LOSING HIS MEMORY

Amid the deceptively smooth rolling pastures of this rural lake community, there is a crack.

Through it, into a most unfair darkness, a young man and his baseball longings have slipped.

His name is Shawn Crews. He is, at 18, the oldest son of the late Dodgers reliever Tim Crews.

Fourteen years after his father was killed in an infamous boating accident during spring training, Shawn has become him.

The kid has the same sparkling blue eyes, the wide smile, the forceful twang. He has the same overhead delivery, the penchant for constantly adjusting his cap, the habit of constantly tucking in his shirt.

His family still lives in a ranch across the lake from where Tim and fellow Cleveland Indians reliever Steve Olin were killed when Crews drove his bass boat into a dock.

Shawn has fished from that dock. He has driven his own boat around the dock. He has walked out into his backyard and angrily stared down that dock.

Shawn has big pieces of Tim’s heart, and the best bits of his soul, but he’s missing the part he needs most at this first crossroads of his young life.

The son misses the father’s touch.

The son longs to hear the father talk about his career; the stories, the jokes, the history that defined him.

The son longs to hear his father give him advice about his own career decisions, ones that have landed him as a freshman pitcher at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville, Fla.

More than anything, the son longs to ask the father one question.

“If I could have my dad back for a moment, I would ask him to show me how to pitch,” Shawn says. “How did he do it? How should I do it?”

At Tim’s funeral in the spring of 1993, cars stretched for miles over the winding central Florida roads. The three Crews children were surrounded with love. Embraces were abundant. Promises were forever.

“I remember everyone telling us how they would never forget us,” says Laurie Crews, Tim’s widow.

Since then, it seems, baseball has forgotten them.

In searching for advice from her late husband’s long list of happily cultivated sources -- everyone loved Tim Crews -- Laurie Crews has struck out.

No player has stopped by the ranch to talk to her children about her husband. No official has invited them to a game, even a spring training game, to remind the children of the connection.

Nobody has kept in touch with them beyond a Christmas card. If it wasn’t for a few old videotapes, they would never know their father played. Even now, Shawn and younger brother Travis, 17, have no memory of the sound of their father’s voice.

When preparing for last year’s hurricanes, the Crews family pulled down every photo of Tim and put it in a closet. In a very different way, baseball has done the same thing.

“You would think that at least a couple of people would have kept in better contact with us,” says daughter Tricia, 23. “You never know what’s happening in other people’s lives, but it’s still a little surprising.”

At the time of Crews’ death, he had been a member of the Indians for only a month, so Laurie is not comfortable reaching out to them.

When she calls the Dodgers, for whom he pitched for six years while earning a 1988 World Series ring, she can’t seem to find the right person.

During a previous Dodgers regime, she contacted a top club official, only to receive a noncommittal reply from his assistant. She recently phoned the club again, but couldn’t get past a ticket office recording.

Laurie doesn’t want special treatment. She doesn’t even want to talk about needing help. This is her first interview of any sort since a year after her husband died.

“I want my kids to make it on their own, like their father made it on his own,” she says.

But wouldn’t it be nice if those 423 2/3 career innings counted for something? Wouldn’t you think that, after watching Crews spend his life helping teammates escape from trouble, somebody would now be willing to rescue his memory?

“What gets me is that everybody thinks, because my dad was a major leaguer, I have all sorts of advantages,” Shawn says, shrugging. “It’s just the opposite. I have nothing.”

Since his father’s death, he has never seen a game at Dodger Stadium. He has never even visited Dodgertown, which is less than two hours away. He only remembers brief meetings with his father’s former teammates during occasional spring training games elsewhere. He doesn’t remember anyone talking about his father like he was real.

When I sat down with the Crews family last week and spun stories about their father, whom I covered closely and admired greatly as the Dodgers beat reporter from 1989 to 1992, we laughed and cried and wondered why nobody had done this before.

“Because nobody ever talks about him, it’s almost like Tim never existed,” Laurie says, her eyes reddening. “But he did exist. And I have children who need his memory.”

*

We called him “The Dirt Farmer.”

With his pressed jeans and cowboy boots and thick mustache, Tim Crews looked like a stereotypical farmer. With his willingness to pitch in any situation without complaint, he was as unrelenting as dirt.

“The thing I remember most about Tim was his daily joy in wearing a major league uniform,” says Fred Claire, former Dodgers general manager. “I don’t know anybody who was more liked by his teammates. I don’t know anybody who got more out of their ability.”

Crews was such a nondescript Dodgers pitcher, his family’s favorite video memory of him comes not from the mound, but the dugout, when he was jumping on the field after Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series homer.

“My dad looked so happy, every year when they show that home run, I look for his smile,” Shawn says.

But the Dodgers remember his 3.44 earned-run average as a middle man, his willingness to protect his teammates when he once hit Pittsburgh’s Gary Redus, his impressive last-minute start in the 1990 pennant race.

When Travis was born that season, Crews was needed every day because of injuries, so he didn’t fly home to see his son until he was two weeks old.

“He would pitch every day, in any situation, whatever it took,” Claire said.

In 1992, Crews was considered so valuable he was paid $1.2 million, a princely sum for a middle reliever. But after the season, he refused a demotion to the triple-A roster. At age 31, he became a free agent and signed with the Indians.

He so wanted to fit in with his new team, he invited them to his ranch during their only day off during the spring. Then, he so badly wanted to impress his new buddies, he insisted that two of them take a ride around Little Lake Nellie in his bass boat at dusk.

The rest is tragedy.

Police said darkness, high speeds and Crews’ blood-alcohol level of .14 combined to lead the boat into the dock, killing Crews and Olin while seriously injuring teammate Bobby Ojeda.

At the time, Laurie Crews had three children under the age of 10. The children were in school the day after the funeral, and she has been fighting for their normalcy since.

She coached their sports teams. She attended every game she didn’t coach. Her voice was the loudest. She wasn’t afraid to ask questions. Everyone knew she was there.

“She was a great mom ... and she was a great dad,” Shawn said.

Tricia eventually attended University of Florida, and is now entering veterinary school. Travis is on the high school trampoline gymnastics team.

Fitting for the child who looked the most like his father, Shawn was all about baseball.

Laurie sat on a bucket and caught his fastball until her hands became bruised. She worked with his mechanics until his body got too big. She threw him batting practice until his swings were too hard.

“He was a late bloomer, but he’s got electric stuff,” says David Bultema, his coach at Eastridge High in Clermont. “He never showed a whole lot of emotion, but he just kept getting better and better.”

As a high school junior, he pitched a seven-inning complete game to give his team the district championship. A sore arm has since led to a redshirt in his first year at Santa Fe Community College. The arm is fine, but his coaches are now asking him to throw submarine style, and his mother is concerned.

“He’s at the age where I could probably use a little support,” Laurie says. “How am I going to go up to some college coach and say, ‘I don’t like how you have him throwing the ball?’ ”

After several hours of flushing up stories and digging up memories, it becomes apparent that Laurie Crews is far too proud to actually ask for this support, so I throw it upon her.

She does not know that Frank McCourt is the new Dodgers owner. I tell her that he has embraced former Dodgers, and I give her a phone number.

She does not know how to reach Tom Lasorda, so I give her another phone number.

Then I realize there is perhaps something more valuable and far easier I can give them. I turn to Shawn, and I give him the truth.

I tell him that he not only looks and sounds like his father, but he acts like him. I tell him that even if he never throws another baseball, his father would be proud of the grace and dignity with which he and his siblings have handled themselves in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

I tell him that he may not ever equal his father as a pitcher, but he has already equaled him as a man.

From the light in his eyes, it was clear, this is all he needs to hear. This is all any of the Crews children need to hear.

His mother is crying, but Tim Crews never cried, and neither will Shawn.

“Thank you,” he says, in a voice so hauntingly, wonderfully familiar. “Thank you.”

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Plaschke, go to latimes.com/plaschke.