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You’re Drew Storen. You’re the closer for the best team in the majors. You have that job because you throw a hard fastball with crazy life, a plummeting sinker that’s near impossible to make good contact on and a slow slider that slices through the strike zone like a machete. You also have the job because you remain remarkably composed in very stressful situations, you have a career ERA under 3.00 and you strike out nearly a batter an inning. You are very, very good and regarded as one of the best young closers in the game. The Washington Nationals are very happy to have you.
And yet, here you are. It’s all of two months past your 25th birthday and you’re digging your cleats into the tanned dirt mound at Nationals Park, hands on your hips, hat pulled low over your face, as 46,000 people watch your world crumble around you.
About 20 minutes ago, your situation was far less dire. It was the top of the ninth inning in the fifth and deciding game of the NLDS. Your team had a two-run lead and your manager gave you the ball to get the final three outs and send your franchise to its first NLCS in 32 years. His decision was never in question. You’re his closer. It’s your job. And you’ve blown just one save in the past 14 months.
But none has been as tense as this. Maybe that’s why you open the most important outing of your career by giving up a screaming double into deep centre. It’s not the start you were looking for.
But you get the next two batters out and are within one strike of the win against the next hitter. Trouble is, you walk him, and the next guy, too. Your pitching coach comes to the mound, not so much to discuss strategy but to give you a second to collect yourself and slow down a situation that is starting to move too fast for you. After about 30 seconds, he leaves and you turn to your trusty sinker, but you leave it up over the plate and the batter sends it right back up the middle. Two runs score. Tie game.
Then you leave a sinker up to the next guy as well, and he sends it into right field, scoring two more as the ballpark falls silent in disbelief. You strike out the next batter—the opposition’s pitcher, for what it’s worth—to get out of it, but it’s too late. The damage is done. The other team has a closer too, and he needs just 12 pitches to retire the heart of your team’s order and end your season.
This can only be classified—in the interest of forthrightness—as a colossal disappointment. Your team won 98 games during the regular season after eight consecutive years without a winning record, dating back to when the franchise was in Montreal and you were just a 16-year-old high school student in Brownsburg, Ind. Slow, tiresome, patience-testing years of tanked seasons and careful drafting have produced a bounty of top-flight young prospects such as yourself—and now it’s time to cash in. This season was supposed to be about breaking out, not breaking down.
After the game, you sit dejectedly at your locker as clubhouse attendants buzz around you, rolling up the plastic tarp they had laid down in the room just 30 minutes earlier when it seemed victory was assured. You face the music, talk to the media, tell everyone you’re sorry. You don’t know yet that you’ve already received death threats on Twitter.
So begins the longest winter of your life. You and your best friend, Tyler Clippard—who shares a Capitol Hill apartment with you and filled in as closer when you missed time with bone chips in your right elbow—skip town, heading to London for two weeks just to get away. No one recognizes you in the U.K. or ever wants to talk about baseball. It’s a nice change. You come back before Christmas and spend time with your family. You deal with the disappointment, the defeat, the shame. You get over it.
But while you’re out of town, your team is busy, signing veteran starter Dan Haren and speedy centrefielder Denard Span. Power-hitting first baseman Adam LaRoche re-signs and 24-year-old prodigy Stephen Strasburg, the best young pitcher in the game, is cleared to pitch a full season after recovering from Tommy John surgery.
Your team raises its payroll from $96.7 million in 2012 to upwards of $110 million in 2013, resolutely shoving more chips into the middle of the table in a push for a World Series title. These moves are encouraging and you can’t wait to put the shortcomings of 2012 behind you and close for a team that should romp into the playoffs. Except you won’t.
Your GM’s biggest off-season move is his last, signing Rafael Soriano, the former Yankees closer, for two years and $28 million in January. Soriano is a more established closer than you. He led the American League in saves in 2010 and filled in flawlessly for the greatest closer of all time, Mariano Rivera, when the Yankee legend lost 2012 to a knee injury. Your GM didn’t bring Soriano here to be a set-up man. He’s here to close. He’s here for your job.
You found out about the deal on Twitter and immediately called Clippard; you think this might mean you’re being traded. Shortly thereafter, you received a call from your GM saying that no, you aren’t going anywhere, but yes, you are no longer the team’s closer. After two seasons of doing that job, including a brilliant 2011 when you saved 43 games, you won’t be used in the role you’ve worked your entire career to get to.
Baseball is cruel like that. If you could’ve just thrown one more strike against the Cardinals, you’d likely still be the closer. Soriano probably would have signed somewhere else and the Nationals might have used the money they gave him to strengthen their bench or add starting pitching depth. But you couldn’t.
And now, as your team—already among the best in the league—gets even better, you’re just a set-up man in an excellent bullpen. Of course you want the team to win, but does it have to come at the expense of your role? It’s a conflicting feeling to be sure.
But at some point late in the season or maybe even in another elimination game, your manager is going to pick up the phone and tell you to start throwing. And then you’re going to run to the mound and he’s going to give you the ball and you’ll have to block it all out and not think about the last time you were in a situation where the season was in your hand and it all went to hell. You’ll have to forget the defining moment of your young career so far and focus on doing what’s gotten you here.
So, will you be up for it?
Arden Zwelling is a staff writer at Sportsnet magazine
