Not many people pay a lot of attention to Arizona rookie league baseball these days, or any days, really. That's because, well, it's the Arizona rookie league. And it's also because fewer people are paying attention to baseball in general, now that it's basically become a Home Run Derby video game.
Batter comes up, batter goes yard. Batter comes up, batter strikes out swinging. Rinse. Repeat.
Anyway ... even though it is just the Arizona rookie league, something sort of wonderful happened the other night: A 23-year-old kid named Nathan Patterson, in his professional debut, struck out all three batters he faced.
And if you're asking here, "Why is that so wonderful, particularly?"...
Well. It's because the 23-year-old kid named Nathan Patterson was, a couple of months ago, just a fan.
One night earlier this summer, see, he went to a Colorado Rockies game and decided to try his luck at a radar gun pitching booth. The radar gun clocked him at 96 mph. Video of it went viral, and, lo and behold, suddenly the Oakland A's were signing him to a contract and shipping him to Arizona.
That was Hollywood-y enough. But then the kid strikes out the side in his first outing?
"Oh, come on!" every film exec in California just exclaimed.
(OK, so probably not. I mean, someone did do a film about Vince Papale, the bartender who became a special teams fan favorite with the Philadelphia Eagles. And there was that one film starring Dennis Quaid about a schoolteacher who wound up pitching for the Tampa Bay Rays. And there was "It Happens Every Spring," where a nerdy college professor played by Ray Milland became a star pitcher after developing a bat-dodging baseball. But you get drift.)
The drift being, Nathan Patterson is not Ray Milland, but just a guy with a lively arm. And this is not something that happens every day.
It is, you figure, exactly the sort of fairy tale every kid getting the full ESPN treatment out in Williamsport, Pa., right now still believes in. The Little League World Series may have become as slickly corporate as MLB these days, but the kids are still kids, and they still dream their dreams. And so a guy like Nathan Patterson?
He is their secular patron saint. And he is everything good about baseball, or at least what baseball was always meant to be.
Something to hang onto these days, as you watch another boring video game dinger land in the seats.
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