High Heat (19 page)

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.

 

 

W
ell, 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 pitchers 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.”

A few days later, back at the Dodgers' complex in Vero Beach, it was apparent to anybody watching how far the fireballer had come. Koufax threw to Sherry in what the players called “the string area.” This was a series of mounds with string set up near the plates to represent the strike zones. In the past, Koufax had struggled to consistently put the ball inside the strings. But on this day, he was having no difficulty. In fact, he soon told Sherry to cover the plate with dirt. Then he told him to draw a line where the outside of the plate was and another for the inside part.

“After that I just sat on the corners and he hit my glove all day. It was unbelievable how much he changed,” Sherry says. “The previous years he hadn't come close to that. Heck, the previous week he couldn't have done it.”

In 1961, Koufax broke through, going 18–13, leading the league with 269 strikeouts in 255 ⅔ innings. But that was just a hint of what was to come. He pitched the first of his four no-hitters the following season and led the league in victories and strikeouts in 1963, 1965, and 1966. He was inducted into Cooperstown at the age of 36, the youngest player ever to enter the Hall of Fame.

“With any of these great pitchers, the questions become, ‘Can they harness their stuff? Can they pull together what's been given to them sufficiently to become great?'” says Jeff Torborg, who caught Koufax's perfect game in September 1965. “That's not an easy thing to do. Not easy to do on any field, at any time. But these guys show that it can be done.”