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  He broke his right arm playing football. As soon as it had healed, he promptly shattered it again, playing football. “I kind of got used to breaking things,” he says.

  Wagner began life as a right-hander. Even today he still writes and eats with his right hand. But after he broke the arm and during a prolonged time in various casts, he began to throw left-handed. Balls, rocks, anything—it didn’t matter. Wagner discovered that one of the few things in his life he could control was the accuracy and velocity of any available projectile. It felt good to throw hard.

  Born in Tannersville, Virginia, Wagner was shuffled around southwestern Virginia, moving from his father’s, to his mother’s, and on to both sets of grandparents, before doing it all over again. His childhood reads like a map of battlefields from the Civil War—Lynchburg, Concord, Marion, Appomattox. “Back then the world was on my shoulders and I was mad at anybody who talked to me,” he says. “I wasn’t so mad about being moved around. I just felt like my sister and I weren’t getting a fair shake. That we weren’t getting treated like we should be treated as kids.”

  Indeed, Wagner found himself having to act more and more like an adult. When his mother remarried, his new stepfather was a drunkard and physically abused Yvonne. One hot summer afternoon, when Billy was nine years old, the family went swimming at a local pond. While they were in the water, the stepfather became enraged at Billy’s mother. He held Yvonne’s head underwater, almost drowning her, until Billy began to pound on his back and head with his small fists.

  “That was enough to save me,” Yvonne says. “That’s why my son will always be my hero. He’s my heartthrob. I’m so proud of him and what he’s done with his life. He can take the worst situation and find something good in it. But I saw, after a while, he couldn’t grow up the way he should with me. I had to let him go.”

  Yvonne was a waitress at the Golden Corral Steak House in Lynchburg, Virginia, and Billy’s baseball games were often miles away from her work. Between the unstable home life and the inability to get Billy to his games and practices, his mother decided Wagner would move in with his aunt and uncle, Jack and Sally Lamie. At the age of 14, Billy’s wandering days were over and he was officially adopted by the Lamies. His cousin Jeff became his stepbrother.

  Jeff Lamie was a sports star, and Wagner tagged along after him; joining many of the same teams. But while Lamie had an athlete’s physique, Wagner was a runt. In high school, he was maybe 5-foot-7, tipping the scales at 140 pounds. He was so small that he was overlooked for the Virginia High School All-Star Game his senior year despite impressive statistics.

  When no universities expressed much interest in him, Wagner followed Lamie to nearby Ferrum College. The day Billy tried out, he was fortunate to simply make the team. Pursuing an outfield spot, he didn’t hit very well. As a last resort, Ferrum coach Abe Naff suggested he throw off the mound. Although Wagner had never gotten his fastball out of the mid-80s in high school, that day he threw harder than he ever had.

  “That’s when God said, ‘It’s time for you to throw a little harder. Make a life for yourself,’” he remembers. “I had to be throwing 91, 92 miles per hour that day. I had never thrown that hard before.”

  Because the Ferrum team couldn’t afford a radar gun, exactly how hard Wagner could bring it wasn’t determined until his sophomore year. When an Atlanta Braves scout passed through town, checking out several of the college’s senior pitchers, Naff asked him to clock Wagner.

  “He about fell over,” Naff says. “Billy was consistently putting the ball over in the low- to mid-90s. He just couldn’t believe it.”

  Wagner averaged an NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) record 19.1 strikeouts per nine innings as a sophomore. In the summer, he starred in the Cape Cod League, where he caught the attention of a number of baseball pundits, including ESPN’s Peter Gammons. In three seasons at Ferrum, he struck out 327 batters—then a Division III record.

  “At the cut of the grass and the dirt,” says Naff, “his ball just explodes. Always has. You can’t figure how a guy that small can throw the ball that hard.”

  The Braves never got a chance to draft Wagner. He was taken in the first round, 12th overall, in 1993 by the Houston Astros. Wagner, like Lincecum, quickly rose through the organization. He made the major leagues for good after just two years in the minors.

  But the nightmare, at least when it came to family, wasn’t quite over. This time it was a quick blow to the heart instead of a slow numbing squeeze of the soul.

  Two days after the Astros added Wagner to their 40-man roster—May 16, 1995—he received a late-night phone call from his girlfriend, Sarah Quesenberrry. Her voice was frantic and edgy. At first he thought it was some kind of a joke. Then she told him that her father and stepmother had been shot and killed outside a Hillsville, Virginia, apartment complex. The Quesenberrys were helping Sarah’s half sister move when her estranged husband arrived on the scene. During a heated argument, Steven and his second wife, Tina, were gunned down in cold blood. Once again being on the mound, no matter how pressurized the situation, proved to be a sanctuary for him. “There’s no explanation for why things happen sometimes,” Wagner says. “But baseball has been a blessing in disguise for me. No doubt about that. It’s allowed me to move on with my life.”

  Driving Route 29 from the Washington, D.C., suburbs toward Charlottesville, Virginia, can be like a trip back in time. The road dates back to the 1700s and was the same route that James Madison and Thomas Jefferson traveled to meet with the other Founding Fathers back when the nation was being born. Somewhere near Culpepper the last of the subdivisions that line the rolling turnpike out from Washington finally gives way to farmland, and out on the horizon looms the rolling outline of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Near Charlottesville, Wagner lives on a 200-acre farm with Sarah and their four children. After the baseball season ends, he comes home to this spread, complete with alpacas grazing in the fields. From a distance, they could pass for small llamas. During the offseason Wagner usually travels the alpaca circuit, showing and selling the animals.

  But after the 2008 season, Wagner had more pressing concerns. That year, as the Mets battled in the National League East, he had been forced to spend several weeks on the disabled list because of a sore elbow. Then the injury was deemed more serious. After 14 years in the majors, it was determined he needed to have Tommy John surgery. Afterward, he spent much of the 2009 season, his last of a four-year, $43-million deal with the New York Mets, rehabbing the injury. He returned in time to finish the season as a setup man for the Boston Red Sox.

  Theories abound about how a little guy like Wagner can generate as much velocity to compete with the big boys. Former Astros pitching coach Vern Ruhle once said that Wagner’s powerful legs were “the foundation for everything he does.” Dierker says the way Wagner snaps his wrist during his follow-through toward home plate may be the key. If so, Wagner shares the company of Roger Clemens and Steve Dalkowski, who were also known for such techniques.

  For his part, Wagner believes that the reasons may extend past physical ability. “I think a lot of it has to do with my heart,” he replies.

  Despite a childhood straight out of Charles Dickens, struggling to prove himself in a game that regularly turns to bigger guys for the heavy work, Wagner remains remarkably self-confident. Long ago he learned when to keep the demons under lock and key and when to turn them loose.

  “There are a lot of days that I’ve thought about my childhood or what happened to [Sarah’s] dad, and I’ll take it on the field with me. I’ll admit to that,” he says. “It makes me stronger. I’m a little bit more intense. I’m a little bit tougher when I’m out there.

  “When you’re 18 years old, it’s time for you to make your own way in the world. It doesn’t have to be bad anymore. For 18 years it may have been, but after that it’s your life. You can take it and make it anything you want. That’s what I really believe in. You can make it anything you want.”

 
Before missing much of the 2009 season due to Tommy John surgery, Wagner had proven himself in game after game, season after season, establishing himself as one of the top arms in the game despite his small stature. Some maintained he belonged among the greatest fireballers ever—Bob Feller, Walter Johnson, Sandy Koufax, Steve Dalkowski. Some, like Nolan Ryan, believed that in his prime Wagner may have found his way to the head of that class. Could he have been the fastest ever?

  “That’s for somebody else to decide,” says Wagner, who signed with the Atlanta Braves for the 2010 season. “But I’m proud of what I’ve done, how I’ve gone about my business. For the most part, it’s been, ‘Here’s my fastball. Can you hit it?’ It’s been as simple as that.”

  That’s certainly the way it was years ago when I first saw him, on that night in the Astrodome, when Wagner was first becoming Billy the Kid. After getting Bobby Bonilla to ground out, Wagner got two strikes on Alou. But the Marlins’ outfielder fouled off several pitches down the right field line before looping a single into center.

  That brought up the dangerous Conine. Wagner decided to give him nothing but heat. In fact, over the years, the closer figures that 90 percent of his pitches at the big-league level have been fastballs. Wagner, like many relievers, remembers how, during the 1996 World Series, the Braves’ fireballer Mark Wohlers got beat with his third-best pitch on the game’s largest stage.

  “If I’m going to lose,” Wagner said, “it will be with my best stuff.”

  Conine fanned on nothing but high heat.

  Catcher Charles Johnson represented the Marlins’ last chance. He jumped on Wagner’s first pitch, driving the ball deep into right field, where an outfielder tracked it down.

  Afterward, in the home clubhouse, Wagner sat in front of his locker. His left arm, from the shoulder on down to the wrist, was wrapped in ice bags and Ace bandages—an omen of the stress put on his arm and the injury still years away.

  “Nobody was up there just trying to spoil pitches,” he said afterward in the clubhouse. “They were swinging hard, at every pitch. One mistake and they could have hit it out, easy. It just came down to strength against strength. That’s the way it should be, but you know sometimes it just isn’t.”

  My home phone rings and it is Phil Pote on the other end. The man must be telepathic. Almost every time this search for the fastest pitcher starts to stall, he gives me a call.

  “Who have you been talking to?” he asks.

  “Billy Wagner,” I reply, “and Tim Lincecum.”

  “The little guys.”

  “Who can throw hard. Nolan Ryan has Wagner on his all-time list.”

  “I can’t argue with that,” Pote replies. “But remember that the old Astrodome had a fast gun. The pitchers loved to waste one there just to see what showed up. Word had it that the old Dome added a few clicks, especially if a ball was high in the strike zone.”

  “So, you’re saying Wagner was the beneficiary of that.”

  “Listen to the hotshot writer using the five-dollar words.”

  “But that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?” I say.

  “I’m not taking anything away from Billy Wagner,” Pote said. “If I could have thrown that hard back in my day, I’d be living at a much higher station in life than I am now. All I’m saying is consider both ends of the spectrum. If you’re going to focus on Wagner and the like, make sure you remember the big guys.”

  “J. R. Richard.”

  “There’s one. How about tall guys who couldn’t get out of their own way for a spell? Sometimes you wonder how they ever put it together.”

  “Like Randy Johnson?”

  “Now you’re talking,” Pote says. “Sometimes the mechanics of pitching, all the science involved, can be just as difficult for them.”

  “El Rando Grando” steps from behind the velvet curtain. He’s dressed in a white puff-sleeved shirt, gold-colored vest, and red satin pants that look like they’re out of the Arabian Nights.

  As the crowd cheers, he briefly acknowledges his fearless assistant, Impalea, who is strapped to a spinning circular platform. Red lines converge toward her body like crosshairs on a rifle’s telescope. El Rando Grando—aka Randy Johnson—gingerly picks up a pearl-handled knife and begins his act.

  His first attempt strikes a bit too close to Impalea for comfort, drawing gasps from the audience. Although his second pitch soars off camera, there’s little doubt what has happened. An ugly splat is heard, followed by loud groans. Poor Impalea is history. Such wildness doesn’t faze El Rando Grando, though. He shakes his head and moves on, already poised to deliver the next knife.

  This television commercial aired in the Seattle market for Mariners season tickets in the mid-1990s. Other spots included manager Lou Piniella as an unsympathetic psychiatrist, outfielder Jay Buhner as a lousy stand-up comic, and pitcher Chris Bosio as a crazed tooth-pulling dentist. But everyone’s favorite was Johnson as El Rando Grando. That’s because this was the era when Johnson arrived as one of the most dominant pitchers in the game, a fireballer who would reach the 300-victory plateau nearly 15 years later. After years of struggling with his control he was finally ready to humble hitters. A transition mirrored by the shift of his nickname from “Big Bird” to “Big Unit,” and a career punctuated by one of the most bizarre events in fireballer lore—the exploding bird. In March 2001, during a spring training game at Tucson, Arizona, Johnson was on the mound with the Giants’ Calvin Murray at the plate. As Johnson delivered a fastball that was estimated to be traveling at upward of 95 miles per hour, a dove swooped down low between the pitching mound and home plate. In odds that were later calculated to be 1 in 13 million, Johnson’s offering struck the bird.

  “[It] just exploded,” Murray told the Associated Press. “Feathers everywhere. Poof.”

  The official call? No pitch. The incident remains a favorite on YouTube today.

  If it wasn’t for Nolan Ryan and Tom House, it’s likely that Johnson’s legacy would have centered on a few odd pieces of baseball trivia rather than a successful career of All-Star and postseason appearances. During the 1992 season, the Rangers were in Seattle, and Ryan and House watched Johnson battle through a poor workout.

  “It was obvious he was having trouble with his control,” House recalls. “I got to asking Big Tex what he would do about the kid’s delivery. I threw in some suggestions. It’s something we did anyplace we were—watching other players, trying to figure out what makes them tick.”

  Even though so much in baseball is secret, House prides himself on being “a teacher first and everything else second.” After the workout, he overheard Johnson complaining about his wildness. In response, he invited Johnson to meet with him and Ryan the next day in the Rangers’ bullpen.

  House had spotted a flaw in Johnson’s delivery. As the left-hander completed his follow-through, he wasn’t driving toward the plate. At least not driving as hard as, say, Nolan Ryan. In fact, the winter before, through his work with the Bio-Kinetics Co., House had analyzed several pitchers’ windups, including Johnson’s. He remembered that Johnson’s delivery was in so many different pieces, the different stages refusing to work together, that somebody such as Jim Abbott, who is seven inches shorter than Johnson, was almost a foot and half closer to home plate when he released the ball.

  “It was a coaching moment,” House says. “Maybe Randy was more receptive because Nolan was there. I’m sure he had been given similar information before. But on that day we had a kid who was ready to listen.”

  “Everybody said Nolan Ryan had a big influence,” Johnson says of his change in form, “but Tom House was the one who worked on my mechanics.”

  Where Ryan helped was with the mental part of the game. He and Johnson then went over how to set up hitters. And more importantly, Ryan told the hard-throwing but erratic southpaw not to worry about the walks. Control would come in time. He should go with his strength—the heat.

  Johnson likes to compare himself with Ryan. The two rarely pl
ayed on contenders and as a result, Johnson believes, hardly ever received fair shakes in Cy Young races. “A lot of people look at him as having all these individual accomplishments and being only a .500 pitcher,” says Johnson, who changed his number to Ryan’s for a day when the Express retired. “But he was only on a .500 team or below. So, you can only go out there and do so much.”

  Of course, sometimes science can only do so much, as well. Despite the latest in testing and the best of intentions, a fireballer can be misunderstood. As a result, a career can be forever altered.

  Almost from the beginning, James Rodney Richard was a formidable presence on the mound. In Vienna, Louisiana, where he grew up, Richard went an entire season of high school ball without allowing an earned run. By the time he reached the Houston Astros in 1971, he stood 6-foot-8, and his slider was faster than many pitchers’ fastballs. He struck out 15 batters in his first National League start, tying Karl Spooner’s record set in 1954. Richard went on to strike out 313 hitters in 1979. Many a hitter caught wind of that résumé, snuck a peek at Richard out on the mound, and considered himself pretty much out before he even stepped into the batter’s box.

  “When you’ve got a guy out there who throws the ball 98 miles per hour like James Rodney, the batters don’t do too much joking around. It’s all business,” Astros catcher Alan Ashby once told Cox News Service. “When a batter steps into the box against J.R., the comments don’t vary much. Usually, they just look there and say, ‘Well, no chance this time.’ And afterward, you just see the guys turn around slowly with this look of despair on their face, kind of an expression of helplessness. Against J.R., you see it all the time.”

  Yet along the way, Richard was also called a loner, a problem player, and a malingerer. In the end he would become yet another fireballer with a tragic closing act as his career, which began with so much promise, so much velocity, was derailed well before the intimidating right-hander had any chance at reaching the Hall of Fame.