The Arm by Jeff Passan Page B

doesn’t touch a baseball once the weather turns.
    â€œMy dad is always talking about it,” Pint said. “During the winter, when we’re taking three, four months off, he says, ‘You know there are kids in California who still haven’t put down a ball.’ It’s hard to put down a ball for that long, but he tells me we have bigger and better things ahead.”
    Pint’s father, Neil, pitched in college at Iowa State. Riley inherited his athleticism from his mom, Missy, as well, even if it wasn’t evident early on. He still cringes at pictures of him as a twelve-year-old so pudgy that he needed to rub lotion between his thighs daily to prevent chafing. After his freshman year, he grew six inches without shedding a pound, and it was then that Neil realized how he needed to handle his son. He wouldn’t be the parent who allowed the pressures of elite youth baseball to stunt his child’s development. Don’t pay attention to the rankings. Stay away from all but the largest showcases until his senior season. Whereas Molina was the classic travel-ball case, with eleven Perfect Game events before nationals, Pint was a modern anomaly.
    â€œI’ve always felt like maybe I’ve erred on the side of being toocautious,” Neil said. “But I’d rather do that than say, ‘Hey, you blew your kid out.’”
    Neil and Missy don’t worry about Pint. His grade-point average is a steady 3.5. The most dangerous beverage he drinks is Coke. “I’m trying to stay away from the soda,” Pint conceded. He never got into video games. He enjoys history documentaries. “I just like learning about the past,” Pint said. “My two favorite subjects are the Vietnam War and World War II. It really intrigues me just to listen. I’m a big documentary guy. I’ve watched an eight-hour documentary on Vietnam in HD on Netflix about three times.” He asks a different girl to every dance because Neil worries that a girlfriend could interfere with school and baseball, his two priorities. “I feel kind of bad sometimes for him,” Neil said. “I’m sure he wants a girlfriend.”
    And then the commiseration vanishes, stolen away by the clock that ticks in Neil’s head. Every day is one closer to June 2016, one more that Pint’s elbow didn’t roar, one more on the path to a delightful choice: life-changing money from a Major League Baseball team or a full scholarship to Louisiana State University, which made the offer to Pint after the WWBA tournament. Pint’s friends at Aquinas joke with him about it, asking what it’s going to feel like to be a millionaire. “I walk away or change the subject,” he said. “It’s kind of awkward to talk about.”
    As good as Pint’s knuckle-curve was at LakePoint, the velocity on his fastball bowled over scouts and inspired a story on the Perfect Game website that all but anointed him. Perfect Game’s love affair with velocity is much the same as baseball’s in general: total and seemingly unbreakable, even as evidence linking the relationship between velocity and injury mounts. The nearly one-third of major league pitchers who average 93 miles per hour on their fastballs are nearly twice as likely—21.2 percent to 11.2 percent—to end up on the disabled list the next season as a pitcher whose fastball velocity fails to crack 90, according to a study from Jeff Zimmerman of the website Hardball Times . For those whothrow 96 mph–plus, the chances of a DL trip the next year jump to 27.7 percent, according to Zimmerman’s analysis.
    Molina and Pint hit the 96-mile-per-hour mark as sixteen-year-olds, and Pint didn’t stop there. Early in his junior season, one fastball against DeSoto High School hit 98. His advisor, Greg Schaum, sat in the stands with his boss, agent Jason Wood, a former college player at Saint Louis University. Wood,