contract from the San Francisco Giants, then the largest ever for a pitcher. But on that afternoon it was just a binder, science’s rigid attempt to define the abstract. Boras gave one of them to Zito, who took it back to his house in Hollywood. He put that binder on his kitchen counter and left it sitting out as a reminder of the things that he had done and the things that he would do.

Barry Zito is a believer in totems. In those days, he had a replica of Reggie White’s Green Bay Packers jersey draped over the back of his couch for inspiration. He had a shrine built to Sandy Koufax in his bedroom, near his own Cy Young Award from 2002. A portrait of Carlos Santanawas on the wall nearby. And now there was this blue binder sitting on his kitchen counter.

That binder destroyed Barry Zito.

I first met Barry back in 2000, when he was just a young kid who still carried his stuffed animals with him on the road. He had a reputation for strangeness as well as for a curveball that defied description. It was this perfect, beautiful, singular thing, and people who saw it sometimes fell in love with it and the man who threw it. I was one of those people.

Because Barry sometimes went out for breakfast with people he didn’t know, we went out for breakfast one morning in Toronto. He was a bright, buoyant force of nature. Barry had received many gifts from his father, Joe, a