Tommy and the Boys of Summer

Tommy Miller stood near the pitcher’s mound of Dodger Stadium on an evening as warm and sweet as honey in tea, observing home plate with a lopsided grin.

Even when the catcher was ready for him he hesitated, treasuring a moment that would never come again, wanting it to last forever.

All eyes were on him, the p.a. system was saying his name and he, Tommy Miller, was about to pitch.

Fantasies come true on nights like this, aglow with the kind of shimmery half light that brightens dreams and fairy tales.

And this was a fantasy coming true.

Tommy Miller, age 34, peered forward just like Sandy Koufax used to do, went into a windup and threw.

The ball seemed to hang in midair between the mound and home plate, suspended by the same magic that builds castles out of stardust and causes time to freeze on the ghosts of our ambitions.

For those distracted by the anticipation of a real baseball game, Tommy Miller’s moment was over before they had a chance to understand his ebullience or empathize with his joy.

The ball fell into the catcher’s mitt with a muffled thwump, the crowd cheered, Tommy Miller took a bow and the fantasy glimmered off like a child’s dream, over the emerald field and into the coming night.

But, man, what a moment.

I sing today of those fantasies we create on the empty stages of our daydreams, climbing mountains of towering proportion, swimming oceans of endless expanse.

Tommy Miller, the ultimate fan, was able to leap from what Wordsworth saw as the bliss of reverie’s solitude into the reality of Dodger Stadium to realize his fantasy before 45,000 spectators.

The rest of us should be so lucky.

His presence was part of a promotional gimmick called Think Blue Week, in which fans were invited to nominate someone to participate in a baseball fantasy.

Tommy’s wife nominated him to throw that ceremonial first pitch of the game between the Dodgers and the Houston Astros, because her Tommy is such a Dodger nut.

He is one of those guys who, if he scratches his head while watching his team on TV and Eddie Murray hits a home run just at that moment, will scratch his head every time Murray comes to bat, even if it wears a hole in his skull.

That will last until Murray strikes out during a head-scratch or hits into a double play, at which time Miller will be alert to other forms of sorcery intended to propel his team into a championship.

He traces his amiable superstitions back to the time his mother was ironing clothes while watching the Dodgers play the hated New York Yankees during the first game of the 1963 World Series. The Dodgers won.

Miller was 8 at the time and recalls his mom, also a fan, saying they won because she was ironing. Not wanting to tamper with luck, she also ironed while watching game two, and the Dodgers won again.

This was too mystical to be coincidence, so naturally she continued ironing during the third and fourth games, and the Boys in Blue swept the series.

“We believed, of course, that mom was responsible,” Miller says with a laugh. But then he thinks about it for a moment and I notice he isn’t laughing.

Baseball is a game of fantasy and superstition, and Tommy Miller seems to symbolize them both.

He will not watch the Dodgers on big-screen TV because they do not win on a big screen, and he will eat any kind of chicken during a game because the Dodgers win when he eats chicken.

They lose during pizza.

I discussed this with Miller on the morning of his Big Pitch. He was excited about the prospect of pitching, but, as an advertising executive, also understood the gossamer nature of fantasy.

Still, there is a compulsion to his Dodger loyalty he will not deny.

Take his memorabilia.

The man has got hats, pins, pennants and programs in such numbers to satisfy any fan, but even that isn’t enough.

He similarly possesses videotapes of Dodger games, record albums of Dodger highlights and a 45 r.p.m. of Vin Scully calling the last inning of Bill Singer’s 1970 no-hitter.

There are also boxes of newspapers that chronicle glorious moments in Dodger history on the sports page, while the front pages of the same journals thunder social calamity.

“It’s kind of dumb, I suppose,” Miller says, “but it’s fun. Everybody ought to be a fan of something.”

That night, he stood on the mound in the perfect stillness of a spring dream, grinned at the crowd and threw his single pitch.

That night, he was Don Drysdale and Fernando Valenzuela. That night, he was a star. And that night, the Dodgers won 5-1.

There’s nothing wrong with that.