Читать книгу Rage. The Legend of "Baseball Bill" Denehy онлайн

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I was one of the best young pitchers in the nation when I graduated from high school in 1964. I could throw a baseball ninety-five miles an hour. I once struck out twenty-four batters in a high school game. I retired forty-one batters in a row when I pitched in two American Legion games. Both outings were almost perfect games. Did you ever do something where you felt—where you knew—that you were the best in the whole wide world? That’s how I felt when I was a teenager in high school.

When I came up to the New York Mets in 1967, I got more ink than Tom Seaver, the college kid from California. In our first games pitching for the Mets, Tom and I each struck out eight batters to set a rookie record that wasn’t broken until 2012. My future was so bright that Topps even put us on the same baseball card, calling us Mets Rookie Stars of 1967. I was living my dream. It was a dream I got to live for about two weeks.

In my fourth start, I hurt my arm. I never saw it coming. I had never been hurt before. I threw a pitch and felt the intense grip of pain in my shoulder. Little did I know that my brilliant major league career was finished after exactly two months; after that I was just hanging on to my dream.