4 pitches for their futures

On Sunday, October 19, a 23-year-old stepped onto a pitcher’s mound with the outcome of the American League Championship Series in his hands. Just a few pitches later, he might have given up a bases-loaded single to tie the final game of the series. Instead, he struck out Red Sox outfielder J.D. Drew. Within the span of four pitches, rookie David Price became a hero.
Four pitches. It may not seem like a lot for a baseball player to prove himself, but it’s enough for any major leaguer to transform into an hero or a goat. It would have to do, then, for the 128 high school prospects from all five boroughs who attended the Senior Fall Showcase on October 18 at KeySpan Park.
Everyone, including parents, coaches and professional scouts, is here to see a few pitches possibly make or break some students’ path to a career in professional baseball.
Is there pressure on the 17-year-olds and their parents? You bet. But the protocol of the day is to stay quiet and act casual - and to hope that it rubs off on your pitching.
Joseph Lopez, a pitcher for All City Leadership Academy in Brooklyn, wants to play professional baseball. He says he was nervous on the way to the park, but that he calmed down when he spoke to some coaches on the field and decided, “I’m just here to do my best and work hard for what I want.”
Like every other pitcher, Lopez has five chances to impress the players and coaches lined up along the side of the bullpen, and the parents and scouts peering downward from the edge of the third-base stands. There are two pitching mounds in the pen, and the players abide by a constant rotation: Warm up with five throws from one mound, listen to the coach in charge blare your name (“JOSEPH LOPEZ, ALL CITY LEADERSHIP ACADEMY”), take your five best shots in front of the radar gun, and get the heck out of there.
Some players do quite well. Mariel Checo, of Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan, hits 89 miles per hour. Elvis Torres, of EBC High School in Brooklyn, displays a dramatic curveball. Bennie Fair, of John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx, is lanky and commanding and looks a little bit like Dwight Gooden.
Others, somewhat unluckier, draw a reflexive “ooh” from the crowd when their pitches sail into the fence, or right into the audience of teammates.
“I feel like they should have made us throw more, show how much speed we’ve got,” Lopez says after it’s all over. “[But] it felt good.”
Now, Lopez can take a comfortable seat behind the third-base dugout, watch the infield practice before him, and dream about playing for his beloved Yankees. He is careful to point out, of course, that he would gladly play for any other team, too.
Randy Klein, sitting not too far from Lopez and holding a camera, is the parent of a catcher. His son Jasper plays for the High School of American Studies in the Bronx, and he’s currently catching tosses from the near infield and throwing out imaginary runners at second base. After three throws, he’s had his turn. As Jasper returns to the dugout, Klein gives him a thumbs-up, then calls back to him that no, he doesn’t have any food.
Klein cares deeply about his son and his sport, and says, “We sleep and eat catching at our house.” Nevertheless, he recognizes that so much of his son’s baseball future is out of his hands - and, for that matter, out of his son’s hands too. Even though Jasper’s three heaves to second never miss perfection by more than two feet, there are other factors in play.
Right at the top is the fact that Jasper measures 5’9.” You cannot teach tallness.
“You can’t even think about being at a Division I school if you’re not 6’1” or higher,” says Klein. “Competition is severe at this point. You cannot have expectations like you are gonna be in the major leagues. … All the parent can really do is be encouraging and be positive.”
“It’s not so much whether they win. It’s a personal thing,” Klein continues, citing the private hurdles a catcher must clear to keep up with 90-mile-an-hour pitches. One common exercise is to catch balls from a pitching machine - and to move up two, four, six feet to simulate the speed of a Francisco Rodriguez fastball. When someone finally calls you a gamer - “the highest compliment,” Klein says - you know you’ve reached baseball nirvana.
Among the professionals watching Jasper catch is Jason Burns, an assistant coach at Schenectady Community College who has recruited 10 players from the Senior Fall Showcase in the last four or five years. Burns’ protocol is to call the coach of a player who interests him, but sometimes he is the one being approached. “As soon as I got out of the car” at one Chelsea High School game, he recalls, “a lot of people came up to me and asked for a scholarship.”
Now, though, Burns is back at the bullpen, taking notes unbothered as Lopez and others show off their stuff. As they watch from the third-base stands, he and Will Horan, a fellow assistant coach, identify six things they look for in a pitching recruit: size, mechanics, consistency, arm action, and velocity.
“You can’t change size, and mechanics don’t change,” Burns explains. Horan, meanwhile, is making comments about players that range from “He looks like he’s forcing a stop” to “His arm got up out of the slot a lot quicker.”
“I think a few players might be a little scared to death in front of all these people … and it’s a pretty small sample size,” Burns says. “It’s better to see them in games. But this helps limit the schools you have to travel to.”
Do not tell that to Patricia Lee, who has been to Jamestown, NY, and Las Vegas to see her grandson Garrett Reischour play. He is a pitcher for New Dorp High School in Staten Island, and yes, Lee noticed that he “got a little red” when he was throwing in the bullpen.
However, Lee’s perspective is different from most; she has come to the Senior Fall Showcase with a little bit of wistfulness. Lee lives in New Jersey now, but it was here in Brooklyn that she went hoarse rooting for the Dodgers. She calls the trip to KeySpan Park “nostalgic for me.”
Indeed, the names and numbers emblazoned on the walls here are not just of Brooklyn Cyclones “graduates” like Brian Bannister and Danny Garcia. They are also of the Dodgers of old, players like Carl Erskine and Gil Hodges who will always live more in Brooklyn than they do in Los Angeles.
That’s what the all the fuss - the scout showcases, the pitching-machine practicing, the desperate requests for scholarship money - is really about, it seems. It’s about the romanticism of baseball, and all the hard steps one has to take to enter its world.