The Arm (10 page)

About a week later, Perfect Game called. Neil apologized, but Riley couldn't come. He didn't break promises, and he pledged to go to Chicago. Different Perfect Game representatives called his advisors, Greg Schaum and Jason Wood, and even the coaching staff at Louisiana State University. When that didn't work, Ford paid Pint a personal visit and tried to talk with Neil about San Diego, even though Schaum explicitly said not to bring it up.
Perfect Game's inability to tolerate rejection did not endear the company to the Pint family, least of all Riley.

One of the challenges of burgeoning stardom is learning to say no. “I hate it,” Neil said. “I'm not good at it. And they know it.” His son suffered no such compunctions. “I don't really like when people try to tell me what to do,” Riley said. “I do listen to people, but when I'm already committed somewhere, I don't want somebody else coming and talking to me like it'll benefit me more. I've made my decision, and I'm happy with it.”

It wasn't that Pint thought too much of himself. He just hated distractions. If an agent tried to recruit Riley away from Schaum, he said thanks but no thanks. Two lieutenants for Scott Boras, the industry's most powerful agent, went to what seemed like every one of his games, wearing Boras Corp. logos on shirts with the Greg Norman shark emblem. Pint paid them no mind. When USA Baseball wanted Pint to headline the eighteen-and-under national team, perhaps the biggest possible honor for an amateur, he said no, because those conversations with Neil about taking care of his arm resonated, and he didn't want to throw too much. The numbers supported Pint's choice: A ten-year study by ASMI showed that pitchers who threw more than one hundred competitive innings were three and a half times likelier to suffer a serious elbow or shoulder injury.

It's not that Pint was incapable of throwing more. He refused to kowtow to the machine Perfect Game had created. If he wanted to make some spending money over the summer, he would babysit. The way Neil Pint protected his son was one thing. The lengths to which Pint went to protect himself were empowering. He was the antishowcase antidote, proof that the right kids could make the system and not vice versa. Pint knew his stuff and believed in it. He didn't need Perfect Game to tell him so.

“Personally, I don't really look at the site,” Pint said. “I don't pay attention to it much. The rankings are cool, I guess, to see where you're at, but I don't look at it that much. I know some
people who are just excited when they see their name on Perfect Game.”

Anthony Molina's name more or less disappeared from the site over the winter. His ascent was fraught with peril in the first place. He went to West Broward High, near his home in Pembroke Pines, Florida, as a freshman. He transferred to American Heritage, a local powerhouse, but got kicked out after he got caught with fifteen bucks worth of weed. Molina said he was just holding it for a friend.

“The kid's got a golden arm,” said Mike Macey, an assistant at Heritage. “We were going to do everything we can to get him in and make sure he can pitch for us. His head's not screwed on. Mom and dad tried to get him away from that environment. But the kid kept coming back to it.”

After spending his sophomore season at Somerset Charter Academy, he returned to West Broward for his junior year. After school on January 13, 2015, Molina punched a local kid in the face and blackened his eye. The kid called it a cheap shot. Molina said it was self-defense. That evening, police officers came to Molina's house and arrested him. Now seventeen, he spent the night in detention. The next morning, Molina was charged with aggravated battery, a felony. He cried. So did his mother, Olivia.

“It's been a nightmare for us,” said his father, Nelson.

Olivia worried about something like this. Molina loved to mock and debate his overprotective mother. “Tony is a good attorney, I'll tell you,” she said. “He will not back down.” He promised he would go to class and do well and stay out of trouble.

“I see two versions of Tony,” said Richie Palmer, his travel-ball coach. “I see the great kid with me. And I see the fuckup. It has nothing to do with the arm and everything to do with character.”

Six months earlier, at nationals, all that mattered was the arm. It was his identity, his raison d'être, and Perfect Game was betting on it. Before his game, Molina was handed a sheet of blank mail
ing labels and sent to a table in the empty concourse. He used red, blue, green, and purple Staedtler Lumocolor pens to sign dozens of labels that would be pressed onto special trading cards made by Leaf for Perfect Game. Each card is emblazoned with a number denoting its rarity. For just $29.99 on eBay, anyone could have a gold-bordered, autographed Anthony Molina card—number 37 of 50—with an out-of-focus picture of him from nationals. In retrospect, it would seem like a great day compared with those ahead.

“I deal with five Anthony Molinas every summer,” Palmer said. “I try to tell him, ‘You're not special,' even though he can be. I've seen guys like him throw it away. And that's the path he's going on.”

It especially chaps Palmer because he knows the sensation of pitching, how it can be a hundred little games in one, an unremitting challenge. He loved it more than anything when he played at Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, and then he tore his UCL. Palmer never made it back.

W
HEN HE TRIED TO UNDERSTAND
why his elbow gave out, Arizona Diamondbacks pitcher Daniel Hudson harkened back to the last game of his high school career. Down 8–0 after three innings, he kept pitching, into the fourth and fifth, on to the sixth and seventh, through the eighth and ninth, six straight scoreless, enough for Princess Anne High to play catch-up and force Virginia's Group AAA state championship game into extra innings. And Hudson continued in the tenth, too, because Jerry Ford was right. Winning makes dolts of grown men whose job it is to take care of kids who know no better. Virginia state rules limiting a pitcher to ten innings a week saved Hudson from himself and the coaches who found vindication in a twelve-inning victory that brought Princess Anne its first state title. Hudson threw 164 pitches.

“At that point,” Hudson said, “I'm not thinking five years down the road, either. . . . It's not like, ‘Hey, how's this going to feel when I'm twenty-five years old?' It's: ‘Fuck it, I want to go win.' The only reason I didn't go out for more is because there's a limit on how many innings you can go in a week.”

The overuse didn't stop in high school. No pitch counts exist in old box scores from Hudson's games at Old Dominion University. He's certain he exceeded 120 in most games and often went well into the 130s. Every Friday, it was the same routine: damn the torpedoes, at least seven strong for Huddy.

“Coaches have to win to keep their jobs,” Hudson said. “They're going to ride their best pitchers. It's just the nature of college baseball, you know? Most guys are competitive as hell and want to win. I didn't know any better.”

The culture of college coaches subjecting pitchers to punishing workloads is nearing extinction. Exceptions exist, particularly at smaller programs, but the pitch-count shame police do a strong enough job of monitoring habitual offenders that they change or run the risk of other coaches sabotaging their recruiting with the truth. Scrutiny on high school kids isn't nearly as strong. In 2014, Dylan Fosnacht, a senior at Rochester High in Washington state, threw 194 pitches over fifteen innings in a district playoff game. Fosnacht refused to apologize. He wasn't planning on playing baseball beyond high school. “Just trying to get a much-needed win for my team,” he tweeted at Detroit Tigers ace David Price, who had called Fosnacht “a beast” before suggesting his coach should be fired.

Kids today still are part of the first generation reared via Perfect Game. It started right around the same time as Hudson—born in 1987, into travel ball around 2000—when the business was in full expansion mode, out of Iowa and into the South, then the coasts, then everywhere. The quality of assessments from the organization weren't exactly top-notch back then. Hudson traveled to a showcase in Fort Myers at sixteen, where Perfect Game
made a laughable appraisal of a delivery that scouts and personnel people alike long believed would get him hurt: “Short, compact arm stroke in back and good extension out front. Hudson does fall off to first base some on his finish, about the only serious quibble we'd have with his mechanics.”

Perfect Game's evaluation skills have grown alongside its business. Now an industry leviathan, Perfect Game can rewrite the story of what it really wants to be and how it wants to be known. Its reputation does not match the company Ford described to me. “I really don't think we are causing anyone to throw year-round,” he said. “We certainly don't promote that.”

Not actively. Perfect Game does hold year-round showcases, though, and kids who don't have Riley Pint's or Anthony Molina's natural gifts feel compelled to attend events out of fear that their rankings will drop if they don't. Agents trade derisive stories of Perfect Game imploring a kid to show up at a certain event.

Ford truly believes it when he says he wants to grow baseball. In recent years, Ford said, he stepped in during a tournament and shut down a top prospect whose coach was about to pitch him twice in one day. Ford can't micromanage every game, though. Perfect Game's worst crime was accidental: it hatched an industry with inadequate oversight.

When that happened once before, Major League Baseball donned its big-government cap and intervened. The youth system in Latin America has been a wilderness of corruption for decades, with trainers pumping teenage boys full of steroids and taking 30 percent cuts of their signing bonuses. Slowly, baseball wants to transition the system into a league-controlled entity that can monitor not just the kids' finances but also their arms. The prospect of Major League Baseball going after Perfect Game in a similar fashion is not far-fetched. Two of the sport's highest-ranking power brokers told me that transferring the youth apparatus to Major League Baseball's hands was a priority, although wresting
control from an established company with such reach would take years.

Perfect Game could help its cause by prioritizing players' health, even if that stunts the extreme growth Ford expects. Ford could de-emphasize year-round baseball if he so desired. And he could commission an app that allows coaches, families, or kids to enter pitch-count data so a player's entire record is accurate and available. Perfect Game can be a leader.

Instead, it's creating showcases for nine-year-olds.

In early 2015, Perfect Game announced a spin-off called the Series, which consists of three types of events: scouting combines, tournaments to find the best kids from a geographic area, and a national tournament pitting those local teams against one another, ages nine to eighteen. With the Series, Perfect Game reinforces every ugly stereotype about itself, from too young to too soon to too much.

Ford tries to rationalize it. By keeping showcases local, families wouldn't need to travel as much. Measuring kids before they hit double digits also provides Perfect Game a compelling benefit: the ability to build a powerful database of information willingly given by children. “Let's say this data has meaningful components to it,” Ford said. “Let's say your son, a seven-year-old kid, shows us traits that Mike Trout had at the same age. What that means to me is we need to keep that kid involved in baseball. We lose so many kids to other games because, quite honestly, the other games are sometimes more exciting or accessible to those kids.”

I didn't walk away from my conversation with Jerry Ford thinking Perfect Game is any more evil or greedier than the rest of the world that fattens itself on youth baseball. Just that he was lost in his idealism. Of all people, Ford should be hypersensitive to the issue. His son, Ben, the one for whom he created Perfect Game, needed Tommy John surgery in 2001. Instead, Ford sits by as the Perfect Game generation keeps on breaking, just another person absolving himself of responsibility.

N
ELSON MOLINA EXPECTED THE PHONE
call. The baseball community is too damn gossipy to have kept Anthony Molina's arrest secret. On the line was a coach from the University of Miami. He was pulling Molina's scholarship offer. Because the commitment was verbal, Miami had no obligation to Molina and could dump him whenever it pleased. All this time Nelson spent worrying about Tony's elbow, and it was his fist that ruined things.

“They said he should've walked away,” Nelson said of the incident that landed his son in jail. “Everything has been set up to fuck Tony.” He took a deep breath. “I'm sorry for my words. It's hard. Tony's the type of kid everyone loves. He's like a magnet. Everyone goes to Tony. But you hang around in the wrong places . . .”

Nelson never stopped sticking up for his son. The weed episode “was a misunderstanding” and the transfers “not a big deal.” Molina's travel-ball coach, Richie Palmer, said, “The dad's the biggest problem. He's an enabler. I try to talk to him, let him know you can't be like this with him. Tony's not stupid. He's a sharp kid. He's smart. And unfortunately, he's a big problem. The dad refuses to be a hard-ass with him, which is what the kid needs.” A few days after the incident, Palmer said he heard from a friend who said he saw Molina cutting school. “I just dog-cussed him,” Palmer said. “I got tired of him lying to me. ‘You're probably going to be working at IHOP across the street cooking for me and my daughter instead of being on my TV.'”

Not once did Nelson consider moving away or shipping Molina off to boarding school somewhere. He took a few months away from baseball before Nelson called to tell me: “He's coming back.” Molina's grades were up. He was practicing with Elite Squad again, even as his lawyer, Lyon Greenblatt, planned Molina's defense. He hoped to get the felony
battery charge reduced to simple battery so Molina could enter a diversion program instead of juvenile detention. In the worst-case scenario, if the case went to trial, Greenblatt was considering using the stand-your-ground defense. He said video existed of the alleged victim wielding a knife on another occasion and that Molina punched him as he reached into the same pocket from which he had previously pulled the blade.