The remarkable talent Robert Pollard had before Guided by Voices
Led by frontman and creative director Robert Pollard, Guided by Voices have long had a deserved place in the history books due to their wide-reaching influence and incredibly prolific nature. After all, Pollard has nearly 3,000 songs registered to his name, a triumph by anyone’s standards. In 2014, it emerged that Pollard had another spectacular talent outside of music, seeming he was always destined to achieve greatness.
When speaking to Magnet Magazine that year, Pollard revealed that he was an accomplished sportsman in his younger days. He was a fearsome baseball thrower for Wright State University in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio. He was so good that on May 11th, 1978, he threw a no-hitter against Indiana Central en route to a 9-1 win. Unsurprisingly, such a feat made local news, and the curly-haired Pollard’s photograph was included in an article in The Daily Guardian. Remarkably, it was the first no-hitter in the history of Wright State baseball, yet it was not the only one the future rockstar experienced. According to his dad’s records, he had 12 over the years.
In the interview, Pollard described his general pitches before the no-hitter. He responded: “I threw 80 per cent fastballs. I threw a lot harder in high school before I injured my arm and developed tennis elbow. I had an imitation slider, which is basically a 3/4-armed curveball that my college coach allowed me to use. I developed a pretty effective curveball in college that I couldn’t control very well, but a lot of hitters would swing at it anyway after seeing predominantly fastballs. I had a decent brushback pitch.”
Taking readers back to that moment, he continued: “Well, first of all, I didn’t know that I had a no-hitter going. A run had scored, I guess, on a couple of walks and errors, so I had assumed that a hit fell in at some point, which is actually a good thing because it took some pressure off. Also, I wasn’t really feeling that sharp. I only had about six or seven strikeouts, but I guess my placement was good, and my team was playing pretty good defence. I struck out the final batter, and our bench came running out and mobbed me, and I completely didn’t know what was happening. I was like, ‘What?’ and they were like, ‘You threw a no-hitter!'”
Demonstrating his baseball skill, the Guided by Voices frontman – who was there to promote the album Motivational Jumpsuit – confirmed that the no-hitter in question was not a fluke at all. He said: “My dad has kept records of my pitching throughout my life, and last year he tabulated my best games. I threw 12 no-hitters, 19 one-hitters and 21 two-hitters between the ages of 10 years old and 20 years old.”
Ever the realist, Pollard noted: “It’s funny, I’ve thrown a lot of no-hitters, and I’ve never had a hit song.”
