Last night while we were warming up on a sultry, well
groomed youth league park in Plano…my son, Luke and his Ranger Team were about
to play the last game of the season…and RA Dickey was throwing a second 1
hitter in a row…the first time since 1988 when Dave Stieb
of the Toronto Blue Jays threw two of those one hit
wonders. It should be noted that the
cruel fate of baseball had both of Stieb’s back to back no hit outings being
broken up with 2 outs, 2 strikes... in the ninth inning…oh the brutal reality.
I remember that
1996 spring day, on my commute home, when cruel fate would strike… just 8 years
later from when the Baseball gods wreaked havac on Stiebs back to back one hit
games. The Rangers had sign RA Dickey to
the “Big Leagues” with an impressive signing bonus of $810,000.00. For a change, the Texas Rangers were focusing
on a pitching phenom…a total paradigm shift from “lets bludgeon to death the
other team with big bats.”
A Rangers
physician saw Dickey’s right throwing arm hanging oddly in a photo and
requested further evaluation. The
evaluation completed and Dickey’s signing bonus plummeted….to $75,000.00…the
reason…Dickey had no ulnar collateral ligament of elbow joint. Doctors were bewildered of how he could even
perform day to day task without enormous pain…little lone hurl an 87 mph fast
ball. He labored in the minors…made it
to the majors in 2001….but his stuff wasn’t very good…and in 2006 the Rangers
slotted him as the 5th hurler in the rotation only to be rocked by
giving up 6 home runs in his season start.
In 2007, a guy by
the name of Doug Melvin, GM for the Milwaukee Brewers signed him to the
organization…Melvin should ring a bell for the Rangers fan…he was the GM for
the Texas Rangers when they signed Dickey in 1996. To cut to the chase…and to be brutally
honest…Dickey’s ERA looked more like James LeBron’s rebound average than a big
league pitching ERA. He bounced around
in the minors…from the Brewers…to the Mariners…then on to the Mets…
Somewhere along
the way, RA Dickey learned how to throw the knuckle ball…yep…the much maligned
knuckle ball. The pitch that will give
the batter fits…heck…most the time the pitcher doesn’t know where it’s
going…but it seems Dickey throws it different…he actually pounds the strike
zone with it…he doesn’t walk hitters with it…and here is the kicker…it can
range in speed from 83 mph to 55 mph…that fact alone makes me want to write bad
checks. His ERA is now where “Holy Cow
he can Pitch” ERA’s should be…teams that face the Mets now calculate out where
Dickey is in the rotation and pray to the powers to be that allow the same
brutal reality that faced Dickey back in 1996 to show mercy on their poor
hitting souls in 2012.
This eclectic,
avid reader and born again Christian is an enigmatic personality that has
scores of life’s lessons wrapped up in his biography. You never give up…you never quit…even when
you labor in anonymity…you Press On despite what cruel reality comes your
way...and continue to evaluate who you are…what you are…adapt…over come…and
when you can’t seem to throw the fast ball to get an out…do something
unorthodox…like maybe the knuckle…yeah…throw that knuckle…
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