He's on sidearm mission to majors Column by The Post's Lonnie Wheeler
It's mid-morning of the day in which the Brooklyn Cyclones of the New York-Penn League will finally win their first game of the season after seven unfortunate outings, and Joe Smith, a side-arming relief pitcher, is standing in front of his 20-story dormitory at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, trying to hail a cab to get over to some teammates across the borough and have some breakfast.
"Man," says the 22-year-old graduate of Amelia High School, where he was better known for basketball than his favorite sport, "this is the thing about New York. It's hard to get from A to B. I don't mind the subways so much, but oh my goodness, the cab rides are driving me crazy. I guess I'd like somewhere a little smaller."
Not that he's complaining, mind you. After what he's been through, Smith would sleep on a hard bench at Grand Central Station if the package included professional pitching.
It's all he ever wanted to do, a determination that was positively essential to getting himself named as the Male Athlete of the Year at Wright State University, to getting himself selected (with an 0.98 earned run average) as the best reliever in the Horizon League, to getting himself drafted in the third round earlier this month by the New York Mets.
"When he got here," observed Rob Cooper, Smith's head coach at Wright State, "Joe was a competitive kid who had dreams of playing in the big leagues. Over time, he became a guy who instead of just thinking that, basically went on a mission."
He first showed up at the suburban Dayton school as a 6-foot-2, 230-pounder with a good arm hanging from a bad shoulder, which had begun to bother him during the summer after his promising sophomore season at Amelia High School. At the time, Smith was pitching in the high-reaching Midland system, and something went awry at a tournament in Battle Creek, Mich.
"One organization that really stuck behind him was Midland," remarked his father, Mike Smith. "Jay Hayden was the one who stuck with him; kept him on the club even when he was hurt."
Smith took his ailing labrum to Reds doctor Tim Kremchek, who advised him that he was still too young for surgery. The kid scarcely pitched for Amelia the next year, and then, attempting to throw through it, aggravated his injury over the summer. It was a partial tear, and this time, Kremchek approved the operation.
By his senior season, Smith's shoulder was healed but still weak. He pitched rarely, and when he did, it didn't go particularly well. When he walked on at Wright State, he was cut.
However, Ron Nischwitz, the Raiders' distinguished coach at the time, permitted the Clermont Countian to hang around and practice with the team, which was all he was really looking to do. "I knew I wasn't going to be able to pitch my first year there," Smith said. "I just needed a place to go and work out and get in the swing of things."
A year later, Smith's improvement was conspicuous enough that Nischwitz brought him on for some first-rate relief work, which he delivered with a conventional overhand motion. Then, with the WSU stadium already in his name, Nischwitz left the program and Cooper took over, which is where the story picks up steam.
As Cooper tells it, "We got here and we thought that Joe was good enough to help us on the mound, but we didn't know in what role. He threw about 83 to 85 miles an hour and threw for strikes and threw his curveball for strikes. We knew he could help us. There were some other guys that we were going to drop to sidearm who we didn't think could compete at this level otherwise. Joe was not a candidate for that. But he was more or less hanging around the bullpen one day when our pitching coach (Greg Lovelady) was working on this. Joe said, 'Hey, I can do that,' and dropped down and all of a sudden you saw run on the ball, you saw the ball moving.
"The pitching coach came down to where I was and said, 'You've got to see this.' It looked different. It was good."
At first, Smith resisted the change. There were meetings. There was encouragement. Eventually - after Cooper convinced him that the low-slung style would actually raise his profile - there was consent. And soon, success.
"He was pitching well for us," Cooper recalled, "but it was never like, 'Wow, this is unbelievable.' About halfway through the year, we had a game against Evansville and we thought, golly, it looks like he's throwing harder. But it was night, and cold, and we thought that's what it was. Then we went to play at Arizona State and after the game the head coach came up to me and said, 'That guy's unbelievable. He's better than anybody we've got in the Pac-10.'
"The next day a Texas Rangers scout came up and said, 'Tell me about Joe Smith. I've got to be honest, that's the best one-inning guy I've seen west of the Rockies.' He said Joe was throwing between 88 and 91 miles an hour. I said, 'You've got to be kidding me.'''
This spring, his weight down to 205 and his dream coming into focus, Smith occasionally reached 94 on the radar gun. He developed a serviceable slider and a better changeup.
"I was at Miami when Danny Graves was there," Cooper said, "and Joe Smith has the ability to pitch in the major leagues."
The Mets obviously think so. Upon signing June 19, Smith was immediately inserted into a closer's role. The short Class A season started the next night, which found Brooklyn losing 18-0 to the Staten Island Yankees.
Smith's first appearance came the next night against the same team, when the Cyclones led their archrivals 7-2 going into the bottom of the eighth inning. He entered with the bases loaded. He left with Brooklyn trailing.
It wasn't as bad as the numbers suggested - only one Yankee hit the ball out of the infield against him - but his next outing wasn't quite as good as might be imagined from a statistically scoreless inning and two-thirds. "If you were at the game," Smith admitted, "it didn't look all so graceful. I came in with two runners on and the first pitch went back to the backstop. Then I hit a guy to make the bases loaded. Then they hit a ground ball back to me and I knew it at the catcher's knees, off his glove, and that run scored."
Finally, Wednesday night, Brooklyn took a lead into the bottom of the ninth inning at nifty KeySpan Park, which sits directly across from Coney Island, a 25-minute ride on the F-train and a 40-minute trip in the team van from the dorm at Polytechnic University, and Smith was summoned and the sidearm was working and three batters came up and three sat down and the Cyclones, hallelujah, had won their first game.
"They told me I was on a fast track," Smith said, "and as long as I do well, they would move me."
The next stop would be somewhere like Hagerstown, Md., or St. Lucie, Fla., where the buildings stop at a few stories and all roads lead from point A to Double-A.
Contact Lonnie Wheeler at lwheeler@cincypost.com.
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