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Kit was the youngest member of the Lukash Dairy softball team, and usually given the crappiest games to pitch in, or left to ride out the game in their makeshift bullpen while the older and more experienced (read: experienced) girls on the team got the starts. Coach wasn’t willing to lose games to the chicken farmers or worse, the sheep farm from upstate, and everyone more or less agreed that Dottie Keller was the player in that family, and Kit was along for the ride.
But it was a hot afternoon in June when Kit proved her worth.
She’d been pitching at the side of the barn at their house for weeks. Her mother swore it meant the cows weren’t giving as much milk, but her father winked at her and painted a target for her to practice on.
It paid off. She was scheduled to start on a Sunday, when a lot of folks didn’t come out to the games at all anyway, and they were playing against a smaller dairy outfit from just over the state line.
Kit pitched a complete game shutout. Dottie didn’t play that day; she was being courted by Bob Hinson and he had some ideas about Sunday softball. So for a week, all anyone talked about was Kit, her unhittable fastball and that sneaky change-up she let fly in the late innings.
Truth was, they talked for more than a week, and Kit Keller didn’t ride the bench after that.
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Their first road series as Peaches, Kit and Dottie were riding the high of being bonafide professional baseball players, and on good terms. They sat together on the bus for the first and only time and talked about baseball pitching and how different it was from softball pitching. They retold stories they knew secondhand about the great pitchers of the era, and eagerly broke down box scores they’d memorized for clues. Kit wanted to develop a curveball, add something to her arsenal, and Dottie had ideas to share.
It was a lovely, sisterly sort of conversation, but so technical that at one point, Doris threw a pillow at them.
“Can’t you wait to talk shop at the ballpark? Geez louise.”
Kit did try the curveball, though, at the game later that afternoon. And it was beautiful, the way it dipped and tricked the batter. They won that game and the momentum gave them two more on the road. Word started getting around, and people were showing up, a little more every day, to see the Peaches and their own home teams.
The Peaches, already standing out as a championship-caliber team, gained a huge advantage with Kit’s new pitch, and Ellen Sue and Betty often called Kit over to them at group events, so they could talk about pitching.
In the book Stillwell Gardner wrote, he called that particular curve the “Keller,” and glowingly described the day it was used in the last-ever AAGPBL game, for a strikeout that rang through the ages.
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Kit, on the mound for Rockford, late in the top of the sixth inning in the fourth game of the World Series. The count is 3-2, there are two outs and two women on. The game is tied.
Dottie calls time, trots to the mound, and prepares to tell her sister the one thing that always, always, always set Kit’s teeth on edge and ended any hopes of amicable relations for the rest of the day.
Jimmy comes up behind her. Kit watches them, jaw set and fists ready for a fight.
Dottie opens her mouth to say it but Jimmy does it first.
And then.
“You’ve got this, Kit. I’m not warming anyone in the pen. Take a deep breath.”
“Dottie?”
Kit’s voice is shaky, unsure of what Dottie will say, if she’ll tell Jimmy that’s a bad idea and they’re going to have it out right here, all three of them.
But Dottie doesn’t contradict him or try to reason with him. She’s stunned, but watching Kit’s entire demeanor shift is revelatory. She can do this. She will do this.
“Deep breath, okay? He’s right. The next pitch has to be high and fast. She can’t lay off ‘em.”
Kit grins.
And when Kit throws it high and fast and the Racine Belle at the plate swings for the fences and misses, the out secured and the game moving on, it is beautiful and magical. A story is written for the papers that makes the career of not just Kit but the writer behind the prose. There is more to the game; there's still a chance Racine could win it, but no reasonable lover of the game would discount Rockford’s momentum. Their 1-2-3 come to the plate and there is dynamic baseball played, as Doris in the lead-off position hits a double and Mae bunts them both forward a base and Dottie at clean-up knocks one out so far they’re still talking about it at the Hall of Fame ceremony in 1988.
But it’s Kit whose picture they use for the display. "Baseball is made up of legends, mapped out as a constellation in the dirt, and there is Kit Keller in the firmament."
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“But Grandma, why didn’t you keep playing?”
“Grandma, you were better than Doc, or Ryan!”
Her knees creaked more than they did back then, and her hand cramped easily. She couldn’t show them the curve, could barely hold the ball at all these days. Kit looked into her granddaughter’s eager face, her eyes shining with hope even as her brow furrowed in confusion.
“Grandma, I wanna be a Peach!”
Kit hummed, remembering.
She told them every story, and her granddaughters, all too big for her lap now and all ready to make their way in the world, took it all in.
“Grandma, you were a star.”