01:00 AM EDT on Tuesday, May 31, 2005

CRANSTON -- He is outside the Alpine Country Club talking on a cell phone, a scene right out of 2005.

But you look at Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd and at first glance it's as though it's still 1986, the most dramatic baseball summer of his life. Still the same body. Still the same mannerisms, all jumpy and spontaneous, like some jazz riff heading for who knows where. Still the same Can. Still pitching, after all these years.

Only this time it's not for the Red Sox, as it was 19 years ago when the Can was a story nobody could have made up, the kid who had grown up in the racial hell of Meridian, Miss., had grown up carrying the dreams of his father and his older brothers on this thin right arm, the heavy baggage of prejudice and broken dreams, a story more suited to Faulkner than The Sporting News. The kid who always carried all this with him, the personal minefield he always seemed to be tiptoing through back then.

This time he's pitching for an independent team called the Brockton Rox.

"I still want to pitch," says Boyd, nicknamed "Oil Can" because he liked beer. "It's still how I make my livin'."

Maybe that's the one thing that sometimes got overlooked during Boyd's tumultuous times in Boston, how important it all was to him, how pitching was the way he defined himself.

But it always was more complicated than that.

In July of 1986 I was sent to Meridian, in search of the Can's past. He was in a Worcester hospital at the time, the pennant race going on without him, his future in limbo, drug rumors circling around him like so many buzzards.

Meridian was hot, oppressive. The file on him at the local newspaper was thin, mostly full of small wire-service stories. No one in the office knew where his family lived. There was no sense he was any hometown hero.

Eventually, I found the old, rickety ballpark near his father's house where he and his brothers first learned the game and where an old bus sat, the one his father used for his barnstorming trips around the Deep South. I learned about how the public schools had been integrated when Dennis had been in grammar school, and how he had had rocks thrown at him.

Was there any wonder he seemed to carry the scars from all that? Any wonder that there was a fragile quality to him in that summer of 1986, as though the only time his personal demons were in their cages was when he was on the mound with the ball in his hand?

Maybe it would have been different if he were in Boston now. Times change. A franchise changed. Maybe the Can wouldn't seem so outrageous now, someone that Sox management seemed never really able to deal with. Not on a team that calls itself "idiots." So much of the Red Sox's unfortunate racial past has either been forgotten or is so much in the past tense that it's all irrelevent.

"It's all different in Fenway now," he says. "Different music, different everything."

He is 45 now, lives in Tupelo, Miss., has worked in the construction industry. It's been 19 summers since he pitched the game that clinched the American League pennant in 1986, 14 years since he retired from the Texas Rangers. He last pitched competitively in 1997 for a team managed by a former Sox player, George Scott, but he says he's always been throwing.

On this afternoon he is part of a press conference to hype the first annual Good Sports and Entertaiment Celebrity Golf Tournament that will be held in late August at Alpine to benefit Saving Sight Rhode Island. He is introduced by Billy Vigeant as the "next Satchel Paige," and there's a certain symmetry in that. The Can always had a picture of Paige in his locker, Paige the patron saint of both the game's barnstorming past, and of the "ole timey" baseball the Can always felt so linked to, as though his baseball soul always belonged back there in the old rickety ballpark in Meridian.

"I never let my passion for the game die," he says. "People see that."

His goal is to get back to the Major Leagues, and if it seems out there on a wing and a prayer somewhere, the Can also knows "baseball is my foundation," the anchor of his life.

"When I'm around baseball I'm a better person," he says. "I'm a better husband. A better father. A better everything. So only good things can come from what I'm doing,"

He says he's throwing well as he ever did when he was in the bigs, with a better head to go along with it.

"It's all for the love of the game," Boyd says. "All for the love of what I can do. It's a rejuvenation of my spirit."

Part of that is that wherever he goes he's met with affection. People remember. Then again, the Can always was an American Original, through the good times and the bad. Complete with a story that no one could have made up.

"To see me pitching is to see me most alive," he said. "I'm not sitting around in some rockin' chair talking about going fishing,"

He paused a beat.

"What do you see Dennis Boyd doing at 45? Pitching. And what do you see him doing at 55, the good lord willin?' Still pitching."