from the Kingston Whig-Standard
By Patrick Kennedy
If the heyday of local fastball came during the 1960s — the first-rate Kingston Amateur Softball Association held sway at Nelles Megaffin’s not-yet-20-year-old ballyard — then what a pity. What a shame Bob Storring never got to match his finest against the offerings of Bubs Van Hooser, Kenny Lewis, the Litchfield boys, and other stars of that long-mothballed loop.
Alas, the march of time prevents such matchups. Who wouldn’t want to see Ali and Marciano go at it for 15 rounds or less. But with a generation separating Storring from his peers in the past, it’s left to area fast-pitch pundits to debate where he ranks in the annals of big-ball pitchers from the Limestone quarter.
Storring, just 55 when his two-month battle with terminal cancer ended a week before Christmas, was certainly one of the best, if not the best, power pitchers of his time.
“Maybe there were smarter pitchers, guys who mixed things up,” said veteran softballer Al Hannah. “Big Bob would just blow it by you, and then he had that amazing drop pitch.
“I’d put him right near the top of the best I’ve seen.”
During his sandlot career, Storring was a dominant force on several teams in a number of different leagues, which ranged in calibre from businessmen’s to blue-chip fast-pitch, the kind witnessed at the annual International Softball Congress World Tournament.
‘Big Bob’ was not bothered by the big stage, and in softball circles there is none bigger than the ISC worlds, which has been hosted annually since 1947 and showcases some of the more talented softballers on some of the best teams under-the-table money can buy. At the 1985 event, the burly right-hander, then 27, posted a 2-0 mark for the Ottawa Turpin Pontiacs. He poured third strikes past 17 batters in nine innings of work.
Two years later at the Ontario senior championship, Storring went 6-0 for the Turpins.
For a large man, he had a peculiar penchant for playing in sweltering temperatures.
“The hotter it got, the harder he threw and the better he pitched,” added Hannah, who spoke of one such tourney played in withering weather.
“We only had one pitcher and it was about 95 degrees the whole time. Big Bob threw every game.”
Tournaments being social affairs, the pitcher enjoyed a couple of cold ones and a hotdog or four after the semifinal win.
“Before the final,” Hannah continued, “he gagged down two glasses of Alka-Seltzer and went out and tossed a one-hitter.”
Born the middle of three children in the summer of ‘58, Storring was raised in Inverary by his mother, Willa, and his stepfather, Court Campbell.
As youngsters, Bob and older brother Brian, who predeceased him by about seven months, spent countless hours playing catch outside the house on the main street.
“It used to drive their grandmother crazy. She’d go right back inside the house,” remembered 77-year-old Willa Campbell. “One would miss the other’s throw, they’d blame each other, my mother would go inside, and the boys would send their sister (Allison) down the street to get the ball.”
In his salad days as an elite underarmer, Storring presented an intimidating image to a batter standing just 46 feet away. He stood six-foot-two and weighed 280-plus pounds. A menacing-looking black moustache matched the dark eyes and dark hair and psychologically hardened the image. He had hands the size of a catcher’s mitt.
For the batter, particularly one facing Storring for the first time, the real piddle-your-pants part was a dramatic delivery wherein he leaped far off the rubber before releasing the pitch. His left foot routinely landed just inside the 16-foot pitching circle (when there was one later in his career). When Rapid Robert reared back and fired one, the ball was already a good six, eight feet closer to the batter.
“He made for a pretty imposing sight coming at you,” said Terry McCann, who played with and against his friend.
Added Hannah: “Three hundred pounds jumping off that mound straight at you: that’s a pretty scary sight.”
Storring looked scary on the field, but in truth the shy, dedicated school caretaker and family man was a genial, gregarious soul, quite opposite the fiery-eyed flame-thrower who could leave batters quaking in their cleats.
“He was a big teddy bear,” Anne Storring said of the gentle giant she married 33 years ago following a courtship warmed by evenings of dancing to the strains of Muriel Day and the Night Squad in the Bird Cage Lounge at the old 401 Inn.
“One of our first dates was a ball game in Inverary, imagine that,” said Anne, laughing.
During his prime, Storring pitched for a decade in the Ottawa Senior Fastball League.
His chief weapons included a rise pitch that could start out belly-high and end up two feet over the hitter’s head. His drop plummeted sharply, as if falling off a table, just as it neared the strike zone.
He developed the latter pitch during his decade with the Turpins in the Ottawa circuit. “Used to be if you threw hard enough, you could get by basically with a rise ball,” Storring pointed out during a 1990 Whig-Standard interview. He was 32 and still had about a half-dozen seasons left in that right arm. “In that senior league, you could sneak the odd rise ball past someone, but if you threw enough of them, they’d get you.”
If those two pitches marked his aces, a competitive nature was his trump card.
The big teddy bear was an aggressive grizzly on the mound. He played hard, played by the rules and played to win, and nothing stirred those competitive juices more than the sight of a batter taking a toe-hold, or worse, crowding home plate. He’d brush back Willa if she stood too close.
“You can’t be scared to go after the batter,” he noted back in 1990. “If that means pitching him inside, then OK.”
No one did it with less malice and meanness than Big Bob.
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A celebration of Storring’s life will be held on Sunday, from 1 to 4 p.m., at Rideau Acres Campground on Cunningham Road off Hwy. 15.
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