×
×
homepage logo
LOGIN
SUBSCRIBE

Nothing fills this void for Twomey

By Tom King - Staff Writer | May 23, 2020

He’s Nashua’s Mr. Baseball.

But right now, Bill Twomey, 87 years young, feels like a man without a country. Or actually, a sport.

“That’s exactly the feeling,” Twomey said. “It’s an empty feeling in you. It’s my life. I was an air traffic controller for 30 years. I still look at baseball as being the most outstanding accomplishment in my life. It made me meet people.”

If you’re a ballplayer, you may not know Twomey by name, but it’s likely you know him by face. He’s coached everyone. Some of the young general managers in the game – including former Pirates GM Neil Huntington – have played for Twomey at some level or another, here and internationally. He was a first base/bench coach with the Nashua Pride during most of their 10-year time here, and he met a ton of people in the game from his days cavorting around the Atlantic League.

“I could walk up now to Rickey Henderson and say, ‘Hey Rickey, remember the time I told you to do this, do that?’,” Twomey said the other day. “I did talk to Rickey that way.”

This is a guy who keeps a dozen baseballs in his trunk, and if he sees a few kids at any field in the city, he throws them a few balls to help keep them playing.

Holman Stadium is his second home. During recent high school seasons, you could see Twomey alone down the right field line, watching a game and if he saw somebody he thought was good, he’d talk to a college coach or two about them.

“I drive by that ballpark every day,” Twomey said of Holman Stadium. “If I see two or three kids – I saw a couple of kids from Bishop Guertin at the beginning of the virus – and they were just throwing a ball around. I came over to them and threw them two brand new baseballs that I keep in the back of my trunk.

“Whenever I see two kids, three kids, five kids, by themselves, with no parents, I go to the bag. I used to tell the Pride I stole two dozen baseballs at the end of the year. And when I see kids out on a field, anywhere, I stop the car. “Anywhere, I don’t care where it is, what town, even in Massachusetts. I’ve done it in Mass. Because I feel that’s one of the things I did growing up that made me love the game, was just to play the game myself – and let the chips fall where they may.”

Twomey has a fungo bat near his front door. He’s dying to take it out and use it on a field.

“I’m 87 years old now,” he said. “I don’t want to end up not doing something one more time. It’s like hitting your last home run and coming off the field, if you know what I mean.

“When I go by Holman – in fact, I used to walk the warning track after seasons, all the time to get in shape, and North Common, I walk up and down there as much as I can. It really hurts me to see kids not going out.

“When I see anybody with a ball… I’d get excited even watching a girls softball game. It’s something.”

He’s hoping the Silver Knights get some semblance of a season this summer at Holman. He’s hoping youth baseball teams can play.

“I hope that works,” he said. “You’ll see me down there if I’m ambulatory (chuckling). … Right now I just want to take a tennis ball and throw it up against the brick wall at Holman Stadium (in left field) to keep in shape.”

The one place you won’t see him is Cape Cod, because the nation’s oldest and best collegiate summer league, the Cape Cod League, was cancelled due to the pandemic. Twomey years ago actually was one of the coaches with the Harwich Mariners. And in later years, as a summer tradition, he and his wife Mary would venture down to the Cape for a day and watch some baseball.

But now now.

“That (cancellation) took our summer away, my wife and I,” he said. “We would go down to Seafood Sam’s, then to to the beach, and then hit one of the 5:30 games. All we wanted to see – I’m like the scouts. What do the scouts do. They’d go to a 5:30 game they could see. They’d go to the closest one or follow a player.

“You get the 5:30 starting pitchers. They only last two or three innings with a starting pitcher. And they’d see four pitchers a night. I miss that part of it. I used to sit with the scouts. It was a whole day for me. We’d leave at 9 in the morning and get back at 9:30 at night, without spending anything except for a meal. For other people who would go to the Cape it would cost them a couple hundred bucks just to get there.”

“I’m sure they had to make a decision because no one knows how long this pandemic would be. It was a business decision, I’m sure.”

But not for someone who simply wants to watch baseball, because the dollars make no sense. Balls and strikes and fungo hits do. Instead Twomey will go up and visit his daughter and son-in-law at their home on Lake Winnipesaukee . But still, no baseball to watch.

That’s what Twomey lives for.

“I do,” he said. “I really, really do. …Just being involved. You don’t have to play.

“Baseball saved my life. It saved my life. I really mean that.”

And Nashua’s Mr. Baseball is hoping somehow it can still save his summer. Tom King may be reached at 594-1251,tking@nashuatelegraph.com, or@Telegraph _TomK.

Newsletter

Join thousands already receiving our daily newsletter.

Interests
Are you a paying subscriber to the newspaper? *