose Canseco, Mark McGwire, Dave Stewart, Rickey Henderson and the rest of the old Athletics weren't there, just Steinbach's fellow teammates on the local Hanska town club. And rather than hundreds of reporters from around the world, about the only media organization paying any attention was the Sleepy Eye Herald-Dispatch.
But it was baseball, and when you get right down to it, that's all that really matters. Better yet, there was no earthquake like there was at the 1989 World Series. Although, Steinbach said, "We had a couple kegs of beer that might have seemed like an earthquake when they tipped over."
"It was fun -- we had a big come-from-behind win," Steinbach said. "We were the visiting team and we were down by three runs in the top of the seventh and then we scored four runs. We went to the bottom of the inning and the first batter hit a foul pop-up behind the plate. You can imagine the pressure. The lighting isn't great in those small parks and I hadn't caught a pop-up in five years."
Imagine that. Here's a veteran of three World Series and an All-Star Game, a man who homered in his first major-league at-bat, a guy who caught the final inning of a world championship and the final pitch of a major league no-hitter -- and he was sweating over a foul pop in a little sandlot in rural Minnesota.
Well, why not? You don't need Bud Selig's official signature on the baseball for the game to mean something.
"It really brings it back to perspective of what baseball really should be," Steinbach said. "Obviously, it's not the same level as the majors -- we've got guys throwing in the 40s and 50s. But it's just fun. Instead of bowling or playing cards, you've got a bunch of guys who still have a passion for the game of baseball."
I always feel for big leaguers when they retire. They play baseball almost their entire lives, growing up with it from the first games of catch with a parent to every level on their way to the majors. And then one day they have to retire, and they never get to play the game competitively again.
Is it any wonder Henderson is willing to play in the lowest minor league around in the hopes of returning to the majors? "I'll tell you the truth," Henderson told The New Yorker recently. "I'd give everything up -- every record, the Hall of Fame, all of it -- for just one more chance."
Steinbach can appreciate his old teammate's desire. After he retired from the majors in 1999, he played amateur town ball in Minnesota the next summer to keep himself in shape for the 2000 Olympics. That plan ended when he tore his hamstring water skiing. Except for helping with his sons' games, he didn't play again until this summer, when his brother and some other friends asked him to play for Hanska, a town of about 450 people near his New Ulm hometown in southern Minnesota. It didn't take much prodding to get him to agree.
