Once a Blue Jays prospect, now a 52-year-old college reliever. How this pitcher reclaimed the romance of a sport that nearly killed him

What is baseball, ultimately, but competitive commuting?
When Harry Muir stepped out of the night and into the dull half-light of the Fanshawe Falcons bus on a recent Thursday night, limbs and ligaments were weary from a doubleheader. But the memory muscle is forever fresh. Buses, planes, trains, all the same. Pick a seat, park in beside one of your ball-playing brethren and pass the journey.
This 2024 commuting season in the Ontario Colleges Athletic Association is different, though. Muir, the pitcher who wears No. 34 on his back, has a fair bit more than that behind him. He’s 52 years old and where now he travels alongside teenage teammates, those “anyone sitting here?” spots were once occupied by iconic names from halcyon Toronto Blue Jays days: Pat Hentgen, Tom Henke, John Olerud.
Middle(aged)-reliever, fresh(ish)man architecture student, construction firm owner, general manager of the Intercounty Baseball League‘s Chatham-Kent Barnstormers, father, husband and goofball. Muir is all of these things all at once. He was a teenage phenom once, too, signed by the Blue Jays out of high school. Reach for a cliché and you’d describe that last bit as being “in a previous life.” But this is all one life, an utterly unique journey that reminds you why this sport’s most timeless quality has always been its romance.
Baseball is patient, baseball is kind. A half-century later, in spite of heartbreaks, Muir is still smitten.
“I can tell what I’m doing has affected people, it’s touched a lot of people,” Muir says. “Some people are romanticizing ‘if only I had kept playing’ or ‘maybe I can play again.’ It’s neat to be a topic of conversation like that. Baseball is one of those sports …”
It is. But to be a 52-year-old college ballplayer, sitting in a dugout alongside teammates younger than your kids, you have to be a 52-year-old college student, in itself a rare diversion. As far as Muir recalls, this was mostly his wife’s idea. If baseball is patient, so too is the truth. When eventually reached, Stephanie Muir at least confirms she was all-in on this mid-life changeup.
“I have every belief in Harry, I really do,” she says. “As much skill and talent and wisdom as I know he brings to it, he brings a lot of hope and joy. The sense of possibility. That’s not only a great example to our children, but in a broader sense so important to what we need in culture right now.
“Baseball is absolutely a sport for romantics, and this is a good story. The stories we author for ourselves are often not the ones we script early on. We have visions of who we are going to be at 20 and then we hit 50 and see where we are. We don’t always have control of the pen when we’re writing our story, but we certainly have control of how we respond to what’s in front of us.”
The Muirs had mostly highway in front of them this past summer, Harry’s first as GM of the Barnstormers, with Stephanie also hands-on in helping the new club navigate year one in the IBL, the top independent baseball league in Canada. Shuttling from home in London to Chatham-Kent, they debated how Harry might spend more time involved in baseball and a little less in day-to-day construction. With their own kids reared, school weirdly made sense. So, a four-year degree in architectural technology, the goal to design houses rather than build them, now stretches before Muir.
A few times a week he also has the best college hitters in Ontario in front of him. But he has Marcus Normandin, too. The Falcons catcher left his teens behind weeks ago, right around the time a grey-bearded, dark-rimmed glasses-wearing newcomer arrived at tryouts.
“We were not expecting someone as old, mature as Harry to turn up. It almost freaked me out,” Normandin says. “When I first found out Harry’s age, I called my dad that night — because my father is, I think, 58 this month. I go: ‘Hey, I just spoke with what I thought was a coach, turns out he’s 52, was drafted by the Blue Jays and is now my teammate.’
“My father never laughed so hard in his life. He came out to some of our games just to watch Harry pitch and was like, ‘For 52, he is really good at hitting his spots.’ ”
Muir calls his fastball more of a slow ball these days, at 65 miles per hour. But the Normandins aren’t the only ones marvelling at how he confounds aggressive young college hitters. “A lot more finesse” is Muir’s approach. He’s loved working with the Fanshawe pitching coach: former major-leaguer and Canadian Hall of Famer Jeff Francis, nine years Muir’s junior. A 1.21 ERA tells you it’s working.
Things click in the clubhouse, too. “It’s kinda like hanging out with my kids,” Muir says. “They’re all the same age, they talk about the same things. But I’m also kinda a goof.”
Normandin concurs. “We definitely have those moments where you’re like: This guy is 52? But there’s no barrier. He is close enough to our fathers’ ages, but none of us see him as a father figure. He’s just another one of the guys.
“Because he’s a first year, it’s tradition that the newer guys sing karaoke in front of us. Well, Harry got up there and he just crushed it. He was having so much fun. The entire team was laughing, clapping and Harry is just going at it. No lyrics in his hand or phone. He just went straight off memory and it was fantastic.”
What did he sing? “I don’t remember exactly,” Normandin says. “I think it was from the ’80s, ’90s, maybe even early 2000s.” All count as old-time classics to the class of 2024. Muir later confirms it was “Need You Tonight” by INXS.
For all that’s in front, what’s behind Muir shapes everything, too. How could it not? Baseball formed him, almost killed him, yet has never left him. It’s beyond apt that this all goes back to transit in the first place.
“My dad was a bus driver and would always try to get his routes near our house,” Muir says. “He’d stop in on lunch and we would play catch in the backyard every day. I fell in love with baseball because of him.”
Muir remembers how “different it all was back then.” He’s not wrong; he went from local to pro ball in the kind of flash that feels impossible now. He threw hard and made it to Team Canada, throwing the country’s first no-hitter at the world juniors. Such exploits had pro teams and schools calling. He answered one instantly.
“It’s pretty tough to say no to Toronto when they turn up at your door and offer you a uniform,” Muir says. “They were starting to win, showing signs of (what would come).”
The back-to-back World Series glories that came in 1992 and 1993 might make you think this was a wonderful place for a teenager to chase the dream. Not so. A winning ball club doesn’t do much looking down. “It was a big learning curve,” he says. “I was too young, being out of Canada and being a little naïve. The Jays had a great team, so there was not a lot of movement.”
Muir describes it as “four years of going up one level, putting a lot in and not seeing much results back.” But there were times the show came to him. Spring training in Dunedin. Fla. was a land of wonder.
“The first time that you start to see big guys walking around …” he exhales. “I remember Dave Stieb walking in the training room and then I’d be in the outfield with Tom Henke. Our fitness days we’d do all of our testing in one group and there was Devon White. Holy crap. These guys were the guys.”
In 1993, his third season, Muir moved up one more rung to St. Catharines and CBC included him in a documentary, “Chasing The Dream.”
“They call it the 21 longest miles in baseball. You’re way down the ladder, but on a clear day you can look across and see the big-league team.” He’d briefly get closer when the Jays brought him along for a part-fundraiser, part-World Series celebration game in Saskatoon that May.
“We met up with the team in Chicago and flew on a private 747 to Regina, played our exhibition game in front of 32,000 people, then we flew down to Texas,” Muir says. “That was when I realized that these guys are just guys. I sat beside them on the bus or the plane. I sat beside Pat Hentgen, got to know Al Leiter and they were all just cool guys. Yeah, their paycheques were bigger, but they had been though the same things.”
After four years, Muir had been through enough. His pro career had one last flourish when he flew to France and won a national championship. Maybe things would have been different if he started with a rebuilding MLB team, but his is not a journey with regrets among the luggage. There’s a reason for that.
Muir stayed close to baseball as he worked as a commercial pilot (commuting, yet again) and then construction. He was about to transition from pitching coach to GM of the London Majors in 2005 when, during a pre-season bullpen session, he began to feel woozy.
“I went home and within 24 hours I was in a coma, fighting for my life,” he says. “Everything stopped working except for my heart. They called the priest twice.” Streptococcal toxic shock syndrome left him in a coma for 18 days. It would be 12 years before he got to the bottom of it.
“I came across something that said blunt force trauma to the lower calf can be a cause. I realized that week in 2005 when I was throwing (batting practice), I’d stepped outside of the (protective) L-screen and took a line drive right off the bottom of my leg. It gave me a very weird bruise and it bubbled up in this weird way, but of course never had anyone look at it. To me, it was just something that happened in baseball.
“It nearly killed me. Long and short of it, that’s why I keep doing this stuff. I’ve been given a second chance.”
A piece of Irish advice when it comes to life’s livelier excursions is to “take the longest way there and the shortest way home.” It’s rarely proven wrong.
For Muir and baseball, though, the approach has unwittingly, unforgettably been the opposite. It might have arrived too quickly, but he’s come back to it all in his own time, on his own terms. Fifty-two years in, he’s coming out of the bullpen in control of life’s pen. What next?
“I only have two years of eligibility because of my pro career, so next year is when I might put it all together. That’s also my retirement year. I told the guys I’m going to come back throwing 90!”