Beyond Belief Read Online Free PDF

understood it was a temptation for teams to consider using me as a pitcher, since left-handed power pitchers are the rarest and most valuable commodity in baseball.
    By the time my senior season began, I had been told by more than one scout that I would be one of the top two picks regardless — pitcher or outfielder, it didn’t really matter. In one of our early season games, with a line of scouts behind the plate, I was the starting pitcher and came out throwing bullets. The kids on the other team had no chance. My daddy was sitting close enough to see the readings on the scouts’ radar guns — they were consistently 94 to 96 — and after the second or third inning he walked down toward our dugout and got my attention.
    “Josh, take a little off,” he whispered.
    I was confused. Nobody could touch me. I was blazing everybody.
    “Why?”
    “’Cuz if you keep throwing like that, all these scouts are going to want to make you a pitcher. Tone it down to about 90 — they still won’t be able to hit it.”
    If the scouts were unsure whether I was a pitcher or a position player, later in the game I gave them something that either further confused them or set their minds at ease. On one of the few decent pitches I saw, I hit a 450-foot homer into the football practice field beyond the fence in right-center. I was also walked intentionally three times, an event that happened way too often for my — and the scouts’ — liking. They would grumble and groan about not getting a chance to see me swing the bat after they’d driven all day to watch me play. Some of the coaches we played against understood what was going on and actually allowed their pitchers to throw to me so the scouts could get a look. I hit over .600 my senior year, and I learned to become a pretty good bad- ball hitter because I was never sure I was going to get a decent pitch to hit.
    On the days I pitched, I became accustomed to the choreography of the scouts as I stood on the mound and looked in for the catcher’s sign. They stood — sometimes as many as sixty of them — behind the chain-link backstop and raised their radar guns to eye level in unison every time I started into my windup.
    When I came to the plate, they all watched intently with their stopwatches in their hands, thumbs on the trigger, ready to click the second I made contact so they could time me running from home plate to first base.
    Scouts are a traditionally skeptical bunch. Sometimes they fall in love with a player and exaggerate his abilities, but they’re more likely to seek out flaws to hedge their bets. They rate players based on five tools — hitting for average, hitting for power, throwing, fielding, and speed. A player who is above average in three of those tools — or, in the scouting lexicon, “plus” in three tools — is considered a definite pro prospect.
    Scouts throw around the phrase “five-tool player” the way they throw around concrete pillars. It’s the most exclusive description in baseball, and from the time I was a sophomore in high school, it was the term most often used to describe me. Some of the quotations from the scouts in the newspapers were so flattering they bordered on embarrassing. They were comparing me to the great Mickey Mantle and saying I was the best high school baseball player they’d ever seen.
    The scouts did their homework, too. They left nothing to chance. When it became clear that I was going to be one of the top two players taken in the June draft, the intensity escalated. The Tampa Bay Devil Rays had the number-one pick, and the Florida Marlins had the second pick, and both teams made sure they knew all about me in advance of the draft.
    They interviewed me, my teammates, my friends, my coaches, my parents, my brother, and pretty much anybody else they could think of. They would have interviewed my girlfriend if I had one. They put me through psychological testing to see how I would respond to tricky situations. They asked