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"FacebookPinterest\n\nAs you enter the spring-training offices of the Seattle Mariners in Peoria, Arizona, the second thing you see is a photograph of Ichiro Suzuki, baseball's most sublimely gifted player. The very first thing you see, however, is a photo of a guy you may not recognize \u2014a stout, baby-faced pitcher frozen in mid-delivery, with wild black hair and drooping uniform pants. His name is Felix Hernandez, but ever since his first, amazing season as a 17-year-old minor league phenom, fans have called him King Felix. Just over two years later, with only 84.1 innings in the majors to his credit, he is being hailed as potentially one of the greatest pitchers of all time.\n\nIn the Mariners clubhouse one morning this March, the King is nowhere to be found.\n\nVarious players pore over USA Today at a picnic table, and a tiny clubhouse attendant who looks like the backward-speaking dwarf on Twin Peaks circulates, carrying a stack of folded towels. Near the trainers' massage tables, Ichiro is weighing himself on a balance-beam scale. In thin white sweats, his body is a slender column of muscle, and as he stands on tiptoe to record his weight on a sheet of paper tacked to the wall, he looks pleased. A few minutes later, he's lying on his back in front of his locker, carefully stretching his hamstrings. Ichiro at all times appears hermetically sealed in a state of deepest concentration, but to my surprise, when I approach him he readily agrees to a brief interview about Felix. An interpreter is found, and Ichiro begins animatedly speaking. \"His potential is on a scale we cannot measure right now,\" the future Hall of Famer declares. \"That's how big he is.\" When I ask him how he thinks he'd do at the plate against Hernandez, he laughs: \"I wouldn't want to face him.\"\n\n But then Ichiro smiles reproachfully from behind his wraparound mirrored sunglasses. \"Felix sometimes does not act like a rookie,\" he says. \"For instance, yesterday he was late for a morning stretch, and usually only the big players do that.\"\n\n I'll hear from others that Felix may be developing a swelled head. But you probably would, too, if you were barely 20 years old and could do what he can. He throws a 98-mph four-seamer \u2014some say he'll touch triple digits once he's done filling out \u2014and a 94-mph sinker. He throws his curveball 85 mph, harder than some major leaguers' fastballs. He also features a superb changeup and a slider that's reported to be his most devastating pitch but which the Mariners, to protect his arm, won't let him use. (Every once in a while, just for fun, he throws it anyway.) His pitches have so much natural movement on them, says Yorvit Torrealba, his batterymate last year, that \"he literally can't throw straight.\"\n\nNot since Dwight Gooden has a teenage pitcher been so brilliant. \"Veteran scouts tell me he's the best pitching prospect they've ever seen \u2014like ever,\" says Jim Callis of Baseball America. \"Compare him to Gooden, compare him to Kerry Wood, and they say, &#145;This guy is probably better.' \" Mariners manager Mike Hargrove likens him to Nolan Ryan; Benny Looper, Seattle's vice president of player development, tells me Felix ranks alongside A-Rod and Junior Griffey as one of the three best players he's ever scouted. Says Felix's teammate the sweet-fielding shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt, \"I've never seen anybody like him. He's the kind of player who comes along every hundred years.\"\n\nThis will be Felix's first full season in the majors, and his club, which has lost ninety games two years running, needs him badly. Throughout the organization, jobs are on the line. But history shows that virtually every major league pitcher the King's age who's carried a big workload has ended up a case study in orthopedic carnage. In Callis's words, Felix may be \"too good too soon\": so gifted that the Mariners can't resist pitching him as much as possible; so young that in doing so, they may destroy his arm.\n\n\n\nAs legend has it, the King, growing up in Valencia, Venezuela, added velocity the way most kids add height. Some say they saw him throw 90 mph at age 14. Renee Cortez, a Mariners minor league pitcher who also hails from Valencia, remembers reading \"about this young guy, 15, who threw ninety-five. The whole country knew about him.\" By the spring of 2002, reports about the kid were streaming in from local scouts to front offices throughout Major League Baseball. Felix Hernandez had to be seen to be believed, they said.\n\nFelix turned 16 in April 2002, and during spring training that year, he visited the States on a sort of showcase tour of minor league clubs. Dayton Moore, the Atlanta Braves' assistant GM of baseball operations, excitedly recalls first seeing the kid's precocious breaking pitch. \"He already had the weapons in his pitching arsenal to get major league hitters out,\" he says. By now, Felix's suitors numbered six: Seattle, Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Colorado, and the New York Yankees. Budgetary considerations had scared away the rest, because when you bid on a 16-year-old pitcher, you're essentially bidding on an architectural blueprint that God has folded and sealed in an envelope. Six years later, when you eagerly tear open that envelope, you're hoping to find you've got yourself a cathedral, but likely as not it's a porta-potty. \"There's an old baseball expression,\" says Callis. \"You need ten pitching prospects to get two good big-league pitchers. It's kinda the nature of the beast.\"\n\nOn July 4, 2002, Felix signed \u2014not with the highest bidder (take a stab at who that was), but rather with the team whose people his family had liked best. His bonus: $710,000 \u2014a lot to write off had he not panned out, but a pittance in light of who he swiftly showed himself to be.\n\nFelix began his minor league career in 2003 with the Everett AquaSox, striking out seventy-three batters in fifty-five innings \u2014mind-blowing numbers. He was 17 years old. In 2004, he dominated the notoriously hitter-friendly California League, then the Texas League, and John Sickels, author of the annual Baseball Prospect Book, rated him as the best pitching prospect in baseball. In Triple-A Tacoma the following year, the King drew full houses everywhere he pitched. Meanwhile, back in Seattle, Mariners starters were surrendering upwards of five runs a game. General manager Bill Bavasi sent Benny Looper and an associate to watch Felix pitch in Triple-A. \"We both said, &#145;Felix has got better stuff than anybody we've got in the big leagues,' \" Looper recalls.\n\nOn August 4, 2005, thirty-seven months after signing a major league contract, Felix ascended the mound of Comerica Park in Detroit wearing a pitching glove bearing the inscription el cartelua, Venezuelan slang for \"badass.\" He gave up just one earned run in five innings and commenced a streak during which he would face 112 major league batters before yielding the first extra-base hit of his career. \"What was strange was, he looked the same as he did in the minors,\" says Callis. \"Even the best pitching prospects don't come into the big leagues and do that.\" But the King might have been even better than he'd been in the minors: He walked half as many batters in the same number of innings. NBA great Larry Bird once acknowledged that he'd occasionally pass up easy shots just \"to make it interesting.\" If Felix's concentration did waver during his time in Triple-A, it must have been out of sheer boredom.\n\n\n\n\"Almost every baseball pitcher, if he plays long enough, will suffer a serious elbow or shoulder injury,\" says Glenn Fleisig, Ph.D., of the American Sports Medicine Institute. J. P. Ricciardi, GM of the Toronto Blue Jays, says, \"It's inevitable. It's just a question of when does it happen? How bad is it?\"\n\nBetween 1995 and 2004, only one other team, the Reds, had as many top pitching prospects suffer career-threatening injuries as the Seattle Mariners. \"They've just done a horrible job,\" says Will Carroll, who writes the online injuries column \"Under the Knife\" for Baseball Prospectus, the stats-analysis think tank. He rattles off the names of some of the wounded and says, \"The list goes on and on. They're just abysmal. It can't be bad luck, because it's been going on too long. And it can't be the water at Safeco [the Mariners' home field].\"\n\nSo what is it, then? Stats geeks have dedicated considerable man-hours to the question of how to preserve the arms of young pitchers, and the future they predict for the King isn't necessarily a bright one. Let's begin with the issue of workload. Mike Hargrove, Felix's manager, says the King will throw no more than 200 innings this season, spring training included. This, unfortunately, is a little bit like insisting you will pull the trigger no more than five times during your first turn at Russian roulette. Seven pitchers Felix's age have pitched 200-inning seasons since 1967, and six of them suffered devastating arm or shoulder injuries by age 25. Carroll has done a study suggesting pitchers shouldn't throw 200 innings till age 23: \"If you can make it to then without a serious injury, you're usually going to be okay.\"\n\nThe second issue is the number of pitches per game. Throw too many and you'll see an immediate short-term decline in performance. Throw too many too often and you risk serious injury. And fatigue tends to make a pitcher alter his mechanics \u2014drop his elbow, say, which reduces the stress on some muscles but dangerously increases it on others.\n\nMechanics are the final and, it seems, most controversial piece of the puzzle. When you throw a pitch at 98 mph, your arm is essentially trying to rip itself out of its socket. Only soft tissue prevents it from doing so. Bad mechanics will aggravate the process of anatomical destruction that is inherent in every pitch. So how are Felix's mechanics? \"His head flying off and to the left [as he releases each pitch] is just such a red light,\" says Carroll, who doesn't much like the King's windup, either.\n\nMike Marshall, who won the Cy Young Award in 1974, today holds a kinesiology Ph.D. and divides his time between instructing young pitchers at his Florida academy and pissing off the baseball establishment. His ideas are a mixture of the innovative, the dubious (he believes that supination, the natural rotation of the wrist at the terminus of the pitcher's delivery, is the devil), and the doomsaying. \"Pitching coaches have no idea why their pitchers injure themselves,\" he says. \"They blame the pitchers and use pitch counts and other nonsense to convince their owners that they're doing everything they can. General managers, player-development directors, and pitching coordinators protect their paychecks instead of the arms of their pitchers.\" For GQ , Marshall looked at stopmotion images of Felix's delivery and pronounced this terse verdict: \"If he continues to use this pitching motion at this intensity, he will destroy his pitching arm.\"\n\nMariners pitching coach Rafael Chaves simply doesn't see it that way. \"If I weren't comfortable with his mechanics, I'd be attacking them right now,\" he declares. \"I think he's exactly where he needs to be.\"\n\nA handful of guys are born with Hall of Fame talent. Only a fraction of them are anatomically aberrant enough to throw 200 innings a year for fifteen to twenty years without sustaining a major injury. \"Don't let anybody try to fool you,\" says Ricciardi, whose Blue Jays have excelled at keeping young, electric arms healthy. \"A lot of this is luck. Look at Roger Clemens. That guy's a freak. To pitch that long and be that healthy and that productive, that's just the good Lord blessed you.\" Ricciardi's \"freaks\" include Nolan Ryan (an average of 232 IP over an astounding twenty-seven seasons), Steve Carlton (245/24), Tom Seaver (249/20), Bob Gibson (261/17), and Greg Maddux (234/20). Of course, there's another group of guys whose arms ultimately couldn't bear up under their huge talent: Think Mark Fidrych, Gary Nolan, and Ryan Anderson (see box). The only way to discover whether or not Felix belongs in the first group is to risk discovering that he belongs in the second.\n\nRight now, the King is one of the few great things the Mariners have going for them. He can single-handedly win games, he can fill seats in the ballpark, he can get the team on Fox. But there's a goose-wholaid-the-golden-egg quality to all this: Do you make use of Felix's magical talent on his terms or yours? How do you not ride a guy like this as hard as you can? The press has compared Felix to the Hope diamond and a particular Ming vase in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he's not like those things at all. A diamond and a ceramic vessel do not endanger themselves simply by existing. By doing his job in the prescribed fashion, a baseball pitcher destroys himself.\n\n\n\nI'd been told Felix would pitch for the last time during spring training on a Monday night against the Texas Rangers. The game would be televised \u2014a rarity for spring training \u2014but I wanted to see his 98-mph heater in person. But that evening, when the Mariners take the field, it's Gil Meche who's throwing in the bullpen. In the press box, I find out that Felix has developed shin splints and will not pitch again before the regular season begins. The Mariners are being ultracautious with him, as they have been all along. In Triple-A, for instance, he had an innings quota that, once reached, entailed his being shut down for the season \u2014even if his team qualified for the playoffs. And this past spring, the team prevented him from playing for his native Venezuela in the World Baseball Classic. \"He's gonna be letting it out completely when he's representing his country,\" says Benny Looper. \"We didn't think that was a good idea, considering the load that's gonna be on his arm this season.\"\n\nThe next morning, the King pads stiffly through the Mariners clubhouse, his right calf bulkily wrapped beneath his uniform pants. He's huge \u2014six feet three and listed, conservatively, at 230 pounds. He's not wearing his cap, and his tangle of black hair is tipped with blond highlights.\n\nNo reporters approach the King this morning, though all spring long his teammates have been besieged by questions about him. (\"Felix?\" Adrian Beltre, the third baseman, exclaims disbelievingly when I approach him. \"Again?\") The kid has been besieged, too, but he's been big-timing journalists for weeks now (including me); my sense is that he doesn't know how to deal with all the attention; ergo, he's not.\n\nAs salsa blares from a boom box, eight or ten Seattle pitchers slouch on low stools in one aisle of the clubhouse. They're bullshitting or just sprawled there in a sort of silent, bleary solidarity. Mariners pitching has been lit up this spring. Three times, the staff has given up fifteen runs. Twice, ten. On five other occasions: eleven, thirteen, fourteen, seventeen, and twenty.\n\nThe next morning, the salsa has been supplanted by Rob Zombie, but only a few players linger by their lockers. Most of their teammates, it seems, have removed themselves to the gym. Periodically, an envoy from manager Hargrove appears, points at a player, and curtly announces, \"Skip wants to see you.\" The Mariners break camp tomorrow, and today the manager must cut or demote eleven players. A 30-year-old catcher named Corky Miller returns from Hargrove's office, slumps onto a stool, and stares into space.\n\nAvoiding eye contact with anyone, I notice two Post-it notes adhering to the upper right-hand corner of Kenji Johjima's locker. Johjima, a rookie, is the ex\u2013Japanese League star who will catch Felix this year, although they have no language in common. (\"It's not like we're going to be talking about government,\" Johjima explains. \"We all know how baseball is played.\") The Post-it notes read, respectively, \"Fuck Yourself Jo-Jo/Stay Strong\" and \"Suck Dick Joh Joh.\" A smiley face accompanies the latter inscription. You have to wonder what Johjima's teammates told him those notes say.\n\nEventually, Hargrove admits me into his office. He's seated at a mostly bare Steelcase desk; much of his stuff must be packed by now. I thank him for finding time to see me on this particular day, then seat myself amid a cascade of you bet's and sure thing's. All morning, the manager has been dashing players' hopes; his face drawn now, he speaks quietly when I ask him about Felix. \"There are a lot of pitfalls for everybody, and those things are much bigger when you're 19,\" he says. (Felix would soon turn 20.) \"Overwork. Pitching when you're hurt. Losing your focus off the field. We have to pay attention.\"\n\nA day earlier, the Cubs placed two of the best pitchers in the game, Mark Prior and Kerry Wood, on the disabled list. Both players are casualties of their manager Dusty Baker's predilection for outlandishly high pitch counts. Baker, it's been said, has the effect on young hurlers of a buzz saw, and the thick medical files of Prior and Wood may prove to be his legacy. Hargrove, too, has faced criticism for riding starters too hard, and he certainly doesn't want to be remembered as the man who prevented the King from assuming his throne. But it appears that he's going to be careful with Felix, or at least that he believes he is. \"We'll take him as far as we can in a game,\" he says. \"I really feel that with anything over 125 pitches, you affect his ability to recover for his next start.\"\n\nThe words come out so easily, I'm not sure I've heard him correctly \u2014125 pitches? \"Certainly, we don't want to sacrifice wins, but the overriding factor is gonna be his health.\" What if Seattle is fighting for a playoff spot but Felix has reached his innings quota? Hargrove grimaces: \"We may have to readjust.\"\n\nTwice during the interview, the manager will say of Felix, \"He's 19 years old,\" the tone of his voice mixing wonder and exasperation, and it occurs to me that Felix's limitations probably constrain his manager most of all. As Jim Callis says, \"What do you do if the kid's thrown a hundred pitches over eight innings and you're ahead two to one? Do you really take him out?\" It will be Hargrove's unhappy duty to knowingly make his team worse every time he removes Felix from a game.\n\n\"Is he Tom Seaver, who goes into the Hall of Fame?\" asks John Sickels. \"Is he Dwight Gooden? Or is he somebody who blows out his arm at age 21 and never comes back? I think he's got a better chance to succeed than most 20-year-old phenoms, but he faces long odds.\" How long? \"Probably only a little better than fifty-fifty.\"\n\nThere may be a finite number of games in which the best pitcher in baseball \u2014a kid who can't even drink beer legally until next April \u2014has his best stuff. Gooden, after averaging 215 innings between the ages of 19 and 24, put up ordinary numbers at best for the remaining ten years of his career. A baseball pitcher who flashes as early as Felix is like one of those rare natural phenomena that appear fleetingly and then vanish for decades \u2014like Halley's comet, which will next be visible from Earth in the year 2061. Which is why I urge you to get yourself tickets behind home plate, no matter the cost, and see the King when he comes to your town.\n\nThe hope is that Felix will prove to be a \"freak\" like Clemens or Nolan Ryan, or that the Mariners will somehow find a way to keep him from getting hurt. Dayton Moore says, \"The people in Seattle are great baseball men, and they'll do what's right,\" but I suspect that Hargrove and his bosses know the game's history. They know that Felix will almost certainly suffer an injury, and they know that they'll be blamed for it, even if they've done everything they could have to avoid it. There will always be some moment an outraged fan can point to \u2014if only they'd pulled him that time, if only they hadn't let him stay in to strike out that last guy, if only they'd allowed the bullpen to just do its job. Because then the kid would still be pitching."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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