IT WAS March 2007, early in spring training, and Phil Hughes had just taken a 34-pitch, seven-man tour through the Minnesota Twins in his first real test as a hot major league prospect. His fastball had been fast, his curveball had been sharp, he elicited gasps and shouts from teammates and fans.
He was 20 years old and having the time of his life.
“All five spots in the starting rotation are spoken for, so I know I’m not fighting for a job,” Hughes said that day, sounding, as always, 12 or 15 years older than his birth certificate. “I’m here to learn something, to see what it’s like to pitch on this level, get a taste for that.”
He smiled.
“I won’t say today was easy, because it’s never easy getting major league hitters out,” he said. “I know I won’t really know how good I’ll be until I hit a little rough patch. Adversity. It won’t all be smooth sailing for me. I know that. I’m ready for that.”
It’s one thing to say you’re ready for that. It’s another to be ready. Hughes’ arm wound up being as precocious as his attitude last year, so he got a long taste of the good (that aborted no-hitter in Texas, his October cameo) and the bad (his barking hamstring) right away, at an age when most kids are still suckling on beer funnels.
Now he has more adversity than he ever could have expected, or bargained for. He was ineffective this year, pitching to a 9.00 ERA, looking a lot more Paul Gibson than Bob Gibson. He was hit hard. He was booed off the mound Monday, a performance by Yankees fans every bit as graceless as Mets fans giving Johan Santana the same treatment a few weeks back. . . . Wait, did someone say Johan Santana? We’ll get back to him in a second. . . .
Yesterday, a few hours before the Tigers finished off a tidy sweep of the Yankees with an 8-4 win, we received this news: Hughes has a stress fracture in his ninth rib; that he’ll be doing zero activity for at least four weeks; that he’s probably pitched his last big-league game until July, at the earliest; that the journalism professors of talk radio who declared his disabled list stint fraudulent were a tad mistaken in their leaps of logic.
It won’t all be smooth sailing. He was right about that. But it was hard for him to expect the three-hour tour of the S.S. Minnow, either, even though that seems to be mostly what he’s gotten in the big leagues so far.
“It’s good that we identified what the problem is,” Brian Cashman said. “It’s better that we allow the player to recover and get better.”
Cashman was calm and collected for a man whose own future is intertwined so completely with Hughes and with Ian Kennedy, last night’s starter who is also taking his time revealing himself as the next Allie Reynolds. This is where we get back to Santana.
No matter how this turns out, Cashman deserves credit for inventing a plan then sticking to it when the most haunting kind of temptation presents itself. It’s like a man who commits to his girlfriend a few months before Gisele Bundchen shows up out of the blue and asks for his hand.
Cashman held firm. Good for him. Santana is only 3-2 right now, but every indication is he’s every bit as good as he’s supposed to be. And Hughes was having a terrible year, even before his rib set off the bells of the MRI machine yesterday.
“Disbelief,” Hughes said of the diagnosis. “That’s the best way I can describe it.”
He is only 21, too young to be categorized as a disappointment, or as brittle, or as anything else. He can still make his career everything he wants it to be. In time. The man who assured that that career would take place in The Bronx? Cashman has time, too. Just not as much. Not if things continue along this path.
Not if the sailing doesn’t get a little more smooth. And soon.