The Rotation (10 page)

Baltimore Orioles part-time scout Kenny Dupont seemed to be the lone
exception. He watched Roy pitch five or six times in high school and liked what he saw. In fact, he filed a report with the Orioles about the small right-hander from middle-of-nowhere Mississippi. He told Baltimore to give Oswalt a look, despite the fact he hit only 86–88 mph on the radar gun.

“They actually laughed at me,” Dupont said. “They said he was too small. They said he had bad mechanics. They said there would be too much wear and tear. They did not project him to be a 90-plus guy. They told me I was crazy.”

The Orioles could feel comfortable in their evaluation of Oswalt because nobody else considered him a prospect, including Division I colleges. Having nowhere to go, but wanting to play baseball, Oswalt enrolled at Holmes Community College in Goodman, Mississippi, about 50 miles from Weir.

Dupont, who coincidentally became the pitching coach at Holmes, always believed Oswalt would throw harder once he started concentrating on baseball, which is exactly what happened. Oswalt dedicated himself to the game. He would walk to one side of the field with a five-gallon bucket of baseballs. He would long toss to the other side of the field, collect the balls in the bucket, and throw them back to the other side. Even in the rain.

“He was the hardest-working guy I've ever coached,” Dupont said in the summer of 2011.

Oswalt cleaned up his mechanics and started to throw 90–92 mph as a freshman. The Houston Astros selected him in the 23
^rd
round of the 1996 draft and offered him $50,000 to sign. He did not immediately sign. The Astros maintained rights to Oswalt until two weeks before the 1997 draft. In the interim, the little right-hander's fastball had jumped to 95 mph. Houston increased its offer to $500,000. Roy signed.

He was on his way.

Or so it seemed.

Oswalt developed calcium deposits in his shoulder in 1999, which forced him to miss the first month of the season with Class A Michigan. He rehabbed the shoulder, rejoined the team, and felt great before feeling pain in a different part of the shoulder later in the season. The Astros had tried to change his pitching mechanics, which could have had something to do with
it. But the pain got worse and worse and he started taking painkillers to handle it. He figured he could finish the season, rest in the off-season and be ready for spring training. But the shoulder hurt like hell every time he threw a pitch. He could barely raise his right arm over his head, and even when he returned to Mississippi in the off-season, simple tasks like reaching the top shelf at the grocery store became difficult.

He figured he needed shoulder surgery.

Before he made the call to the Astros medical staff he had some work to finish on the used Ford F150 he used for hunting. Oswalt knew trucks and cars. His neighbors down the road used to race, so they were always building engines. Oswalt spent enough time there to learn a few things and felt pretty confident he could fix the hiss he heard coming from his engine. It was running when he reached for a bare spark plug wire with his right hand.

Electricity shot through Oswalt's body. His hand gripped the wire tighter and tighter. He couldn't let go, so he did the only thing he thought he could do. He jumped backward. It jarred the wire from his hand and he tumbled to safety.

Shaken from the shock, he noticed something.

His shoulder felt better.

“The next day I couldn't feel it at all,” he said.

Oswalt told the Astros about his spark-plug miracle, but they were skeptical. A country boy from Mississippi had just called, telling them he had just electrocuted himself, and magically healed his shoulder.

They told Oswalt that time and rest had probably healed it.

“I'm telling you it wasn't time,” he told them. “It was to the point when I was about to call you to tell you to cut me open and look in there.”

The spark-plug incident provided the jolt to a remarkable career. Oswalt went 15-7 with a 2.21 ERA in Single A Kissimmee and Double-A Round Rock the following season. He went 14-3 with a 2.73 ERA his rookie season with the Astros in 2001, finishing second to Albert Pujols for National League Rookie of the Year. He won 20 games twice, made the All-Star team three times, and finished in the top five in Cy Young voting five times.

He also won the 2005 NLCS MVP Award, which was how he got the bulldozer. He was talking to McLane one day, when the Astros owner casually mentioned he owned a bulldozer and was cleaning up 500 acres of land he owned in Texas.

“When you're finished with it I wouldn't mind buying it from you at a
discount,” Oswalt told McLane.

They went back and forth about it, but hadn't finalized anything when McLane ran into Oswalt before Game 6 of the NLCS at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Oswalt was watching film of Cardinals hitters when McLane approached. The Astros had never reached the World Series before and McLane wanted it more than anything.

“If you win this game I'll buy you a new bulldozer,” he said.

Those words got Oswalt to look away from the screen in front of him. He shot up from his chair and shook McLane's hand.

Oswalt won the game. He allowed three hits, one run, one walk, and struck out six in seven innings to send Houston to its first World Series. Oswalt walked off the mound after the seventh inning and looked at McLane, who was sitting by the visitors' dugout.

“You better call me in the off-season,” he thought to himself.

McLane called.

“Hey, come pick it up,” he told Oswalt over the phone. “We got you one.”

Oswalt drove home to Mississippi just hours after the Chicago White Sox swept the Astros in the 2005 World Series.

It made no sense to stick around.

He always feels the tug back home. He loves it there. When he is not with his family in the off-season, he is spending free time where he spent much of his childhood—outdoors. Except he no longer has to hoe the watermelon fields or run the knuckleboom. He gets to make up for those countless times when he ran out of daylight and couldn't go hunting or fishing. At any moment in the off-season Oswalt might be hunting or working land he owns in Mississippi, Missouri, or Illinois.

“Nothing really has changed a whole lot for him,” Brian Oswalt said. “Outside, being around the same things.”

Oswalt owns the Double 4 Ranch near his home in Kosciusko, Mississippi, which boasts 1,000 acres, whitetail deer, gemsboks, blackbuck antelope, and mouflon sheep. Billy Oswalt and Robbie Hall, a cousin, serve as guides for patron hunters. According to Oswalt, a city slicker with almost
no hunting experience would have “about a ninety percent” chance of killing something on his reserve.

But that isn't how Oswalt hunts. He is a little more methodical. A little more deliberate. He selects an animal—not just a buck, but a specific buck—and begins his pursuit.

“It makes it more of a challenge than just a deer coming out to eat and shooting it,” he said.

That's how he got Eight Ball.

He spent the entire three-month season in 2004 hunting a deer he nicknamed Eight Ball because of its eight-point rack. He never took a shot at anything else, even deer that were bigger and better than his target. Eight Ball became Oswalt's Moby Dick. He had photographic evidence of his existence from the night-vision cameras he has on his property. Deer, like most animals, stay in a particular area, but Eight Ball hadn't revealed himself when Oswalt had been in position to take a shot. And time was running out. It was the last day of deer season and Oswalt was sitting in his stand just before dark. Something told him to get out of the stand and walk to the edge of a ridge.

“I never do that,” he said. “I always stay in the stand until dark. Just something told me to go over the ridge.”

Eight Ball was 15 steps away.

“I could have killed him with a rock,” Oswalt said.

Eight Ball was with a doe. Startled at hearing the hunter, the doe ran away. She passed Eight Ball, blocking the buck's view. Oswalt raised his rifle and looked through his scope.

He was so close the scope only showed the animal's neck.

Got him
.

“It's the challenge,” the pitcher/hunter said. “You always have the chance of killing something that's unbelievable or extraordinary. And I can't just sit around my house. I talk to guys and they sit around the house for three or four months during the off-season. I'm just not that type.”

So he will climb into his stand and sit there for hours in the off-season.

“It's just the peace and quiet I like about it more than anything,” he said. “It's you. It's just you out there. Plus, you're waiting for that next adrenaline rush.You never know when that adrenaline rush is going to hit.”

The land has given Oswalt's family plenty over the years, but nature took something back when thunderstorms and tornadoes tore through Mississippi on April 24, 2010. As the rain fell and the wind howled, Oswalt's mother, Jean, grabbed her Yorkie, Sweetie, and ducked into a closet in the back of her home.

It would be the last time she saw her house in one piece.

Inside the closet she heard what sounded like explosions as a tornado touched down. Her home was being shredded into pieces and tossed like kindling by 200-mph winds. When the storm passed and she emerged, she noticed her husband Billy's Bible—Billy was on a hunting trip in Missouri when the storm struck—a few feet from her. It was unmarked.

She considered it a sign. Seven people died from the storm, but she survived. A few strong beams around the frame of the closet stood tall and saved her from injury or worse.

Oswalt was with the Astros when he heard the news. He immediately gathered his wife and two daughters and drove eight hours from Houston to Weir.

“Prepare yourself,” Oswalt's brother Brian told him during the drive. “There's nothing left.”

The childhood home of Brian, Roy, and Patricia Oswalt, their older sister, had been destroyed in a blink of an eye. Trees had vanished. The landscape had totally changed.

“It looked like a bomb went off,” Roy said.

The loss crushed him. He took pictures of the destruction on his cell phone, which he flipped through nearly a year later in the Phillies' spring training clubhouse. One picture showed a friend's banged-up pickup truck, which had been tossed the way a child might throw a Tonka truck from one side of the sandbox to the other.

Oswalt, whose own home roughly a mile away was untouched, immediately got to work. He used the bulldozer McLane gave him to clean up the rubble of his childhood home.

“That was pretty rough,” he said.