Finding Mudville: My first win as a pro | Sports | Berkeley Independent

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Finding Mudville: My first win as a pro

Published Tuesday, June 30, 2009 10:54 AM

By Dan Brown
Berkeley Independent

The ink written by my 18-year-old hand has faded to a dull brown: July 1, 1976.

Thirty-three years ago today.

The baseball bares the scars and scuffs of a game. It still feels good in my hands.

An 0-2 curve ball, a big roundhouse type that complimented a 90 mph fastball hitting the glove as pretty as you please on the outside corner.

Kenny Phelps was the hitter, the Kansas City Royals’ number one draft pick that year. Phelps was a hitting machine, played nine years in The Show with K.C. and Seattle, with arms like tree trunks and one of the nastiest make-you-week-in-the-knees glares you’d ever want to see staring back at you from the batter’s box. His look alone made you question your choice of profession.

I had just gassed him with an eye-high fastball for strike two.

My 0-2 deuce started out at his eyeballs and hit the catcher’s target at Kenny’s knees – which coincidentally, buckled like cheap table legs.

The umpire rang him up and I picked up my first win as a professional baseball player.

Billy Evers, my catcher, now a scout for the San Francisco Giants, trotted to the mound, gave me this ball, and said, “Nice job, rook.”

My pitching line that day: nine innings pitched, one run, three hits, no walks, and eight strikeouts.

I wasn’t even a month out of high school, a professional for all of three weeks then. I’d been to Florida twice before in my life, but this was the first time I’d ever been by myself – in fact, this was the first time I’d been anywhere by myself.

The Cubs drafted me on a Thursday, I signed on Saturday, was on a plane by Sunday and on the mound on Monday.

That fast.

We won 6-4 in 14 innings. I threw nine innings of relief to get the win. I gave up my only run in the 13th, a game-tying homer.

The real moment of the game came in the top of the 14th, on a George DeMatteo inside the park homerun to score former USC ball player Steve Rackley from first. DeMatteo drove the ball to right center. It ricocheted off a metal pole in the tarp covered chain link fence into the right field corner near the bullpen.

What made this moment so funny was that Rackley suffered through those 14 innings of baseball in 99-degree Central Florida summer heat, sweating out a half dozen or so Tequila Sunrises from the night before. Bloodshot and rheumy eyed, Steve laced a single up the middle as a pinch-hitter just moments before. He said afterwards that he saw three baseballs coming at him and swung at the one in the middle.

He stood on first, hands on his knees, heaving, desperately trying to keep the Tequila, orange juice and grenadine where it belonged.

As the ball left DeMatteo’s bat, Rackley was off. His problems started as he rounded second and tried to find third.

He couldn’t, wandering off almost into shallow left field at full gallop until correcting his course to finally hit third, his mouth agape, his tongue wagging and his complexion waxen.

Steve took such a wide, roundhouse turn of third he almost fell into the third base dugout, but another more pressing problem by then arose. George, who hit the ball, had already rounded third and actually had to slow up or he’d have passed him.

Rackley and DeMatteo hit the plate one behind the other. Steve though, didn’t break stride, running through the gate, down the tunnel under the grandstand and out the exit to the parking lot where he promptly surrendered those half dozen or so Tequila Sunrises.

When we boarded the bus to go home, we found Steve lying prone, stretched across the two back seats, an ice towel draped over his face.

He was not moving, and we did not bother him.

I remember this play every time I hold that baseball.

So Steve, if you’re out there, let’s do lunch. Sweet tea this time, hold the tequila and hold the sunrise.

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