Click the link below the picture
.
“The butterflies have already started,” said Rod Scurry on April 18, 1981, in anticipation of his first major league start the following day in Houston. The season was almost two weeks old, and Scurry had yet to make an appearance on the mound. In fact, he hadn’t pitched more than four innings in a single outing in two years. He was only getting the break now because Pirates ace Jim Bibby was injured; still, Scurry was excited and was hoping not just to start but also to finish his own game. “I’ll be trying to go nine,” he said.
Growing up, Rod Scurry never doubted he would play in the majors, if not as a pitcher then as a hitter. In high school, he once hit a five-hundred-foot home run. But despite his batting prowess, he had always been a pitcher at heart. In the 1960s, when he was just a child, he stacked mattresses against the wooden fence in the backyard of his Nevada home and hurled fastballs at them. He had always had power. But then there was the hook. He could sweep his curveball in at such an angle the ball would bend between a batter’s legs. Frequently compared to the preeminent lefty of all time, Sandy Koufax, Scurry drove himself to live up to the compliment. This desire propelled him out of bed at 5:30 a.m. to jog to school through high mountain air and sometimes freezing temperatures just so he could get extra pitching practice in at the Hug High gym before the opening bell rang. On game days, when his teachers believed him to be studiously tending to his work in the classroom he would in fact be poring over index cards he had made that listed the tendencies of the opposing team’s big hitters.
.
Pittsburgh, where baseball was changed forever. Photo by Andrea Evangelo-Giamou/EyeEm/Getty Images
.
.
Click the link below for the article:
.
__________________________________________
James' World 2 
Leave a comment