Ex-teammate lived a hall of fame life
Bill Gilbreth, my old baseball teammate at Abilene Christian, used to scare me. A left-handed pitcher, he threw harder than anybody I’d ever seen, maybe as hard as Nolan Ryan. He was just wild enough that anyone stepping into the batter’s box had to be thinking there was a chance the pitch rocketing toward the plate might not end up where Bill expected it to. Fortunately, I was a teammate, not a hapless would-be hitter for Trinity or Arkansas State or Lamar Tech. I only had to face him in batting practice now and then. That was more than enough.
Last Sunday, the only ACU baseball player to make it to the bigs died suddenly, not of COVID-19, as I suspected when I saw the Abilene ReporterNews headline, but of complications following emergency heart surgery.
Although we went our separate ways after college, Bill’s passing affected me more than I would have expected. Maybe it had something to do with the extraordinary times we’re living through or with time fast passing for his generation and mine or maybe it’s just the simple fact that he was a good guy — West Texas friendly, unassuming. “Such a great and humble fellow,” is how his longtime friend Ron Hadfield, ACU’s vice president for communications, put it the day after Bill’s passing.
In his four seasons with the Wildcats, Bill was 25-9, with a school-record 2.14 earned-run
average. He threw two no-hitters and finished with a schoolrecord 445 career strikeouts. In his final season, he led the NCAA in strikeouts, averaging 13 a game. Four times he struck out 18 in a game.
For a long time, I felt a twinge of regret that I didn’t take Bill up on his offer to spend a summer in Abilene with him. We would work out together, play on an Abilene summer-league team and maybe, just maybe, some of his God-given talent would rub off on me. Alas, I was homesick — for Waco, of all places. Instead of learning from a future major-leaguer, I went home to a summer job installing air conditioners for Stover Appliance and pitching on Sundays for the Waco LULACS. Bill went on to pitch for the Detroit Tigers.
My college baseball career reached its nadir on a dusty, wind-whipped afternoon in March, me on the mound for the first game of a double-header against the Tigers of the University of Missouri. For years afterward, I could see my catcher leaping like a hot-footed cat as he tried to rein in my errant fastballs, my outfielders racing like gazelles in pursuit of screaming line drives hit in the gap. In the fourth inning, Coach Haskell Sinclair trudged out to the mound and relieved me of my misery.
Later that evening, after the Wildcats had dropped a couple to the Tigers, a friend and I were heading eastward on state Highway 36 in her Plymouth Valiant convertible, our destination Austin. Beyond Lampasas, the countryside had begun to turn green, the roadside lined with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush. Central Texas looked and smelled like glorious spring.
When we got to Austin, we happened upon Buck Owens and his Buckaroos performing at UT’s Gregory Gym. As earnest ACCians, we could only sway and tap our feet, but we were happy to be among a raucous crowd of redneck hippies, the likes of which we rarely saw in Abilene. A windblown baseball field in West Texas seemed far away.
Bill would soon be on his way, as well. He signed with the Tigers in the third round of the draft and made his Major League debut on June 25, 1971, a day after being called up from the Triple-A Toledo Mud Hens. He threw a five-hit complete game in a 6-1 victory over Cleveland at Tiger Stadium, with seven strikeouts and seven walks. He also borrowed a bat from Tigers first-baseman Norm Cash, a fellow West Texan, and got two hits, including a single in his first Major League at bat.
He told an ACU audience earlier this year about stepping into the batter’s box toward the end of the game. Cleveland catcher Ray Fosse glanced at the 23-year-old rookie. “Enjoy it kid,” he said. “These things don’t happen often.”
The all-star catcher was more right than he knew. In his next start, Bill threw a three-hitter to defeat the Yankees, but by the end of the season he was back in the minors.
Hadfield said Bill told him he got on the bad side of tempestuous Tigers manager Billy Martin — a distinction Bill shared with countless baseball people — because he refused to throw at batters. “Billy, I have enough trouble with control anyway,” Bill recalled telling Martin. “I don’t want to run the risk of hurting someone.”
The Tigers traded Bill to the California Angels, where his teammate was another hardthrowing young Texan. He and Nolan Ryan became lifelong friends.
By age 27, Bill was out of baseball. Ryan told the Los Angeles Times that his friend could have had a long, successful career, but he came to believe that other things were more important.
His family back in Abilene needed him. His mother had broken her neck and was paralyzed, and his father had undergone eye surgery. His grandmother had suffered a stroke.
“They took care of me a long time,” Bill told the Times. “I had to go take care of them. Besides, when your parents are sick, you lose all interest in baseball.” He spent the next 10 years looking after his parents and raising his own family. (He’s survived by wife Phyllis and two grown daughters.)
In the winter of 1986, Hadfield recalled, Bill was walking through a wheat field near the ACU campus when he heard a voice tell him: “If you build it, they will come.” (The movie “Field of Dreams” wouldn’t come out for another three years.)
As a good Church of Christer, he knew the brethren would likely look askance at such a mystical experience. He was mystified himself, but he figured that if “the voice” was alluding to a baseball field, he had a lot of work to do. ACU had dropped its baseball program 11 years earlier; the field where Bill had mowed down batters had become the site of a new biblical studies building. He flew to Alvin for advice from his old friend.
With Ryan’s help and encouragement, Bill and his baseball buddies resurrected the program, transformed the wheat field into a first-class ballpark and in 1991 fielded a team, with Bill as coach. He coached five seasons, leading the Wildcats to a conference title in 1993. He was inducted into the ACU Sports Hall of Fame in 1999.
He worked as an accountant the last 25 years of his life, but baseball was still important. Countless Abilene-area kids who dreamed of pitching in the majors came to the local legend for private instruction.
“Abilene, particularly Abilene Cooper (High School), became a baseball mecca, and you can attribute a lot of that to Bill Gilbreth,” Hadfield told me by phone a few days ago. “He was plain-spoken, down-to-earth, with a West Texas country-boy demeanor. He not only knew the game, but he knew how to relate to people.”
Listening to Hadfield reminisce about his old friend — our conversation interrupted at times while he composed himself — I thought of Lou Gehrig. Bill was no Hall of Famer, but I got the feeling that, like the Yankee immortal, he was grateful — to the game that gave him opportunities and for countless friends whose lives he touched in Abilene and beyond.
“Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” Gehrig famously told a Yankee Stadium crowd shortly after being diagnosed with the fatal illness that bears his name. Sudden death stole over Bill like a runner breaking for second, but I suspect if given the chance, he would have said the same thing.