No Limitations, No Pity for Man on the Beat

Physically, the cerebral palsy allows Kurt Loe the use of three fingers on his right hand.

He can turn his head some. Sometimes, he gestures weakly with his right arm.

Once, he wore out the bottom of his left sneaker. The rubber fatigued because he pressed his foot as hard as he could on the pedal of his wheelchair every time Chuck Finley threw a pitch.

For years.

On a shelf in his bedroom, there is a black-and-white photograph of Loe as an 8-year-old boy in a wheelchair, positioned on an all-dirt infield, pointed toward home plate. Loe’s father, wearing a crew cut and a flannel shirt, stands nearby, proudly. A baseball is soaring toward the camera.

Behind the baseball, the boy has lurched forward. His head is down. His right arm is extended after the ball.

Thirty-two years later, the baseball still hangs there, out beyond the wheelchair, never falling. And Kurt Loe is extended as fully as the disability allows, and then a few inches more.

“This,” Loe said, meaning the cerebral palsy, meaning the brain that didn’t entirely survive an extended, difficult labor, meaning the lifetime spent paying for it, “this is not a tragedy. I don’t know what you want to call it, but it’s not a tragedy.”

Loe, 40, has been a writer since he graduated from Cal State Fullerton in 1983. He worked for small weekly newspapers in the Anaheim area for about eight years, and attended his first Angel game as a reporter in mid-April 1985.

He soon became a fixture in the press box and in the clubhouse, and in the summer of 1991 he wrote his first freelance article for Halo magazine, the club’s in-house publication. It was a feature on reliever Mark Eichhorn. He writes several times a season for the magazine; his latest work is a profile of Manager Mike Scioscia.

Since the afternoon in 1985 when he arrived warily into a fast-paced, professional world of unchecked egos and offhand cruelty, Loe has missed 25 of about 1,250 Angel home games. He has become friends with many of the players, with the reporters who cover the team, with club management and game-day personnel.

Some of the most rewarding days of his life have been spent at Edison Field, nee Anaheim Stadium. Loe has been hospitalized three times in recent years. Come opening day, though, he is hale again.

“I live all winter for this stuff,” Loe said. “I deal with whatever I have to deal with. And I get through it. . . . I do what I have to do. . . . I’m rewarded by being able to come out to the ballpark again.”

On a recent day, Loe maneuvered his battery-powered wheelchair through the narrow hallway that leads to the office of the Angel manager. He was waved in and parked at the desk across from Scioscia. Club vice president Tim Mead sat on a leather coach nearby.

Loe pushed the record button on a tape recorder that rested on the tray attached to his wheelchair, and commenced to asking pointed questions about Angel slugger Mo Vaughn.

When the interview was done and Loe steered out of the office, Scioscia called out, “Hey, Kurt, who are you with?”

Loe slowed his wheelchair, but before he could answer, he heard Mead say: “He’s one of us.”

His heart leaped. “One of us.” It warmed him so.

This winter, his closest friend on the team, Finley, left for the Cleveland Indians after 14 years. Many nights they spent hours together after games, Loe straw-sipping a Samuel Adams beer that Finley kept stocked for him in the clubhouse refrigerator, Finley and a few others dipping into the same 12-pack.

“What I always loved about Kurt is that he had a sense of humor,” Finley said. “He made fun of himself in a light way. I didn’t feel sorry for Kurt. I didn’t think I had to. He never asked for anything. We’d just sit there and talk.”

There have been others. Doug Rader called him “Andretti,” a reference to the wheelchair, and the nickname stuck. He has been close to Deron Johnson, a former hitting coach. And Joe Maddon, Spike Owen, Jim Abbott, Doug DeCinces and Bob Boone.

Jim Edmonds used to steer the wheelchair around the Angel clubhouse, taking Loe on an obstacle course around couches and tables and televisions. Recently, Loe and Vaughn have spent a lot of time together after games, just talking.

There is a routine after every home game. Loe parks near an overstuffed chair in the clubhouse. When Maddon walks past, he asks: “Mom or no Mom?” It is their running joke. If his mother--Muriel--picks him up in the van, Loe might not have the single beer he occasionally allows himself. If his live-in caregiver is driving, that’s different.

Maddon returns from the kitchen with a beverage, and they chat about the game. Players wander past, saying something chummy to Loe, maybe dragging a hand across his shoulders, just to say hello. “Andretti!” they’ll yell, and he’ll nod his head.

The players and coaches speak about Loe with admiration.

“He’s only restricted by the fact he can’t walk around,” Maddon said. “The guy has everything else going for him. He never says, ‘Why me?’ He never plays on his plight. He doesn’t dwell on that.”

Said Vaughn: “It’s had to have made him stronger in some way. It’s given him something we don’t have. He rolls in here with a smile. He doesn’t complain. He just goes. You’ve gotta respect that.”

While new friendships are growing for him, and as old friendships strengthen, it appears there will only be one Chuck Finley.

“I knew I’d miss him,” Loe said of Finley’s departure. “But I thought I’d get over him. I still haven’t. He took me inside of his life. He treated me like a friend. It doesn’t get better than that.”

Said Finley: “This is a guy who could have been bitter. But, he said to himself, ‘I’m going to have fun with it.’ ”

Loe refers to him as “The Lefty,” as if there were only one in the world. Finley called him in the hospital when he was ill. And he stopped Loe’s mother in the parking lot outside the ballpark late one night.

“We really enjoy having Kurt around,” Finley told her.

She put her hand to her mouth. So many years before, in a hospital in Honolulu, Muriel Loe and her Marine husband, Gerry, were told that their son, their first child, had cerebral palsy. A doctor told them that the child might have enough intelligence someday “to be a gardener.”

“I thought I’d never smile again,” she recalled.

By the time he was 2, the boy had learned to count to 10 in German. As he grew older, he invented a version of baseball that could be played by rolling around on the living room floor of his Vista home. Children from the neighborhood would come indoors to play the game.

The black-and-white photograph was taken in those years. Muriel Loe agreed to be Little League secretary, and for her efforts league officials asked Kurt to throw out that season’s ceremonial first pitch. He put everything he had into it, which surprised no one.

“He was a very happy child,” Muriel Loe said.

Loe went mainstream in time for junior high and attended Vista High School. At his graduation, a school counselor stood at the podium and said, “If ever I was having a bad day, I’d hear Kurt going by and I’d think, ‘You know, what have I got to complain about? Look what he’s handling.’ ”

It would be easy to assume his life has been a succession of wheelchairs, of caregivers, of itches unscratched, of averted glances from strangers, of dependence on other people for the most routine personal chores. Indeed, that is what his days are like. But, it is not his life.

Last week, Loe sat in his Fullerton apartment, surrounded by his life. His mother sat in a chair by the foot of his bed. He sipped out of a straw that disappeared into an Angel tankard.

Around him were walls covered with baseball memorabilia, gold frames with his articles in them, autographed by the subjects. Tim Salmon. Darin Erstad. Matt Walbeck. Troy Percival. An entire wall is devoted to Finley--a jersey, photographs, articles.

Above his bed a frame holds the pregame press notes from Aug. 4, 1997. In them, there is a reference to Loe’s 1,000th game in the press box. Written on the notes, in black marker: “Kurt, the first 1,000 is the hardest.” It is signed, “Cal Ripken Jr.”

“Joe Maddon’s idea,” Loe said, laughing.

“The whole organization has been so great for him,” Muriel Loe said. “I was always particularly pleased that that was something he did on his own. It wasn’t because we knew somebody that could help him get into that situation.”

Loe smiled at his mother, and she proudly returned his gaze. They have always had each other, and Gerry--until his death four years ago--and their lives are full. Loe is happy, and challenged, and rewarded. He stands among the most physically gifted people in the world, and is not inadequate.

They treat him like a person. He returns the favor.

They are strong and capable and play a game he has experienced only on the floor of his living room.

“Would I like it to be me? Perhaps,” he said. “Am I disappointed it’s not? No. Because I don’t know anything else. I don’t know anything but this chair. That’s why it’s not a tragedy for me. Give me a chance to walk, to be normal, and the people that would benefit most would be all of the people that helped me all these years.”