By Don Wade
Copyright 2003 - The Commercial Appeal, Memphis
June 18, 2003

The former minor league pitcher, who has the disease named after the late great Yankee first baseman, is sitting on his couch watching Sunday night baseball.

James 'Skeeter' Banks has a pinch of dip tucked between his cheek and gum, his eyes fixed on a field of green hundreds of miles away from Southaven, where he grew up dreaming of being the next Nolan Ryan.

On this night, Skeeter is watching the Yankees and Cubs from Wrigley Field. Jon Miller and Joe Morgan are in the booth. History is in the air.

So, Miller and Morgan naturally start going down memory lane, discussing Babe Ruth's famed "called" shot into Wrigley's centerfield bleachers during the 1932 World Series.

And it's in this pure baseball moment - did the Babe call his shot or didn't he? - that Skeeter Banks is, like any other baseball fan in America, pleasantly diverted from his day-to-day life.

"Of course, what nobody remembers," Miller intones, "is that Lou Gehrig followed it with a home run of his own."

What nobody remembers.

What Skeeter Banks cannot forget whenever he hears that name . . .

Lou Gehrig's disease . . .

His disease . . .

The Iron Horse

During last week's U.S. Open, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - ALS - also became known as the disease of Tom Watson's caddie, Bruce Edwards.

Watson was the Open's improbable first-day leader. Golfer and caddie have been together for decades. On Sunday, they walked off the 18th green arm-in-arm.

It was a moment as moving as Gehrig's famous speech at Yankee Stadium - Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth . . .

Of course, most of us aren't thinking of Lou Gehrig so much as we're seeing Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig in the 1942 film Pride of the Yankees.

We've seen that so much that we've lost touch with reality:

The disease's cause is still unknown.

There's still no cure.

ALS bats .1000.

Which maybe explains why Skeeter, 33, and his wife Kelly, 34, who live in Southaven, take such different approaches to fighting the good fight.

"I've read everything there is to read about him," Kelly says of Gehrig one evening as she watches her husband coach first base and their son Cooper play second base with a half-dozen other miniature players in a T-ball game.

"I have not seen the movie based on his life. My dad told me I probably don't want to see it."

Skeeter doesn't want to see it, either. After all, other than this damn disease from this damn Yankee, what do they really have in common, anyway?

Gehrig was a hitter. Skeeter was a pitcher. On a baseball field, they forever would have been at cross purposes.

Skeeter Banks interested in Lou Gehrig? It's almost amusing to him.

"The only thing I'm interested in," he says with a small smile, "is living."

Good times, bad news

Pitchers have a saying:

You pitch with what you've got on that given day.

Skeeter's known this all his life. From Little League through Southaven High, from Delta State to Shelby State and right on through places like Medford, Ore.; Madison, Wis.; Modesto, Calif.; and Huntsville, Ala.

Skeeter was a 39th-round draft pick of the Oakland A's. Never pitched in a game above Double-A, still treasures his 1994 season in Modesto when he was 3-1 with 15 saves and a 2.37 earned run average and one of this teammates was Scott Spiezio, a World Series hero last season with the Anaheim Angels.

"Best year I ever had," Skeeter says.

The truth of this is evident in the thick scrapbook made for him by the nice lady from the Modesto A's booster club. It's full of programs and newspaper articles and boxscores, several of his minor league baseball cards, a snazzy Modesto A's button, even a packet of dirt from the Modesto pitching mound.

Flip through this book with Skeeter, through that summer when he was in his baseball Shangri-La, and all the minor-league stories come flooding back:

The musty attic that was home in Class A ball in Oregon, when he made $850 a month.

The way Skeeter lovingly tended the Modesto mound - his office, as it were - because the grounds crew didn't.

The way he and Spiezio made good road roomies because each appreciated the numbing nihilistic noise of Metallica.

And, of course, the dizzy bat races in Huntsville and how one night players put eye-black on the bat handle and got the unsuspecting fan but good.

"Man, he had a perfect circle on his forehead," Skeeter says, laughing.

It's not exactly a speech at Yankee Stadium or walking off 18 with Tom Watson at the U.S. Open, but it's real.

Every bit as real as the insidious way ALS crept into Skeeter's life and became his disease, too.

First, the twitching muscle in his left forearm.

Then, losing all strength in his right index finger. This was less than two years ago, when Skeeter was the quarterback for his flag football team and discovered he couldn't even grip the football.

Next came the day he tried to run a pass route and fell for no good reason.

A lot of doctors and many tests later, he and Kelly were face-to-face with his neurologist. A guy still in his 30s, a former professional athlete, shouldn't even have a neurologist.

But Skeeter does. He also has a clinic in Houston he visits every few months, and where soon he'll begin a new trial and explore new hope.

Inside Skeeter's body, the motor neurons that carry impulses from his brain through the spinal cord and to the muscles are deteriorating. The mind-body connection is breaking down.

He still drives, he still walks, he still functions, but there's not a pitcher alive who has struck out Lou Gehrig's disease.

The disease is like the namesake - relentless, hitting, hitting, hitting.

"I know," says Skeeter, "that I'm going to get worse."

Fight or flight

What he doesn't know is how fast.

Baseball is a game of statistics, a game where the best hitters fail 7 out of 10 times.

With ALS, up to 5 percent of patients will survive up to 20 years from the time of diagnosis, up to 10 percent more than 10 years, and up to 20 percent five years or longer.

Skeeter was diagnosed about 16 months ago and his first thought was of Cooper, that 4-year-old T-ball player Skeeter is teaching to play the game the right way, to live life the right way.

And so it is that Skeeter has three baseball rules for his son: Be a good sport, never throw your equipment and hustle on and off the field.

When Cooper inevitably drags his cleats through the dugout dirt one inning, Skeeter helps him out.

"Run, Cooper, run," Skeeter says urgently, yet gently.

Skeeter's second thought that day in the doctor's office was of Kelly, the blonde beauty he had one date with in high school and then courted and married after he was cut in spring training a few years ago, his baseball dream having dried up in the Arizona desert.

But a baseball dream that fell short of its ultimate destination doesn't seem to matter much now. Just as it eventually must not have mattered much to Gehrig that he had hit all those home runs, won all those World Series.

There comes a time when what you've done just isn't relevant.

"I couldn't tell you when it was," says Skeeter, "but there came a day when I just thought, 'I'm still here. I'm still able to do some things.' It's fight or flight."

And flight's no option, not when you've spent much of your life engaged in one pitcher-hitter confrontation after another, like the one now on the TV in front of Skeeter: Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter is at the plate with a 2-0 count when the umpire calls ball 3 on a pitch he apparently believed was high.

"You can't tell me that's not a strike," Skeeter says, indignant. "The guy catches it at his facemask. They're supposed to be calling that pitch now."

Yes, they are. But as Skeeter Banks knows better than most, sometimes you don't get the call you want. And then whether you're on the top of the mound or in the middle of your life, there's only one thing to do.

Keep pitching, man, keep pitching.