Chapter 1

"Hey, Space! The skipper wants to talk to you in his office right after the game, so don't skip out!"

Bill, our equipment, clubhouse manager, jockstrap coordinator and general all-around flunky to the powers that be had pegged me right. I had been scooting towards the shower to get in and get out of there fast, not that I had anything like a pressing engagement back at my dumpy one-bedroom apartment. Unless you were signed as a fat bonus baby, there aren't any big paydays when you're in the low minor leagues.

"Any idea what's up?" I weakly asked, not that Bill would ever tell me anyway. His job working for our AA club affiliate might only pay him peanuts too, but it was still a toehold in the game, and beat having to get a real job selling insurance or vacuum cleaners.

"Couldn't say, but I do know that Hesterfield is done making any further promotions to AAA for (this season) and no one here's getting any call-ups to the big club either. Between you and me and this dirty towel bag, I'd start looking hard for a good off-season job, just in case the team decides that you don't fit into their long-term picture... , which I'm betting you don't.

Bill didn't quite smirk, but nothing in his face or tone of voice suggested that he'd be missing me much next season, if they let me go. There was really nothing personal between us, but he probably was just probably tired of seeing my face for three straight years and thought my locker and spot on the pitching staff would be better off given to some new phenom or an actual prospect promoted up from High-A ball.

The little bastard scurried off before his poker face broke into a smile, thus giving me the excuse to try and pop him a good one. Actually our skipper and my head pitching coach might have approved of my trying to do that ... they were both always after me to show some spark and stop being so philosophical out there on the mound. 'Get all fired up', they'd say, 'Show some Wah' (fighting spirit), or do something ... anything to show that I was 'taking charge' out there.

Not really my style unfortunately. This was my third full season in a row here in AA ball, and the 'prospect' tag had long worn off. I knew that I was going to be toast and likely sooner rather than later. My career was pretty much already done, and I didn't need a long washed up former utility infielder that could never hit a curveball or a slider to tell me the obvious. More than likely, I was about to get a polite but firm request to get my locker emptied out and receive our manager's sincere wishes for a happier future ... out of baseball. Or at least no longer with this club.

Yep, especially after this evening's outing. It was pretty plain to everyone that both my elbow and shoulder were twinging in pain yet again. Frankly if I'd been a right handed pitcher, I'd have been shown the door a couple of years ago. There's never enough good left-handed pitching though ... or even enough vaguely adequate ones. With a healthy arm, I would sort have fit that latter category, but now I was strictly back of the bullpen 'garbage-time' filler material. Someone to run out once or twice a week in the middle innings after one of our starters has already given the game away and we're down five or six runs and unlikely to catch back up. Why put wear and tear on the arm of a decent prospect in what's certain to be a wasted effort?

That's me all right; Mr. Garbage Time, with a fastball generously clocked at its peak only in the mid-eighties and a half-dozen other 'junk ball' pitches that are even slower! Sure I can still throw strikes, even with my arm feeling like it is about to fall entirely off, but fastball speed is the first and sometimes the only thing a major league scout will focus upon. Velocity readings are objective, and sometimes completely misleading, but that's what gets their attention. I've noticed during my long years in the low minors that you have to at least have a minimum velocity in the high 80's to even get on anyone's radar, so to speak. They all come from the traditional "If you wanna go hunting you better bring a gun" school of scouting philosophy for pitching prospects.

Sometimes, I've seen scouts take a slight interest in guys that just throw strikes with middling velocity but have a good sinking movement, or an obscene level of accuracy. Guys like Hall of Famer Greg Maddux, or even me (laugh), back when I was healthy. Real pitchers - not just 'throwers' that can bring heat alright, but usually don't have a clue where the ball is going to end up.

If a pitcher can locate his pitches with accuracy within the zone, moving them in/out, up/down, taking some velocity off/adding some, it shows command. Some young arms just 'grip it and rip it', which is fine, but I still believe that precision will trump just raw awesome stuff against savvy hitters ... well sometimes anyway. It used to work out alright for me before my arm filed for divorce from the rest of my body.

Still having a little time left to kill, I sidled off to Greg's office. He was our 'skipper' and club manager and while his small dingy, barely air conditioned office was normally off-limits to us, having nothing particular to lose, I invited myself in and pretty much made myself at home while I waited for him. From the sound of things outside on the field, Lewis or yet another of our bottom rung relievers was trying to finish out the top of the ninth inning and probably cement our 8-1 loss. Sure as rain tomorrow, our batters would go down as meek as lambs one-two-three in our final at bat, but this would still give me a good five to ten minutes alone to think of some clever argument to offer the boss for keeping me on his roster for at least the final three weeks of the season ... if not a position for next spring.

Frankly, the odds weren't too good and I wasn't even fooling myself with 'glass half-full' thoughts. Sneaking a fast read of my scouting folder which was lying open on the middle of his otherwise cleared-off desk didn't bolster any of my remaining illusions. Frankly it was a wonder that the club had kept me on this long ... praying for a miracle, I suppose, and darned unlikely to get one. I'd been damaged goods for years.

Scouting reports are often vague and subjective at best and projecting the future development of young pitchers is usually a wild crap shoot. Even the best and most talented young top draft pick prospects fail over 67% of the time to reach the big club and get a chance in the majors. The odds, slim as they already are for the best-of-the-best, decrease rapidly to more than a 90% failure rate for young players like me drafted in the later rounds of the amateur draft. Pretty much my career had already defied the odds of success, and my scouting evaluations clearly reflected this ... but they still made rather interesting reading. I'll give you a few highlights.

Pre Draft Report: Spacey was selected in the 23rd round of the 2002 draft out of Victoria State College in Texas. Jesse first rose to scouts' attention during the 2002 State Junior College Playoffs, pitching 13 consecutive scoreless innings to win his team's quarter final match. Significantly below-average FB but with above-average movement. Curve 'plus-plus'. Change very-good with plus development. Good extension, balance and downhill for a slightly undersized pitcher. Throws very easy, low effort out front, repeats very well from wind up. Appears less comfortable from stretch. Strongly resembles Bob Knepper. Above average potential if FB can be improved. Mid-round draft possibilities. Excellent academics with an offer to transfer to Univ. of Texas this fall, but family money issues give him plus-level sign-ability. Plus intangibles.

Career Synopsis: Jesse signed almost immediately and was sent to 'Pioneer League' to begin his career. Beginning his first season with the PL Montana Raptors he was projected as a 3rd-4^th starter and limited to three or four innings per start as he built up arm strength and was not overmatched in his first pro experience. Next promoted to Class Low-A SAL Newport in late-August and High-A Clinton the following spring, he posted very respectable 8.3 K/9 and an excellent 2.7 K/BB ratios. Good work ethic and plus intangibles. A series of recurring shoulder and elbow injuries first incurred at AA Cedar City in 2005 have reduced his prospects to marginal status since. Condition appears chronic and has not improved with treatment or rest.

Additional Pitcher Comments:

Arm-Slot: ¾, with variations

Average v Peak Velocity: Poor; Slow, slow and slower

Pitchability – Above-Average/Excellent – "Backwards"

Summary: There is a whole lot to like in Spacey, despite his lack of acceptable arm strength, durability and his bottom ranked fastball which is the slowest in the entire organization. As he will be 27 by next April 1^st, Jesse should be no longer considered an acceptable MLB level prospect - but if healthy he could become an acceptable borderline LHP option for a bullpen. He has sound mechanics that do not seem to be the source of his chronic recurring tendonitis. Despite his lack of an adequate FB, his secondary pitches (especially his curveball) are well developed and already currently fringe MLB ready now and he shows excellent control of most of his pitches.

Current MLB Projection: Jesse likely projects to become a well-below average MLB talent, but if healthy, he might be a supporting trade block for a team needing veteran AAA filler or emergency LHP bullpen relief.

Well, what more can I say? Professional baseball scouts usually rate prospects on a scale of 20-80, with 45 being an 'average' MLB player. For younger prospects there is often a second number which is their future 'ceiling' projection. Overall I ranked a bit below the baseline average for a major league prospect. Ordinarily this would be quite alright, but with my arm strength and fastball both ranked with bottom basement scores of '20', plus my age, no scout or General Manager was going to notice or weigh particularly highly any of the other things I did do well, like my breaking pitches. I would be twenty-seven by the start of next season, still in the mid-minor leagues. This is the age that most players have their career year, in the major's ... at the big show. For a non-prospect down on the farm, I was just about past my 'sell-by' date and I had no projectable 'ceiling' left according to the scouts.

Pitchability is just a fancy word for intelligence, or Pitching IQ, the ability to set up hitters and exploit their weaknesses while focusing on your strengths. It is occasionally used in a negative connotation for pitchers like me who do not have exceptional stuff but somehow miraculously still manage to get batters out by "pitching backwards" or just throwing tons of strikes. Pitching backwards, which admittedly I do a great deal, is the approach of throwing off-speed pitches early in the count, and then finishing off a hitter with a fastball (or something slightly faster than the junk I'd thrown him previously). It can be very effective, but it also drives old school or traditional pitching coaches and managers crazy. The 'normal' recommended strategy is to throw fastballs early to get ahead, then throwing off-speed pitches to fool hitters and make them chase unhittable pitches to make the out. Just to show off the fact that I'm a crazy left-hander, I'll do anything to screw up the head of a batter, but in this case, I could safely assume that being called 'Backwards' wasn't really much of a compliment.

On the whole, the scouting report was actually kinder to me than I would have expected. My 'Command' and 'Control' were indeed well above average and if I'd had even a below-average Fastball clocked in the mid-high 80's I'd still be prospect material. Sorry guys, at best my FB these days teases just 84 mph ... and often is perilously closer to just 80. One of my pitching coaches once remarked that my change-up pitch was sometimes faster than my fastball! Catchers usually toss the ball back to me on the mound faster than I threw it to them! I used to have a bit more gas in my arm, but nowadays I'm thankful that it's even still attached! My shoulder burns with every fastball I throw, and my elbow hurts more with every breaking pitch, regardless of how slow it goes!

"So Space, how did you like the book?" My manager, our skipper Richard, or rather Dick "Captain" Morgan asked, catching me still in the act of reading some of my older scouting reports in the back of my file. Some were better, more flattering, and others less so. Mostly were actually of the latter variety. The glow apparently went off of my shiny 'prospect' status about two seconds after my chronically sore elbow first hit the bucket of ice four years ago right here in AA. I hadn't quite torn it according to the MRI scan, but it also never quite healed up to anything close to 100% since then. I spent the next year rehabbing back in Low and High A ball and almost two years ago I fought my way back onto the AA roster ... mostly by lying to the club doctor that my arm did indeed feel just fine and that nothing significant was wrong with me.

I wasn't fooling anyone of course. They gave me yet another bout of scans and tests a few months ago and didn't see anything worth cutting me open to try and fix. I just have a 'weak arm' and I am prone to recurring chronic tendonitis. Throwing exercises and lots of weight-room work maybe helped a little, but not really enough to make the problem go away to stay. Now I was probably about to hear the hatchet swing.

"Compelling reading Skip, especially the medical reports! A real page-turner ... but the ending looks to be really bleak." I replied with a smile. Hell, our skipper, the terror of AA Cedar City was actually a rather benevolent old tyrant, assuming you did your strength and conditioning work and were one of the early ones to arrive at the clubhouse and one of the last to leave. If you were a slacker you'd get on his shit list fast and he knew a thousand ways to make a young kid's life miserable. He was old school, a veteran of a dozen decent years service in the big show back in the 1960's and 70's when players were underpaid and worked a lot harder than they mostly do now. My scouting scorecards didn't give out points for 'works hard' or 'dedicated', but there was the nice comment in the most recent summary about 'good work ethic and plus-intangibles'. Still, at best I was being pretty much damned with the very faint praise.

"The ending," he paused for good long effect while he claimed his old beat-up swivel chair behind his even more battered iron desk and started to take off his uniform, "much remains yet to be seen." Like Casey Stengel, if you wanted to talk to the old bear in his lair, be expecting to find an old white-haired man sitting around talking for hours about the game he loved while wearing nothing but his underwear. In summer if the A/C was out (often) he might not even wear those.

Down to just his boxers this early autumn evening, the old white terror whipped out a bottle of Old Overcoat Bourbon from his bottom right desk drawer and a pair of relatively clean glasses and poured each of us about two inches and then gave the doorway a quick glance to make sure that his office door was shut and that 'Bungalow' Bill, our weasel of a clubhouse manager wasn't eavesdropping. The little prick could definitely read lips and would have stuck around to watch if the skipper hadn't next given him a beady-eyed squint through the glass. As I said, our manager was old school and anything said in the skipper's office (or even within the clubhouse for that matter) was to remain private. Some of the kids still ran their mouths anyway and found out fast that this was just about the quickest expressway to the boss's shit list. Me? I'd been a good boy ... and definitely didn't have anything in my career worth telling anyone on the Internet about.

"Space, you might not know it but I cashed in a chip for your fat-ass right after the All-Star Break when Lance was ready to just outright release you. In a fit of temporary insanity, I convinced him for some inexplicable reason that you still had a modicum of potential as trade material. Not for anyone with any actual talent mind you, but the fact that you're a left-hander, and a real pitcher ... not just a thrower gives a tiny amount of slack. Oh ... and you still apparently have a pulse and haven't quite hit thirty yet. All the above still gives you a minor amount of trade value and if you'd been released, someone would have offered you a minor league contract elsewhere, so I convinced him that you were worth keeping around as a petty bargaining chip for some future deal."

All of this was actually quite true. Nearly every major league club is desperate for left-handed pitching. Even a non-prospect like me doomed to the back end of the bullpen has some intrinsic value. I wasn't quite over the hill yet ... and I could throw strikes. Someone would take the risk that under their new enlightened tutelage all of my arm troubles would magically go away and they'd strike lightning in a bottle ... or at least find an adequate 'garbage-time' reliever.

Lance Hesterfield was the GM of our major league club and the top boss over the player development side of things and he wasn't the least bit prone to sentiment. In his farm system, you were either a prospect moving up and onwards or you were a liability that needed to be excised. Lance could give the infamous 'Trader' Jack McKeon a run for his money wheeling and dealing, trading off his 'problems' for new, and hopefully better (and younger) prospects.

"Thanks, I guess, Skip. I wouldn't have thought that I was worth an IOU chip."

"You're not really," he laughed, "but if your arm doesn't fall off first, you sometimes, once in a great while, show the rare flash of having some actual pitching talent. Except for the last pitch you threw tonight to Eversall, that was four solid innings of well-crafted baseball where the hitters were clueless about what slice of junk-shit you were going to offer up to them next. Eversall is going to majors and will probably get the call-up in a few weeks after the rosters expand on September 1^st. If your arm had been healthy, you'd have had another two inches of drop on that sinker, not to mention more movement your curveball and forkball too, and he'd have struck out swinging looking stupid instead of planting your weak sauce over the center field fence. Your elbow hurt and you tried to ease one past him and instead we lost by seven runs instead of just five. Billing still gets the loss, and dinger or not, your season ERA actually dropped by a tenth of a percent, not that having a 5.30 for the year is anything to be happy about. Anyway, Lance called me earlier today to say that he's got your name penciled in as the PTBNL for the trade he did with Los Angeles a few weeks ago right at the trading deadline. This will give you a new start with a new ball club... if you can pass the physical! Now, what I need to know is, how bad is the arm ... really?"