High Heat Page 14

  Born without a right hand, the left-hander became an inspiration to millions. His father, Mike, dreamed up the deft way Abbott transferred the baseball glove from his right wrist to his left throwing hand to catch the ball. He began the technique during solitary games of catch when he was four years old, throwing a rubberized ball against the brick wall of his family’s townhouse. From such beginnings, Abbott went on to pitch around the world and recorded a no-hitter for the New York Yankees in 1993. His deeds included an Olympic gold medal, and the Sullivan and Tony Conigliaro awards, as well as being the first American pitcher to win in Cuba in 25 years. He threw in the mid-90s, and his cut fastball—a cross between a fastball and a slider—sawed off many bats and induced tons of ground balls. Before such stardom, though, somebody had to believe.

  Welke, who was in charge of the Midwest for the Toronto Blue Jays’ organization, first saw Abbott pitching during his senior year at Flint (Michigan) Central High School. The veteran scout can still rattle off the date like it was a loved one’s birthday—May 5, 1985.

  In Abbott, Welke saw a tremendous competitor. The last ballplayer that he had scouted that belonged in Abbott’s class was Kirk Gibson. After that first game, Welke wrote a glowing scouting report: “six-foot-four . . . mammoth heart . . . projected to have well above average fastball.” The only part he hurried through was the report’s last four words: “has no right hand.”

  Welke’s enthusiasm, on the page and in team meetings, wasn’t enough for Toronto to take a real chance on Abbott. The Blue Jays didn’t draft him until the 36th round of the 1985 draft and Abbott refused to sign with them. Yet such interest made other teams take notice. Abbott eventually signed with the California Angels after the 1988 Olympics and became only the 15th player since the amateur draft began in 1965 to make his professional debut in the majors. Throughout it all, Welke and Abbott have remained the best of friends. Welke was in Abbott’s wedding party. “Don’s the first one outside of my family and the ones in Flint,” Abbott says, “who really believed in me.”

  Scouts refer to the difference between a quality fastball and breaking stuff (a slider, curveball, or changeup) as range. If the gap between a fastball and the slower deliveries is big enough, then the pitcher has a much better chance for success.

  “[Batters] can dial up on that heater,” Billy Ripken says. “But Ryan had that nasty hook to go along with the fastball. Randy Johnson has that nasty slider. If a pitcher can throw in the mid to upper 90s and have another pitch that comes in at 80 to 82 [miles per hour], one that he can throw for strikes, you get that kind of package and a guy is pretty much unhittable.”

  As the 2009 season unfolded, one of the best feel-good stories was Zack Greinke of the Kansas City Royals. After having taken time off due to a social anxiety disorder, the right-hander was back, and one of the things opposing hitters and scouts noticed was how much harder his fastball was. Instead of being clocked in the high 80s, the heater had climbed to 98. When coupled with a curveball timed in the 50s, the combination made the opposition look silly. “That’s too big a range even for a major-league hitter,” says ESPN analyst Chris Singleton.

  After six weeks of the 2009 season, Greinke was 7–1, with a 0.60 ERA. Fernando Valenzuela was the last to have an ERA that low eight games into the season, as he went 8–0, with a 0.50 ERA, to start 1981.

  To better ascertain range, let’s take a look at the opening lines of Joan Didion’s story “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”:This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream.

  If a scout were recording that sequence, he would mark the first sentence as a quality fastball, maybe a two-seamer in the mid 90s, certainly good enough for that crucial first-pitch strike. The second sentence, the one beginning with “The San Bernardino lies,” is as long and loopy as any slow stuff: a curveball, changeup, or even a knuckler well off the outside corner. That sets up another fastball (“October is the bad month”) for strike two. Then Didion goes with another short sentence, a fastball perhaps just a few inches off the plate. With the count 2–2, Didion has set up the batter—I mean, reader—for a quick punch-out. And here comes the heat (“Every voice seems a scream”). It may be by us in a rush, but we won’t soon forget it.

  By alternating between fast and slow, long and short sentences—in other words, exhibiting great range—Didion holds our attention, and that last line is one of her best remembered.

  Great range in pitching almost always begins with a quality fastball. From there the other stuff—a curveball, slider, change—can be taught. In essence, that’s what David Price went through at Triple-A Durham. Without an epic fastball, though, great range can never really be achieved. No matter how sharp the break on the curve, the difference in speed isn’t enough to get decent batters out.

  Quality range between the hard and soft stuff is what made Stephen Strasburg, a hard-throwing right-hander out of San Diego State, the number-one pick in the 2009 amateur draft. A fastball that regularly tripped the scouts’ radar guns at 100 miles per hour first spread the word. Add a quality curveball to that repertoire and some scouts were saying Strasburg, like Abbott, could make the jump from college ball to the pro ranks.

  “He’s the best I’ve seen in quite a while,” Ducey says. “With a guy like him, you open the pocketbook and pray everything goes according to plan.”

  Unfortunately for the Washington Nationals, the team with the first pick in the 2009 draft, things had rarely gone according to plan in their short history in the nation’s capital. By the ballclub’s fifth season, it had become a cellar dweller, a laughingstock in a town that tends to take everything way too seriously. Complicating things was the fact it’s far better to roll the dice on a promising hitter than a promising pitcher, no matter how hard he throws. As Thomas Boswell pointed out in the Washington Post, “Strasburg will probably be a .500 pitcher with a 150–150 record, or he’ll be a bust. . . . The history of baseball’s draft since it began in 1965 is unmistakable. You can project exceptional hitters with about a 50 percent success rate. You can’t project No. 1 overall pitchers at all.”

  From 1965 through the 2008 draft, 102 pitchers have been taken in the first five picks. To date only one (Kevin Brown) has won more than 200 games. Josh Beckett certainly has a shot, but all in all, those guys are the exceptions. The best of the rest are Dwight Gooden, Andy Benes, Tim Belcher, Floyd Bannister, Mike Moore, and Bill Gullickson. In comparison, Paul Molitor, Reggie Jackson, Evan Longoria, Ryan Zimmerman, Chipper Jones, and Alex Rodriguez are just a few of the All Star hitters selected high in the first round.

  Strasburg was represented by überagent Steve Boras. He’s the guy who brokered Alex Rodriguez’s landmark $252-million contract—the biggest deal in the game. His asking price for Strasburg’s services? A hefty $50 million for six years. That kind of money was well past the ceiling on top draft picks. Mark Prior had signed for $10.5 million, Price for $8.8 million, with extras. Still, the young fireballer from San Diego appeared worth it, especially to a franchise eager to fill its brand-new downtown ballpark.

  Money aside, Strasburg remained an amazing story. At 6-foot-4, a buff 220 pounds, it’s difficult to imagine that only a few years ago Strasburg was so out of shape he was nicknamed “Sloth” and ignored by most scouts. But thanks to his mother, a retired dietitian, as well as a rigorous workout schedule at San Diego State University, with additional yoga
classes off campus, the pounds fell away. And the velocity soon soared.

  Strasburg’s fastball was in the low to mid 90s his freshman year at SDSU. That summer he was clocked at 98 in the New England Collegiate Baseball League, and he hit the century mark for the first time his sophomore year. The kid was living a fairy tale as his collegiate career came to a close. Behind home plate for his final home start against Air Force Academy were members of the Washington Nationals’ front office, including acting general manager Mike Rizzo.

  In 2006, the Nationals hired Rizzo as assistant general manager and vice president for baseball operations. He had spent the last seven years with the Arizona Diamondbacks, where he helped build one of the best farm systems in baseball. Since coming to the Nationals, Rizzo has made so many trips overseas that his passport ran out of pages; he’s been to Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Australia, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic. “I’m on call,” he says, “ready to fly out on a moment’s notice and sign that next prospect.”

  But when Jim Bowden resigned as general manager after a scandal involving the team’s baseball academy in the Dominican Republic, Rizzo was promoted. One of his first orders of business was what to do with the top pick in the draft, a result of the Nationals being the worst team in baseball the year before. That season the Nationals had failed to sign their number-one pick, a pitcher named Aaron Crow, who didn’t throw as hard as Strasburg. The franchise couldn’t afford another such failure. Even if it meant dealing with Boras across the bargaining table.

  Rizzo had wanted to see Strasburg pitch in person. Like any good scout, he believes he has to look past the radar gun readings. He needed to watch how the young prospect reacted when men got on base, when the phenom was called upon to do something unusual or even extraordinary. The night of Strasburg’s final home start proved to be a best- and worst-case scenario for such expectations, as the young phenom was rarely threatened.

  Strasburg’s first pitch registered 100 miles per hour, and from there he methodically worked through the Air Force lineup. At his best, Strasburg has a deceptively smooth delivery. He doesn’t appear to be throwing that hard until the gun shows that his nasty slider is in the mid-80s, his sinking two-seam fastball is in the mid-90s, and his rising four-seam fastball is 100 miles per hour and above, according to the scouts.

  That night in San Diego, before a sellout crowd and a college pep band, all of Strasburg’s pitches were working. By the seventh inning stretch, everyone in attendance recognized that Air Force had yet to get a single hit off the top pitching prospect in the country. With Rizzo and the Nationals’ cadre studying his every move, Strasburg seemed to turn everything up a notch and was throwing his best stuff heading into the ninth inning. Striking out the final Air Force batter, on a called third strike, Strasburg spiked his glove into the ground in front of the mound, his Aztecs teammates rushing onto the field to congratulate him.

  “I don’t think he really understands what’s happened here,” San Diego State coach and Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn told the Washington Post afterward. “And somewhere along the line he’s gonna say, ‘Damn, I just threw a no-hitter in front of a packed crowd.’”

  The following week Sports Illustrated and ESPN reported that Rizzo had decided to make Strasburg the top pick in the June draft. Mike Rizzo had been convinced. “He is Sidd [bleeping] Finch,” Strasburg’s agent told a baseball executive.

  Well, if we’ve reached the land of Sidd Finch, the powers that be have certainly gone over the top about somebody’s fastball. Welcome to the nightclub where Mystique and Aura are the headliners.

  Sidd Finch, of course, was the original fantasy player. A pitcher whose epic speedball was actually a figment of George Plimpton’s imagination. Plimpton popularized the Walter Mitty everyman story for Sports Illustrated. He got his nose bloodied in the boxing ring by Archie Moore. He played quarterback for the Detroit Lions, which became the book and the movie Paper Lion. Early in 1985, Plimpton met with editors Myra Gelband and Mark Mulvoy about a possible April Fools’ story. That year the magazine’s publication date fell on April 1.

  But after getting notes and suggestions from other reporters, Mulvoy, the managing editor, told Plimpton, “Why don’t you do your own April Fools’ story?”

  Within minutes, the three had come up with a tale about a mysterious baseball player who could throw a ball 160 miles per hour. Plimpton was so caught up in the piece’s possibilities that after the meeting broke up he walked from the Time & Life Building in midtown Manhattan to his apartment on the Upper East Side in a steady downpour.

  “He gave me license to do anything I wanted,” Plimpton, who died in September 2003, said in a 1995 interview with the New York Times.

  Within weeks, Plimpton had come up with a bizarre tale about Hayden Siddhartha Finch, a Tibetan philosophy student who also played the French horn. To pull off the conceit, Sports Illustrated needed the cooperation of a major-league club. The New York Mets were more than happy to comply. An extensive photo shoot was set up for the team’s spring training complex in St. Petersburg, Florida. Photographer Lane Stewart recruited a friend of his, a junior high school teacher named Joe Berton, to play the gangly yet hard-throwing Finch.

  “Mulvoy, Gelband and Plimpton all agreed that the story needed to be played straight throughout,” wrote Michael MacCambridge in The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine. “Gelband had the idea to make the first letters of the words in the subhead spell out ‘Happy April Fools’ Day.’”

  The actual text read: “He’s a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd’s deciding about yoga—and his future in baseball.”

  There were other clues, too. Plimpton pointed out one of the definitions for Finch is “a small lie.”

  But that’s all pretty highbrow for the baseball world. Word soon spread that the Mets had landed the ultimate pitching prospect. A guy whose fastball made Nolan Ryan’s look like a change of pace. Everyone became even more curious when it was revealed that Finch always pitched in one work boot and one bare foot, and that he loved to wear his ball cap backward. After Finch was given a cubicle between Darryl Strawberry and George Foster, the St. Petersburg Times sent an investigative reporter to the Mets’ training camp. The New York Times finally tracked down Plimpton, who was traveling, at two in the morning.

  “It’s a hoax, isn’t it?” demanded a Times man.

  “Of course,” answered a sleepy Plimpton.

  Sidd Finch, Roy Hobbs, Nuke LaLoosh. Sometimes it’s easy to think, especially in light of the steroid era, that baseball’s best action heroes have been made up, figments of our imagination. Yet truth does have its merits. In real-life struggles lessons about perseverance remain, as well as a hint of optimism about the future. Consider Sanford “Sandy” Koufax.

  From the time that he was little kid, Sandy Koufax could throw hard. As he recounts in his autobiography, Koufax, when snowball fights would break out in his old neighborhood in Brooklyn, he would duck into a well-protected place and “pepper the other kids and they couldn’t come close to reaching me. Very useful.”

  But after breaking in with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1955, Koufax seemed destined to be another hard-throwing prospect who never panned out. For those first half dozen seasons in professional ball, his record was rarely above .500 despite his alluring fastball.

  “Of course, this was well before radar guns,” says catcher Norm Sherry. “But Sandy easily threw above 100 miles per hour. The key for him, you could say his career really, was him realizing that he didn’t have to throw all that hard to be effective. Before he got command of his pitches, he’d just rear back and fire that thing. He really didn’t have an idea of where that ball might be going.”

  That all changed in just one day. The Dodgers had a “B” game in Orlando. A bare-bones squad, which included Koufax and Sherry, was due to take the flight from Vero Beach. The roster got even shorter when one of the other pitche
rs missed the plane.

  “I was catching, and on the way over Sandy told me he was going to use the game to work on some extra pitches, his breaking ball and the like,” Sherry recalls. “So we start off in the first inning and I’m mixing in the curve and changeup for him. So he can work on it, like he asked. But Sandy couldn’t throw them for strikes. He walked the first two hitters and started to get a little upset. For the third guy, he went back to fastballs, throwing pretty much as hard as he could. So, he walks the third guy. There we are bases loaded with none out.

  “I went out to the mound and I told him, ‘Sandy, we’ve only got nine or so guys here to play this game. If you keep this up, you’re going to be here a long time. Why don’t you take something off the ball? Lay it in there. Let them hit it. We’ll catch the ball, get some outs and maybe we’ll get out of here at a decent hour. Nobody is going to swing the way you’re going now.’

  “I went back behind home plate and sure enough Sandy starts to throw them in there, nice and easy. We got out of the inning and when we came off the field I told him, ‘Sandy, I’m going to tell you something. And I’m not blowing smoke up your rear end. But you threw harder trying not to then when you were trying to.’ I think that registered with him—that his fastball was so good that he could just let it go.

  “Sometimes the easier that you do things, the more success you have doing it. Look at the guys who hit home runs. It’s kind of the same thing. Most of the time they’ll tell you that they weren’t trying to hit a home run. They’ll say, ‘Gosh, I didn’t hardly swing.’ Everything just worked right. I think it’s the same way, especially when it comes to throwing hard. When it works, everything just comes together—your body, your arm. That’s when you get the max out of things, rather than when you grunt and groan and throw as hard as you can. Too often when it’s done that way things don’t ever happen.”