The Item was a one-sentence transaction for the Saturday-morning newspapers, filler for the agate page, one more bit of bureaucracy, the blur of the baseball business.
Still, if you saw it, it was hard not to feel a chill:
LOUISVILLE BATS — Released RHP Mark Prior.
“Ah, no,” LaTroy Hawkins said yesterday. “Not again.” Hawkins is one of the lucky ones. He is 40 years old and he can still hit 93 miles an hour on the gun, he has been blessed with good health and a mostly rubber arm and, above all, longevity. This is his 19th year as a major-league pitcher. If he wants to, he’ll surely get to 20.
Prior is the other end of the wicked spectrum on which the men who throw baseballs for a living reside. He won’t turn 33 until September. Once upon a time, he was the hot pitcher in baseball, the one whose starts felt like secular holidays on the North Side of Chicago, the one whose future was spackled with gold.
But Prior hasn’t pitched in the majors since 2006. It was the shoulder that went first, and the shoulder that still haunts, though he has also collected a thick list of secondary ailments that kept him out since late April and, finally, led him to another unwanted visit to the transaction wire.
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“You don’t want to say it’s sad, I guess, because he made it, and he had a taste of how good life up here is, and he had that one incredible season, and most guys never get that,” Hawkins said, referring to 2003, when Prior was 18-6, when he pitched to a 2.43 ERA and piled up 245 strikeouts and was poised to rule the sport for a decade.
Only that was a decade ago.
“Put it this way,” Hawkins said. “If you sat and you obsessed about how fickle pitching is, about why one guy gets hurt and another doesn’t, about why this guy can come back from an injury but that guy is never the same, nobody would ever want to do it. It would drive you crazy. And you can’t think that way. You just can’t.”
Nobody wants to think that way, and yet everyone in baseball thinks exactly that way, whenever the next Mark Prior walks onto the mound. The Nationals were crushed — still are — for being proactively conservative with Stephen Strasburg last year. Mets fans are already sharpening their knives for the inevitable day this September when the team shuts Matt Harvey down, and maybe Zack Wheeler, too.
Except then you see Mark Prior, 32 years old, was just released by his sixth team in the last seven years, the Reds joining the Yankees, Red Sox, Padres, Rangers and Cubs, clubs all hoping that a delivery tweak or a lightning bolt or the hand of God could restore what the cruel truths of pitching had pilfered.
“An arm isn’t supposed to go like this,” Hawkins said, miming an overhand delivery. “It’s supposed to go like this,” he said, going underhand, “which is why softball pitchers can throw five days a week and never have to use ice.”
You don’t want to think about these things as a baseball fan on nights like last night, when a Harvey start against the Diamondbacks — with the help of a few postgame firecrackers — brings such a welcome burst of color and pageantry (and 41,257 people) to Citi Field even on a night when the Mets lose. You don’t want to ponder the dark possibilities lurking behind every slider. But it has become involuntary.
Years ago, when Terry Collins was working in the Dodgers organization, the prevailing wisdom about pitchers became this: If they’re going to break, they’re going to break.
“What you want,” Collins said yesterday, “is to make sure that happens as far down the line as you humanly can. And in today’s game, it’s something you think about every day. Because everyone knows the kids who came up and were brilliant. And broke down.”
There’s Brandon Webb, who won one Cy Young and nearly won two others. There’s Chien-Ming Wang. Dontrelle Willis and Tim Lincecum never had arm issues, they just seemingly woke up one morning and the magic was gone; in some ways, that’s even worse. And there’s Mark Prior, released, again, two months shy of 33.
“He was a good teammate, a good guy,” said Hawkins, who joined the Cubs in 2004, just in time to see Prior break down. Then he shook his head.
“Man,” he said, “that was nine years ago. Just think what he could’ve done these last nine years.”