The Arm by Jeff Passan Page A

out twenty-seven hitters over twelve innings. Like other gifted pitchers of the time, Pettit threw every day. When one of his friends in the housing project where he lived begged off to go home for dinner, Pettit found another to play catch. He pitched for his high school team during the week and on Saturdays, plus an American Legion team Sundays. When he was fifteen, a semipro team in nearby Torrance offered him a spotin its rotation, and he jammed that into his schedule, too. “I knew a couple times I wasn’t really in good shape when I threw,” Pettit said. “I remember one winter I played for a team over in Hermosa Beach. I didn’t throw during the week. I was playing basketball. And I went out and threw on Sunday. That wasn’t good.”
    Nobody knew better at the time, least of all a film producer named Frederick Stephani. He wanted to make a movie about a major league pitcher. One featuring a star player would cost too much, so he concocted another plan: he would lock the finest amateur pitcher into a ten-year contract and harvest the rewards when the player signed with a major league team. On October 19, 1949, Pettit agreed to an $85,000 deal with Stephani, who figured with no amateur draft and teams salivating for young pitching he could fetch more money. Three months later, the Pittsburgh Pirates made Pettit baseball’s first six-figure bonus baby, paying $100,000 for his rights. Stephani took the extra $15,000 and the title of baseball’s first player agent. He never made the movie.
    Pittsburgh assigned Pettit to Double-A New Orleans, where he threw a 154-pitch game in which he walked eleven and struck out nine. He labored through the 1950 season, losing velocity on his fastball and forcing him to reconsider how he pitched. “I was working on a curveball,” Pettit said. “I needed one that was a little faster. And I messed up my elbow.”
    Pettit went to Baltimore to visit George Bennett, the doctor believed to have first identified a UCL tear. He had worked in sports medicine for nearly forty years and had seen every kind of sore arm. Ten years earlier, Hall of Famers Dizzy Dean and Lefty Gomez traveled to Baltimore the same day so Bennett could save their arms. Dean’s career lasted two more starts and Gomez scratched out two substandard years. Even the best doctors can’t undo damage already done.
    Bennett cleared Pettit to keep throwing. “I went back, and there wasn’t really any therapy to give me,” Pettit said. “No cortisone. I was anxious to get back. I would just throw and throw. And I’d start favoring the elbow. Then my shoulder and elbow both were hurting.”
    Neither ever improved. Pettit threw 30⅔ innings in the major leagues, won one game, gave up pitching at twenty-one, reinvented himself as a power-hitting outfielder, and bounced around Triple-A for another seven years. Pettit is eighty-four today, too old to harp on his misfortune, except once a month when he goes to the Navy Golf Course in Los Alamitos, California, the place where Tiger Woods cut his teeth, and spends the afternoon with about a dozen other ex-ballplayers who excel at the art of embellishment. However spurious Pettit’s stories sound to his friends, they contain enough truth to cause the listener to feel sorry for him. Baseball’s ignorance killed his arm, and those who did survive engaged in the ultimate victim-blaming.
    â€œA sore arm is like a headache or toothache,” Warren Spahn, the future Hall of Famer, told Sports Illustrated for the 1959 story. “It can make you feel bad, but if you just forget about it and do what you have to do, it will go away. If you really like to pitch and want to pitch, that’s what you’ll do.”
    For every Warren Spahn, every freak who managed to throw tens of thousands of pitches and live to throw tens of thousands more, there were countless Paul Pettits, boys with golden arms that