PROVIDENCE — He was sitting in the lobby of The Westin the other morning, and if you didn’t know better it could have been 1986 again.

Back when Dennis “Oil Can” Boyd was pitching for the Red Sox, back when the Can was a young pitcher with the best nickname in the game, back when he seemed to bring both his great exuberance and his tortured past with him every time he went to the mound.

Because it’s never been easy with Boyd, whose life seems to come right out of some dark Faulkner novel, full of racism and family dysfunction and the ghosts of the past that always have seemed more of an opponent than a hitter ever was.

That was the summer I went to Meridian, Miss., in search of the Can’s roots while he was in a Worcester hospital. His future was in limbo, drug rumors circling over his head like so many buzzards.

The temperature was in the ’90s, the air thick and oppressive, and you didn’t need to be a detective to realize that Boyd was being treated as something less than a native son in his hometown. The file on him in the local newspaper office was thin, mainly small wire-service stories. No one in the office knew where his family lived. On the outskirts of town was a billboard proclaiming Meridian as the home of Miss America.

There didn’t seem to be any mention of Oil Can Boyd, the local kid who had made it all the way to the big leagues and the middle of a pennant race.

Eventually, I found the old rickety ball field besides his father’s house where he and his older brothers had come of age, complete with an old abandoned bus that his father had once used to barnstorm around the South.

But it always had been complicated, Meridian, his family, the personal demons he had brought with him to the bright lights of Fenway Park, all of it.

He was in the sixth grade when the schools were integrated, had grown up in the middle of a racial hell. He was 13 when his parents divorced and his father moved about a half-hour away and started a new family.

It was never just about baseball for the Can.

It also always was about the past, too; about how it can sit on your shoulders like some lead weight. About how it forever follows you like some afternoon shadow, no matter how far away from it you think you have run.

“But you know what?” he said. “As bad as Meridian was, there were no drugs. There was no such thing as drug dealers. And everyone went to the Little League games, the Senior League games. That’s all gone now.”

He is 47 now, been out of the majors since 1992, but still looks like he could go out and give you seven good innings, still lean and wiry, just as he always was. And baseball still runs through his veins, the childhood passion that’s never gone away. Two years ago, he pitched 17 games for the Brockton Rox in independent Can-Am League.

And now?

Welcome to “Oil Can Boyd And The Traveling All-Stars,” Boyd’s plan to help bring baseball back to the inner-cities. Or as he says, “Bingo Long without the bus.”

Maybe we can call it destiny.

For he was always a throwback, back to a simpler time when baseball was played in small towns in the summer twilight, a slice of Americana. He always seemed to belong to some broken-down field somewhere, not in some antiseptic stadium. Those were his roots.

And his heritage, too.

His father, Willie, once had pitched against Willie Mays and Hank Aaron when they had barnstormed through Meridian as kids, back when Willie Boyd was a skinny, jive-talkin’, showboating pitcher who called organized baseball “the white man’s league.” Oil Can once said he remembers being 4 years old and Satchel Paige came to pitch in Meridian and everyone danced on the way to the old rickety ballpark.

It’s the reason why he used to have a picture of Paige in his locker in Fenway Park, as if Paige was the patron saint of black baseball, back when the color line ran through major-league baseball, and barnstorming was a part of the game, especially in the South. The same Satchel Paige who once had played with one of the Can’s uncles. The same Satchel Paige his father had known.

This is the tradition Boyd came out of, one he always paid homage to, what he used to call “old-timey” baseball. He always knew he was a part of something larger than himself.

“Now two-thirds of black kids don’t even know who Jackie Robinson is, never mind the old-time black ballplayers,” he said, shaking his head at the incongruity of it all. “Baseball was all black kids had at one time. Baseball was a part of our community. It goes way back, back to the sharecroppers. We were playing baseball long before we ever shot a basketball, or threw a football.”

But it’s all gone now, or at least much of it.

And it’s more than that, there supposedly are less than 10 percent of African-Americans in the major leagues, or that there have been stories galore the past decade or so that black kids don’t play baseball the way they once did. It’s the feeling that for too many black kids the game simply doesn’t matter anymore, whether it’s due to poor facilities, the pace of the game, other interests, you name it.

Boyd also has come to believe that black neighborhoods across the country need help, that a generation of drugs and gangs and hip-hop culture has crippled them.

“There is no love in the black community anymore,” he said. “There’s no respect for anyone. Our kids are out of control. Drugs are everywhere, and it’s the meanest form of hatred there is.”

He believes baseball can do its part to help, to get people back into the game at the community level, to get kids to know that baseball is a part of their heritage, that their roots run deep in the game, that baseball is their game, too.

That’s the hope, anyway, and the plan is to bring his traveling team into cities around the country, part baseball, part history lesson. Last week he and his team were in Quebec.

“This is real baseball,” he said. “Real barnstorming. And we’re going to go everywhere.”

He paused for a beat, and when he continued again, the words were full of passion.

“We’ve lost a whole generation of black baseball players and fans,” said Oil Can Boyd. “The torch was passed down to us, and we let it go out. Now we’ve got to re-light it. We’ve got to get baseball back to where it used to be.”

Back to the tradition the Can always has been a part of.

The tradition that’s always defined him.

The tradition he wants others to understand.

breynold@projo.com