The Arm by Jeff Passan Page A

a businessman. And we’ll leave it at that.”
    Eventually, Ford wrestled Perfect Game back from Rodriguez for an amount neither would discuss, and what grew from it seems to invalidate Rodriguez’s assessment of Ford. Perfect Game took in $15.5 million in revenue during 2014, according to Ford, and netted $1 million—double its profit of three years before. And it came in a time of significant investment aimed at total takeover of a market it already owns. Perfect Game is now to youth baseball what Kleenex is to facial tissue. Ford still projected “extreme growth” in the future. “We want that corporate identity to be the M of McDonald’s, to be the swoosh of Nike,” said Patrick Ebert, Perfect Game’s managing editor, on a video posted to its YouTube channel. “So when people see the PG, we don’t even need to say it’s Perfect Game, because you’ll know it’s Perfect Game.”
    On its website and social media accounts, Perfect Game documents showcases, games, and events in breathless recaps. Years before Major League Baseball used radar technology to grok on-field goings-on, Perfect Game employed the Trackman radar system to capture pitching velocity and batted-ball exit speed. It implicitly encourages young players to throw harder, run faster, hit longer, all so they can scale the leaderboards that Perfect Game posts online. Perfect Game’s database contains more than one hundred thousand names of past participants. If Harley Harrington sticks with baseball, he’ll go to a Perfect Game event soon enough. Everyone does.
    Perfect Game’s biggest asset—the one that makes its critics cringe—is that Major League Baseball teams find it indispensable. Scouts show up to all the big events, droves of them, to validate a system rife with moral hazard, in which grown men are often forced to pit their own futures against what’s best for the athletically gifted children they’re using to advance their coaching careers.
    Ford doesn’t see his enterprise as the issue. “The problem,” he said, “is there’s this thing called winning. That’s what seems to make people crazy, not Perfect Game.”
    L AKEPOINT SPORTS BRANCHES OUT OVER 127 acres, a sprawling, billion-dollar, mixed-use complex in Emerson, Georgia, about thirty miles north of Atlanta. It boasts soccer fields, lacrosse fields, volleyball courts, a golf course, and sixteen synthetic-turf-covered, scoreboard-equipped, night-lit, full-sized baseball fields. Major league teams are jealous of the place. Perfect Game calls it home.
    Every summer, about three weeks after nationals in Fort Myers, Perfect Game holds the WWBA National Championship at LakePoint, the wood-bat tournament that is the glorious fruit of its toil. Never before had Riley Pint attended a Perfect Game event, so scouts knew of him only by reputation. Pint took the mound July 9, 2013, and popped fastballs of 92, 93, 94, 95, and96 miles per hour. Then he threw a one-knuckle spike curveball that was every bit as good as his fastball. Scouts flocked to sneak a peek. And just like that, after one game, Pint had displaced Anthony Molina as the most exciting pitcher in the class of 2016.
    Because he lived and attended high school in suburban Kansas City and never went to Perfect Game events, Pint had spent the previous two years in relative anonymity, even as his fastball hit 90 after his freshman year. Baseball in Kansas is a seasonal endeavor, and rather than spend his winters at indoor baseball facilities, Pint plays basketball. I first met him at a basketball practice at Saint Thomas Aquinas, a private school in Lenexa, Kansas, where he was running circles around his teammates when he wasn’t running wind sprints. Pint stands six feet four and weighs 190 pounds, perfectly proportioned for a body that can take on another thirty pounds. He is the argument against specialization, a kid who