From Couch to Mound
C.J. Moore
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Ty Reese was sitting at home on his couch Tuesday when he thought he received a prank phone call.
Emporia State coach Bob Fornelli called to tell Reese the Kansas City T-Bones needed a pitcher for Tuesday night.
“I thought coach was messing with me,” Reese said. “Then the manager of the T-Bones called.”
Reese signed a one-day contract with the team and joined former teammates John Martin, a catcher this season for the team, and outfielder Mark McBratney, who the T-Bones also signed today and was in the dugout with the team on Tuesday. McBratney was released a couple of weeks ago from the Detroit Tigers organization and had been hanging out in Wichita.
Reese has spent the summer coaching a AAA Legion baseball team in Emporia, preparing for his new gig next year as an assistant baseball coach at Butler County. He spent Tuesday night on the mound at Community America Ballpark, starting a rain delay game that had been postponed until Tuesday and was in the fifth inning with the T-Bones trailing 8-3.
Reese went four innings and allowed two runs in the T-Bones’ 10-8 loss. Reese’s performance was a win away from the beginnings of a Kevin Costner movie script. The lefty had not thrown a pitch all summer or even practiced pitching.
“I wasn’t planning on it and coach called and asked me if I’d want to try it and I thought, why not?” Reese said.
Thanks to his performance, the T-Bones are going to keep Reese around for at least one more start. T-Bones manager Andy McCauley informed Reese after the game that he would start Sunday against the Schaumburg Flyers. If he pitches well, he’ll most likely keep getting starts, and Reese is fine putting off his normal job.
“If they want me to, yeah, I’ll keep doing it for sure,” he said.
McBratney was not in uniform on Tuesday, but Fornelli said he would probably start Wednesday. The former ESU outfielder hit .186 this season in Low-A ball in the Tigers organization, who signed him in 2007 to a minor league contract.
“He did a good job for them, but got into a numbers game and is done and so he got an opportunity to get picked up and he did,” Fornelli said.
Three former Hornets on the same professional team was a first, which was enough to get Fornelli to drive to Kansas City to catch the game on Tuesday.
“For Ty this might be a one-night experience,” Fornelli said Tuesday evening as he watched Reese warm up. “So I definitely wanted to be here if I could.”
uber_cj_fan (anonymous) says...
Boy Wonder shines again.
To say that CJ has begun to demonstrate mastery of the language is to say that a young Pollack had an idea of how to splatter paint of the canvas. CJ, sadly, is a genious who is doomed to not be understood in his time. He is a man whom generations in the fore will create grand stories to justify his brilliance. But that is the beauty of this man. He is a simple prodigy, willing to earn the public's respect word-to-word, sentence-to-sentence. His plain prose harkens back to a time when Journalism was a place of respite-- the irony being that Moore is roughly 50 years ahead of his time.
To become the subject of a Moore piece--to be put under the microscope of his diserning eyes and dissected by his expert hands and understood by his all-knowing mind-- must be a place or extraordinary fear. But those that know CJ swear his writing ability is surpassed only by his compassion-- they swear that his razor sharp prose is intended to only sculpt his subjects for public consumption and not brutually go for the metaphoric jugular and lay bear their very existence.
In this day and age when consumers thirst for Originality, Moore has become an oasis in the desert for the people of Emporia, quenching our dieing palates with rain-drops from heaven, feeding the starving with mana of knowledge.
August 1, 2008 at 1:14 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
EsqEB (anonymous) says...
Concerning the comment above:
1. Weird
2. CJ should keep his pet rabbits away from this person
August 1, 2008 at 1:24 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
emporialifer (anonymous) says...
Agree Esq. I found myself dozing off halfway through that first post. Perhaps CJ could offer some spelling and grammar lessons though to help clean up that post. Or was it supposed to be a joke since even "genius" was misspelled?
August 1, 2008 at 1:46 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
sportsfan80 (anonymous) says...
What the heck is all that garbage about????? Tell me what the comment from uber_cj_fan has to do with the article about Ty Reese?
Congratulations to Ty for having the opportunity to pitch at a post collegiate level. My son would have been thrilled to be called up to play at that level, even if it was a one shot deal.
August 1, 2008 at 8:01 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )