Where to Go When You Don't Go Pro

bY bO aLLEGRUCCI


Kids, I want you to stay in school.

Play an instrument, learn a trade, go to college, join the family business, start your own business, join the Peace Corps (not the Marine Corps), do whatever you can to diversify and maximize your youth.

Discover as many ways as you can to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Do something productive and positive with your life and try to make a living doing something you love, ‘cuz you ain’t going pro in sports.

Haven’t you seen that commercial during every college football game? “There are over 400,000 NCAA student-athletes, and almost all of us will be going pro in something other than sports.”

That commercial ain’t lyin’. Your odds of going pro are a little over 500,000 to 1, and unless you’re 6-foot-3, 215 with a 4.5 forty or a 40-inch vertical or a 60-percent jumper or a 95-mph fastball, you’re not that 1.

My father played minor league baseball in the Yankees organization once upon a time, and I grew up one of the better ballplayers in a baseball-playing town of 130,000. Working a regular job never looked like fun to me, and since I had a little talent, I wanted nothing more than to start in centerfield and bat second for the St. Louis Cardinals or the Kansas City Royals someday.

Obviously that didn’t happen, or I wouldn’t be writing this article right now, but since I wasn’t quite good enough to play sports for a living, I knew I wanted to write sports for a living. Then I lost my job at a small-town newspaper not once but twice in the last three years. The industry eroded and the economy evaporated, and suddenly I’m thinking I should’ve stuck it out in centerfield a little while loner when I was a little bit younger.

I just turned 30, which is about the peak of your athletic prime in most major sports (give or take a few years), and it got me to thinking: how many guys my age did go pro? Who made it? Where were they from? Why them and not me? I’m not a full-time sports reporter anymore, and since I work overnights at a group home for disabled kids, I have plenty of time for research in the wee-hours of the morning.

I set out on a journey across MLB.com, NFL.com and NBA.Com to find every player my age on every professional roster. I didn’t bother with hockey because I never played hockey, never liked hockey, never wanted to go pro in hockey, never watched hockey on TV and nobody I knew ever went pro in hockey.

I graduated high school in 1998, so that was the criteria for my search … I counted every professional baseball, basketball and football player born in late 1979 or early 1980 (which meant they were likely a part of my graduating class).

I started with baseball since that was my best chance at a meal ticket, but after scanning the current 40-man rosters of all 30 major league teams (1,200 players), I found just 62 men from the class of ‘98 who’re in the show right now at the peak of their prime. That’s five percent of the league.

There’s actually one player in the bigs born the exact same day as me: Toronto reliever Scott Richmond, born August 30, 1979. I guess one of us had to go when the major league teams were making their draft picks a decade or so ago.

The aforementioned St. Louis Cardinals have the most players my age of any MLB team: Six, including most of their stars, Albert Pujols, Rick Ankiel, Matt Holiday and Skip Schumaker. I guess there wasn’t room for all of us on the big league roster, so I’ll lay back and wait for the next life.

Other perennial all-stars my age include Ryan Howard, Mark Teixeira, Josh Beckett, Adam Dunn, Ryan Theriot, Adam LaRoche and Chien Ming-Wang.

Ankiel and Beckett were at the same AAU national tournament my youth team attended in the summer of 1995 outside of Memphis, but I never saw either one. I did play against Albert Pujols growing up in the Kansas City area, and he took one of our best pitchers (and one of my best friends) deep twice in one game during the summer of ‘97.

The best player I ever played against, however, was a guy from Wellington, Kansas, named Nate Cornejo.

Cornejo’s father pitched professionally for the Mets and his older brother was a collegiate pitcher, and Nate Cornejo was a superstar from the first time he walked on the field. He was the best pitchers in the country at an early age and one of the most feared hitters, and his reputation preceded him: you heard about him long before you ever actually played against him.

His fastball was blinding and his four-seam, 12-6 curve was one of the best I ever swung and missed at. He was a household name across the Midwest by age 12, and teams from other states picked him up to play in regionals and nationals whenever Cornejo’s team didn’t make it that far (which was rare).

He hit nine homeruns in the state tournament alone when we were 12 years-old, and the only time I ever faced him was at a tournament in Ottawa, Kansas when we were 16. In three games that day, he hit two grand slams and a three-run homer, the latter of which came against my team, and he also struck out 11 in a complete game one-hitter against me and mine.

I was 0-for-3 with two K’s and an RBI groundout -- our only run in an 11-1 loss. I was behind the plate catching that day, and after Cornejo doubled early in the game, he started stealing my signs from second base and relaying them to the batter. I went out to the pitcher’s mound and told our pitcher to put a fastball in the next batter’s ear, but he refused for fear of Cornejo’s retaliation.

Cornejo had some weird skin disease where he had no eyebrows and these pale splotches and spots on his neck and head, but he was a first-team all-state quarterback and a varsity basketball starter our junior year of high school before injuring his knee late in the school year.

He scrapped football and basketball the following year to focus on baseball, and after he hit 97 on the radar gun in the 4A state tournament, he was drafted in the second round by the Detroit Tigers.

He made it to the big leagues two years later, and I saw him pitch on the 4th of July against the Kansas City Royals in the summer of 2001. I barely recognized him: he had gained about 30 or 40 pounds, altered his delivery and abandoned the disgusting 12-6 curveball I saw at age 16 for a mediocre slider. The pitching coach in the Tigers’ organization that made those changes hopefully lost his job, because they ruined a beautiful thing.

Cornejo spent a couple seasons at the back of the Tiger rotation when Detroit was at its worst earlier this decade, and then he blew out his arm and disappeared into the night. That was the best player I ever saw, and he didn’t even make it pro for very long, so I realized then I never really had a chance. I do, however, still hold records at my high school for home runs in a career (17), season (6) and game (3), so take that all you baseball scouts out there who forgot to call me on draft day!

Baseball may’ve been my best sport growing up, but football was my favorite, and it always will be. There are just under 1,700 players in the NFL right now, and 149 of them are my age (eight percent of the league). Among those 149 are Antwaan Randel-El, Antonio Pierce, Kyle Vanden Bosch, Julius Peppers, Richard Seymour, Bart Scott, Anquan Boldin, Nate Clements, Todd Heap, Carolina’s Steve Smith, Super Bowl hero David Tyree, Super Bowl MVP Deion Branch, Heisman Trophy winner Carson Palmer and the infamous Michael Vick.

I myself was a two-year, two-way starter at wide receiver and cornerback for the biggest high school in my state at the time, and I had my best high school game against Dallas Cowboy pro-bowler Terence Newman. I’m not kidding, and I can prove it. Newman played in the same league for perennial powerhouse Salina Central, and I was sick as a dog our senior year on the night we were matched up 1-on-1.

I checked into all of my classes so I’d be eligible for that night’s game in Salina, but I went straight to the nurse’s office to sleep after role was called, and I even rode to the game with my parents so as not to spread my illness to the rest of my team.

Yes, even sub-.500 high school programs bend the rules whenever they have to.

Later that night, Newman intercepted the first pass thrown to me, but I caught everything thereafter: six catches for 102 yards and a touchdown. We still lost 44-19, and while Newman went on to a full-ride at Kansas State and the fourth pick in the NFL draft, I’m sitting here writing this article 12 years later.

I ran into Terence at the KU-K-State basketball game in Manhattan three years ago, and he recognized me right away. He remembered.

Speaking of basketball, 37 of the 450 NBA players on current rosters were born in late ‘79 or early ‘80, which, like the NFL, comprises eight percent of the league.

My father was once offered a scholarship to play point guard at Texas Tech, but I never played basketball competitively. The greatest collection of hardwood talent I ever saw was at the 1997 Topeka Invitational Tournament, hosted at Topeka High School in Topeka, Kansas, my alma mater.

I was a junior at the time, and I covered the event from top to bottom for the school newspaper. Tulsa’s Will Rogers high school was in town for the ball, and they had a 6-foot-4 man-child named James Hall, who averaged something like 34 points a game in high school and committed to Oklahoma before ending up at some Division II school in Georgia five years later.

Will Rogers also had a small forward named Ronnie Powell, who was an average basketball player but a majestic athlete. Powell’s pre-game warm-up consisted almost exclusively of two-handed windmills taking off from the last block on the lane in front of the free-throw line.

Kansas City’s Washington High School was also at the tournament, and while they had just one headline name, it was a good one: newly acquired Indiana Pacer point guard Earl Watson.

My high school’s team played Watson in each of my first three years in school, and while we won all three, Watson hit us for 31, 33 and 36 points respectively. He made one of the best passes I’ve ever seen at this particular tournament in 1997, and he scored his 36 points that night in a 99-98, double-overtime loss.

Wichita East won the Topeka Invitational that year with two guys you’ve never heard of leading the way: Korleone Young and Laverne Smith. Smith was a Missouri-signee who was a year older than I was, but Young was my age and was long regarded one of the nation’s top power-forward recruits from the sixth grade on. He played AAU ball for the now infamous Myron Piggie, out of Kansas City, and his traveling teammates included Watson and JaRon Rush, the oldest -- and best -- of the three Rush brothers to play at Kansas City’s Pembroke Hill parochial school (Kareem and Brandon followed).

You can Google Myron Piggie and see what you find, but I’ll save you the trouble and tell you that Watson is the only player from that power-packed 1997 tournament who made it in the NBA. The only other NBA player I saw in person (that I know of) was Toronto Raptor forward Reggie Evans, who played at Allen County Community College when I was a freshman working for the Independence Community College newspaper in southern Kansas.

Fun times.

I had several friends who played serious AAU ball growing up, and I remember them telling stories about dominant guys our age named Quentin Richardson and Corey Maggette. Other NBA stars from the class of ‘98 include Michael Redd, Tayshaun Prince, Ron Artest, Caron Butler, Rashard Lewis, Richard Jefferson, Josh Howard, Lamar Odom, Luke Walton, Jamal Crawford and Stromile Swift.

As a sports fan, you wake up one day and realize you’re 30 years old, and if you were ever going to make it, you would’ve made it by now. A few years ago, the college veterans and young professional stars you saw on TV were your contemporaries, and it was comforting in the back of your mind to know that could still be you if you got yourself in shape and went out and had a good day at the right tryout somewhere.

But time marches on long after you’ve stopped, and suddenly the young stars you see busting onto the scene now days are young enough to be your nephews. You never really notice anything changing, but one day you look up and everything’s different.

There are 50 states in the union with 300 million people in them but only 62 guys my age are playing major league baseball, 149 in the NFL and 37 in the NBA. That’s a total of 248, which is about eight percent of the 3,000 athletes in America’s three major sports. That’s how good you have to be to make it to the top, and that’s when you realize exactly who and what you’re up against.

American athletes grow up competing primarily within their own region of the country and almost exclusively against kids their own age -- or at most three years older or younger. Once you turn 18, however, suddenly you’re competing for college scholarships with kids in your age group from all over the country -- if not the western hemisphere or the entire world in some sports.

When your collegiate or amateur days are over, you find yourself competing with every athlete of every age from every corner of the globe to make it as a professional, and there are six billion people and counting on this planet.

I’m not saying it’s impossible, and I’m not saying kids shouldn’t play sports if they won’t go pro, but I’m just saying it’s a good idea to have a plan B. Play sports, enjoy sports, but don't take sports too seriously. Sports are a great way for many kids to earn a college education, but very few will follow the path any farther than that.

Every time someone told me that when I was 12 or 14 or 16, I just laughed. I thought surely I would be that 1 in 500,000 who made it and proved them all wrong, but who’s laughing now?

All I can do now is hope to reach the next generation, so kids, if you’re not going to listen to your parents or your coaches or your teachers on this one, take it from me: you’re not going pro.

Find something else you can enjoy and do well, and be ready and willing to pick that up when sports drops you off.

Football's State of the Union: Is America's Favorite Sport Becoming un-American?

bY bO aLLEGRUCCI

With both the NFL and college football seasons a quarter of the way done (or more), there are some interesting and inverted trends developing in 2009.

In the college game, anybody can beat anyone else anywhere at any given time. BYU beat Oklahoma, who lost to Miami, who beat Florida State, who beat BYU badly in Provo. That’s parity.

In the NFL, there are about a half-dozen teams who’re clearly better than the rest, and the players on the league’s lesser teams have a better chance of beating their wives after a 38-14 loss than beating any of the division leaders. There are five undefeateds and an astonishing six winless teams in the NFL right now, and half of last year’s playoff teams are a combined 6-16 at the NFL quarter pole. The Bengals should be undefeated, while the Patriots should be 1-3. That’s disparity.

The typical American autumn usually sees those competitive gaps reversed. Most NCAA seasons have four to eight teams running ahead of the pack from Labor Day to Christmas, while the NFL sees a few of its worst teams beat some of its best in week 8, and half the league is still in the playoff race heading into December.

A football season where up is down and left is right will help spread the sport to new popularity in new populations, but a foul odor ascends as we lift up the rug and switch subjects from parity to a parody. Football has become America’s favorite sport over the last decade and a half, but just as America became very un-American during the Cheney administration’s war of terrorism, football has become very un-football-like as it falls further beneath a kinder, gentler directive that would make the first President Bush proud.

The NFL’s off-season rule changes regarding blows to the head and knees and defenseless receivers and such are going to skew the essence of the game and the fortunes of NFL teams if they’re not rescinded … and that right soon. Teams will lose games and coaches and players will lose jobs as seasons come to an end because of these cowardly, politically correct, chicken-shit, knee-jerk reactions by the NFL rules committee.

Mark my words. Write that down, date it and I’ll sign it. We will witness an onfield devolution at a crucial moment in a critical game this year where a sissy-ass, please-don’t-hurt-me call will send one team home and the other team on. It might be your favorite team that suffers this tragedy, or it could be your favorite team’s hated rival who prospers from it.

Violence, athletic aggression and the rest of football’s physical wickedness is what draws rough-and-tumble American boys and men to the game, and it has been doing so for over a century. When I was a little boy growing up in a football town near the middle of the Midwest, I had my parents subscribe to Sports Illustrated just so I could get the NFL Films’ free “Crunch Course” video with our subscription. I couldn’t even read the SI articles yet, but I’d already learned the multiples of 7 from watching my older brother’s high school football team rack up touchdowns every Friday night. Soul-smashing hits and butt-busting tackles were what I loved most about the game, and I could pop that Crunch Course video in everyday after school and set my parents furniture up to look like the NFC East while I pretended to be Lawrence Taylor in the living room.

I know Carson Palmer missed an entire season because of an unnecessary blow to the knee in the 2005 playoffs, and who could forget Tom Brady taking a similar low blow that ended his 2008 season before it started? I also know Carson Palmer and Tom Brady make a lot of money for themselves, their teams and their league, but they are still football players, and football players are still supposed to play football.
Quarterbacks wear helmets and pads during the game, but suddenly a blow to the head or a stiff breeze across the QB’s knees will cost the defense 15 yards and an automatic first down. How ‘bout that Patriots-Ravens game last Sunday?

Hitting a defenseless receiver will also keep the drive alive, but a defenseless receiver left upright can catch a deflected pass and score the game-winning TD like Denver’s Brandon Stokley did at Cincinnati in week 1.

The NFL is taking all the balls out of football, but maybe we shouldn’t be surprised, because they’ve already taken all the fun. Anyone not wearing league-approved Gestapo SS gear on game day is fined, and anything entertaining, amusing or otherwise invigorating in the end zone is punishable by death after a touchdown. Meanwhile, defensive linemen or special-teamers who make a routine tackle can do the Macarena at midfield afterwards.

Tom Brady gets a tuck-rule and a lifetime ACL insurance policy whenever he needs it, and like trickle-down economics, the NFL’s un-American fascism seeps down to the rest of the football world slowly but surely. I consider football in the fall to be one cosmic, continuous cultural experience, beginning with the occasional Thursday night high school or college game and progressing through the full amateur docket Friday and Saturday to the NFL on Sunday and ending gloriously with Monday Night Football. I find myself explaining to my girlfriend(s) every September not to expect anything from me or schedule anything with me on the weekends for the next four months, and just as I don’t like when the democratic liberties of my country are compromised by a tyrannical government, I don’t like when the metaphysics of my yearly football journey are likewise disrupted by totalitarian policies and 1950’s philosophy.

When the NFL erroneously oversteps its bounds and overexerts its authority, so too will the NCAA and the high school powers that be. Did anyone see the Georgia-LSU game on CBS last Saturday?

Georgia wide receiver A.J. Green was penalized after the go-ahead touchdown in the final minutes for absolutely nothing. According to ESPN’s College Gameday Final show, the SEC originally backed its incompetent, Third-Reich official by saying “Green made a gesture to attract attention to himself.”

Yeah, he scored a fuckin’ touchdown to put his team ahead late in the fourth quarter of a huge conference game between nationally-ranked rivals! Have you ever seen what soccer players do after they score a go-ahead goal in the 85th minute of an international friendly for Christ’s sake?!

The SEC has since softened its support of the referee who should be doing something else for a side-job, and the officiating crew that day gave Georgia a make-up call, flagging LSU’s Charles Scott for an identical celebration penalty after he scored the game-winning TD moments later and heinously set the ball on the ground while blasphemously pointing to the sky.

Scott found the end zone from 33 yards out after LSU got the ball near midfield thanks to the unsportsmanlike call on Green at the other end. Georgia didn’t have enough time to capitalize on the make-up call that went against Scott, however, and the Bulldogs fell 20-13.

Two wrongs didn’t make a right, and neither the NFL nor the NCAA not anyone else can expect elite athletes in the heat of battle to control a chaos and equalize an emotional energy more intense than anything the average human will ever experience. It’s not realistic, it’s not fair, and it’s ruining one of America’s greatest industries one penalty flag at a time. When you have bad laws, you get bad law enforcement, and these officials at the pro and college level are more like motorcycle cops on a four-lane road handing out speeding tickets to drivers going 41 in a 40.

We, the people … the fans, the customers … are not only entitled but obligated to speak up and speak out when we become discontent with – and disillusioned by – a product we came to know and love under a different packaging. I, for one, will continue to lead those cries and amplify the arguments.

As sure as the players on each team are human and will always make mistakes, so too will the officials, but that’s not the point. The point is, football’s governing bodies have more time to get it right than the players and officials on the field, yet they’re consistently getting it wrong. The powers that be in the NFL and NCAA have months to make their calls and the benefit of hindsight when making their rules, so they owe us a better body of legislation.

America is not perfect and neither is its favorite sport, and while college and pro football do have bigger problems lurking in the weeds (the BCS, the potential for an NFL season with no salary cap, etc.), I, for one, will not sit quietly by as poor policy ruins the game I love most every week on national television.

Greinke Is Still the Man

bY bO aLLEGRUCCI

Playing in front of a national TV audience against the playoff contending Minnesota Twins Saturday in Minneapolis, the Kansas City Royals showed you why Zack Greinke is the American League Cy Young award winner for 2009.

Greinke himself didn't necessarily show you why he's the best pitcher in the AL, however, and one bad inning (the bottom of the sixth) may have cost Kansas City's ace the Cy Young in question. Twins starter Nick Blackburn took a perfect game into the fifth against the impotent Royal offense, but Mike Jacobs and Alberto Callaspo led off the fifth with consecutive singles. Any legitimate major-league lineup would score at least those two runs in a similar situation, but KC has no legitimate major-league lineup.

Mark Teahen bunted the runners over to second and third like a true pro, but Miguel Olivo grounded Blackburn's first pitch -- a fastball in front of his neck -- weakly to shortstop for out number two. Blackburn -- who yields a .323 batting average with the bases empty yet .234 with runners in scoring position -- coaxed and inning-ending pop-up out of Alex Gordon to preserve the scoreless tie.

Greinke is used to that sort of thing, and he got through the bottom of the fifth in one piece before the Twins showed Kansas City how small-market, small ball is played in the bottom of the sixth. Nick Punto drew a leadoff walk before taking second on Denard Span's sacrifice bunt and third on Orlando Cabrera's groundout.

AL batting champion and possible MVP Joe Mauer was up with two outs, and Greinke was a pitch away from getting out of the inning when Mauer pulled a 1-2 fastball into rightfield for an RBI single. Jason Kubel then sliced a high fly ball down the left field line that went off the glove of Royal left fielder Willie Bloomquist and into the stands for a ground-rule double, putting runners on second and third with two outs.

Greinke then made a pair of un-Greinke-like mistakes, skimming Michael Cuddyer with an inside fastball to load the bases before Delmon Young unloaded them with a 3-run double to right. Teahen took a terrible angle on Young's fly ball and didn't even get close to a ball that could've been caught.

The Twins led 4-0 before Greinke finally got out of it, but both the game and the Cy Young campaign were in serious jeopardy. Kansas City chased Blackburn and eventually tied the game at 4 in the top of the eighth to give Greinke a no-decision, but a Cuddyer solo homerun put Minnesota back in front in the bottom of the eighth before Joe Nathan sealed the hatch in the ninth.

Give the Twins credit: they HAD to beat the AL's best pitcher Saturday to catch the division-leading Detroit Tigers, and with Detroit falling to the White Sox Saturday evening, the American League Central comes down to the final day of the season with the Twins and Tigers tied for first.

Greinke didn't take the loss Sunday, but he didn't get his 17th win either, meaning he will tie the all-time record for fewest wins by a Cy Young winner should he win the award. Greinke finishes the season 16-8 with a 2.16 ERA and a career-high 242 strikeouts, the second most K's in Royals franchise history. He will win the American League ERA title, finish second in strikeouts, complete games (6) and shutouts (3), fifth in ininnings pitched (career-high 229 and a third), and sixth in wins with a Triple-A offense and a Double-A defense surrounding him on KC's roster.
Wins are a team statistic, even when credited to a pitcher, and since the Cy Young is an individual award, Greinke should be judged on his individual stats and not his team's ineptitude. Kansas City's No. 1 starter absorbed nine no-decisions this season, meaning he might have 22 or 23 wins on a decent team and possibly 27 or 28 on a good team right about now.

Saturday was a perfect illustration of why Greinke should win the Cy Young, and also an illustration of why he probably won't. Seattle Mariner ace Felix Hernandez had a Cy Young-quality season for a team that was a little bit better than the Royals yet every bit as obscure in the Pacific time zone. Detroit's Justin Verlander had his best season to date, and any Yankee that wins 19 games -- C.C. Sabathia in this case -- will be in the discussion as well. But, the only American League pitcher who has any business taking the Cy Young away from Greinke would be Hernandez.

Anybody who watched this season from start to finish knows even that would be a crime.