Looking ahead and thinking about when the baseball season would start and what shape it might take was fun, for a while.
That was a week or so ago. Opening Day has come and gone in empty ballfields and ballparks from Hilo Little League to the University of Hawaii to Major League Baseball.
As B.B. King might have said, the thrill is gone.
“It’s not all that great,” former Waiakea High School and University of Hawaii left-hander Quintin Torres-Costa said last week in a telephone interview from Phoenix. “There’s some things we can do, I’m doing it all, but it’s pretty different, at least for this time of year.”
Maybe over the winter — or these recently wet times here — when the rains come down and you’re forced inside for a day or two, you can get that cooped-up feeling even on the Big Island.
But when you just came through Tommy John surgery last year with flying colors, your employers in Milwaukee sent you to the Arizona Fall League where hitters love to swing the bat in the thin air, the top prospects are all there and you blow them away with dominating precision?
It’s different, all right. Torres-Costa posted some neon numbers, could feel it all coming back to him and then had to shut it all down.
The future is out there, somewhere, it will arrive at some point off in the distance, but for so many athletes, surely for Torres-Costa, by all rights, he should be in the thick of that future right now.
The Brewers, lest we forget, almost outlasted St. Louis last year in the National League Central, falling two games behind at the end. It’s a game of small differences stretched over six months, so while the Cardinals were 50-31 at home, the Brewers were 49-32. While St. Louis was 41-40 on the road, Milwaukee was 40-41.
That small shade of discrepancy toppled the Brewers into a one-game playoff, which they lost, 4-3 to the eventual World Series champion Washington Nationals. The Brewers had two more hits, got off to a better start, but their closer, left-hander Josh Hader, couldn’t get the job done in the bottom of the eighth, allowing a base on balls and two hits, two earned runs, in the loss.
Let’s pause right there. This isn’t a suggestion that Torres-Costa should be in line to replace Hader at the end of the line for the Brewers bullpen; not going there, at all.
But he might have made the roster, given what he showed them in the Fall League when he threw the ball as well as he ever has in a professional uniform. It’s a hitter’s sanctuary there, especially at that time of year, but in nine innings of work, Torres-Costa struck out 15 batters and looked every bit like he had no business pitching to young prospects. He looked ready for The Show.
“I have to say, I felt great there,” he said. “It was sort of the first steps back, but my conditioning and everything, I felt pretty much like my normal self, I threw the ball well. It was a great experience.”
Those are the kinds of offseason workouts that can recharge batteries in pitchers and put them in position to make a strong case for a roster spot in spring training. Typically, spring training reveals a coming-out party for some pitchers in camps who had been shelved for a while, finished rehabbing through the previous season, threw lights out in Winter Ball somewhere and those guys always make a spring splash.
Torres-Costa isn’t that example, but he’s only a few degrees off. He didn’t spend a month or two in Puerto Rico or some other Winter League to round into shape ahead of everyone else in Arizona and Florida when spring training typically opens.
But, in anticipation of a normal season, the Brewers made preparations to clear room on their 40-man roster over the winter, reportedly to inject some youth in certain spots, and the one-time Hilo youth leagues designated starter for championship games was among the names mentioned.
He started for Kaha Wong’s team in the 2008 Junior (13-14 year-olds), World Series championship game, then in 2010 he got the call for the West Senior Regional Championship game, both of which became losses. A year later, he was again the starter and the winner in 2011 Senior League (14-16 years-old) World Series in Bangor, Maine, when teammate Kean Wong went 2-for-4 and 12-for-23 (.522) in the series in which the Hilo squad clubbed the opposition by 38-2 in its last four games.
The next year he was given the ball again to pitch for Waiakea in the state championship game and he finished off Baldwin 5-2, delivering the Warriors their first state championship in school history. He wasn’t perfect that day, though he struck out 13 batters and walked only one in six innings, but his team was. That game ended Waiakea’s season at 20-0.
He emerged from the UH bullpen in 2015, taking a 35th round selection by Milwaukee to years of bus league travel in the minors that culminated in the injury and last year’s surgery. In five minor league seasons at various levels, he’s struck out 286 batters, walking just 100 while compiling a 20-11 won-loss record and of the numbers, it’s strikeouts-to-walks that drew the most attention from the Brewers.
He’s a 6-foot left-hander who knows how to get outs, but these days he’s staying in an apartment, trying to work out as best as possible under the circumstances.
“The Brewers are good at keeping in communication with everyone,” he said. “We get weekly calls from a pitching coordinator and another from a trainer, just keeping up on the programs they gave us, talking about what we’ve been doing.
“Honestly,” he said, “there’s not a lot they can say, not a lot we can do, but I guess everyone’s in the same boat.”
Torres-Costa said the Brewers are looking ahead in three-to-four week windows, hoping for the best but making no assumptions.
We haven’t heard much from him or a handful of other Big Island professional ballplayers, but that’s life in the minors, for the most part, and these days, it feels like everyone we know in any sport is out there in baseball’s minors somewhere, out of sight, if not out of mind. Unlike a lot of them, Torres-Costa happens to have his parents with them by virtue of a planned trip to watch spring baseball, which became an extended stay, without baseball.
Torres-Costa is just a slice of life, a small example of what professional athletes are going through on a daily basis these days, with nothing constructive on their plates, just biding time, watching the world go by, hoping they get to do what they love once again.
He makes a paycheck by throwing a baseball people can’t hit. Others are coaches instructing players how to throw those pitches or hit that baseball or maintain proper position in volleyball, or how to work on that medium-range jumper in basketball.
Nobody’s planning an afternoon at the ballpark, nobody’s preparing to broadcast a game or write about one. Nobody’s doing what they normally do, and we all want the world to just feel normal again.
We’re all in it together.
As life changes with coronavirus, this column hopes to resume in the near future, but in the meantime, keep buying this newspaper, it’s your best source of local news. Isolating at home? Call them, they’ll bring it to you. In the meantime, you can find me on Facebook at Wright On — Big Island. Spread aloha, not the virus.
