Post by Deleted on Jul 27, 2010 22:04:09 GMT -5
Erick Blasco’s first draft pick as Rockies GM started with a nickname.
“When we first heard about the kid in Baseball America several years ago,“ Blasco said, “We thought it was just a nickname some imaginative friends gave him that happened to stick. We didn’t expect it to be so literal.”
Rick Carson’s nickname wasn’t just a moniker, though. It was a defining description of his baseball blueprint—the fingers that would carve out the precise trajectory and velocity of his pitches, the wrists that would snap for extra bite on his breaking ball, all sending instructions to the shoulder to put the instructions to action—The metallic assembly line of making outs.
No, it wasn’t just a nickname, but the medium for that assembly line.
Old Iron Hands.
It’s a cool spring morning in Pembroke, Vermont. The trees are turning green again, flowers are in bloom, but the last harborages of winter leave their nippy fingers across the New England dawn. Pembroke Academy graduation is two weeks away. When Rick Carson finishes up his final exams, he’ll graduate with a fine birthday present. Being the first round pick of the Colorado Rockies.
He owes that gift to another gift, the fortune of metallic hands. Like the rest of the human population, Carson wasn’t born with hands of iron.
“I used to get made fun of a lot,” Carson says, looking into the distance, perhaps into his childhood. “I’m six-foot-two now, but I was five-foot-two as a freshman and most of junior high school, and real scrawny. My mom was real strict, she would make sure I would be asleep at 9 p.m. every night, and I didn’t watch television that much. Kids used to think I was weird. They made fun of me.”
One time, those kids went too far. A group of bullies assaulted Carson outside his locker forcing him to play mercy. They were so strong they actually ripped Carson’s hands off his wrists. Luckily for Rick, the school nurse/cook/home economics teacher, Betty Frutenschnectburg was nearby.
“I had three choices,” Nurse Betty, who isn't adept at counting, recalled. “I could have called an ambulance, which could take him to the hospital. They may have been able to sew his real hands back, but if they took too long, he could’ve died. Or, I could perform emergency surgery. I wanted to save Rick so I chose surgery.”
Nurse Betty, was later sued for the surgery by four different parties for gross negligence and is no longer allowed within 20-feet of any object that is remotely sharper than a lead pencil, needed something to graft for hands. “I had four choices. I could’ve just tied his wrists into stumps, but that would’ve been boring. I had a hanger lying around, but he would’ve looked like some creepy serial killer. We had some scrap iron lying around from an old locomotive. I took my chainsaw and my scapula and went to work. Next thing you know, he was a work of art.”
He was better than a work of art. “The first thing I did,” Rick remembers, “I went home and my mother screamed for an hour. Then she made dinner, and screamed for a few more hours after we sat down and ate and talked about our day. The next day was a weekend though, so I thought I’d go to the park and play some baseball with whoever was there. I found out that I was throwing really hard. One of the older kids said I should try to join the baseball team. My first tryout, the coach said I was throwing 92 miles an hour. I was like, whoa.”
After some initial bouts of wildness, Carson became a star at Pembroke Academy. He played pitcher and some middle infield, but his pitching was well above his hitting. “I’m still not all that strong, and my bat speed isn’t great, so I stuck to really fine tuning my pitching.” Most of that fine tuning had to come with the nature of having metal hands.
“It’s hard at first, to grip the ball properly. That’s why I was so wild at first. The ball feels so small. But I kept working on it,” Rick says.
“The metal boosts the velocity and hides the ball so well,” he continues. “Since I can’t grip the ball in my finger tips, and have to hold it more towards my back knuckles for grip, the ball gets good natural sink. I fiddled around with my breaking ball and have a real tight slider. It just jets out and spins hard down and away from righties. It’s a late bloomer, kind of like myself.”
Scouts for OSA agree. “That slider isn’t fair. It has the potential to be amazing once he learns to harness it better. His stuff is great, everything is hard and down. Just look at that strikeout total (186 strikeouts in 109.1 innings). It’s ridiculous. If he had another pitch, he’d be a top five pick.”
Another scout disagrees though. “He’s really raw. The stuff is good, but a lot of those strikeouts come just from his hands freaking out these 17-year-olds who are more concerned with making out with their girlfriends anyway. His league isn’t great. I want to see what he can do in the low minors.”
Fans around the league aren’t impressed with the pick. A contingent of Yankees fans who have been making out since the announcement of their own pick, George Klibu, untangled themselves to utter, “That f*****g iron man? He’s not a Yankee so he f*****g sucks!”
Of course Rockies fans were more accepting of the pick. “We’re Rockies so we’re Rock Stars! It makes perfect sense that we draft some heavy metal!” Boris Smirnoff said, making ridiculous air guitar gestures in the process.
Needless to say, both groups of fans we interviewed we’re beyond inebriated
Carson’s critics, though, aren’t just concerned for his team allegiance, stuff and mechanics. There are more fundamental issues attacking the nature of his metal hands.
Eileen Benes, president of Mothers Against Robots is outraged that a person with metal hands could be allowed to play professional baseball. “Listen. If we saw Terminator walking down our streets, we’d arrest him right? Of course we would. We certainly wouldn’t allow him to play professional baseball. Why is this kid given that right?
“Robots are evil. They fight our wars, they corrupt our citizens. What’s to stop this guy from using his hands to choke one of his enemies? He’s a menace. And he needs to pay the price!”
Linda Barnes, an advocate for disabled children laughs off Benes’ paranoia. “He’s a kid who had an accident who has metal implants to help him overcome his disability. He’s not some cyborg who wants to terrorize mankind,“ Linda chuckles in bemusement. “He’s a kid who wants to play baseball.”
“I’m not sure if it’s good for the integrity of the game,” blogger Billy McMillon writes. These steroid clouds have tainted the record books forever. We have no idea what to do with our numbers anymore. Why? Because of artificially enhanced players. If this guy becomes a star, what’s to stop some lunatic from sawing off his hands and making them metallic in order to become a better pitcher. Yeah, there’s a safety risk. Roids carry a safety risk too.”
Barnes disagrees with those sentiments as well. “The effects of steroids are more subtle. Hair loss and acne are minor inconveniences, while artery decay is something that most people can’t see so they assume doesn’t exist. Losing your hands, though, is a much more obvious, and permanent disability.”
Despite the controversies surrounding Carson, one group has already adopted him as a savior. The LMM, or Liberators of Metallic Mutants, has cast Carson as the person who can give hope to humans born with metal deformities.
Morgan White is a member of that organization. His face looks like the tin man’s, and he spruces up his joints with oil every morning. He’s been called everything from a freak, to a natural disaster, to a communist spy based on his birth defect.
“Our group,” he says, “is comprised of people who have to live underground. We can’t live like everyone else. I have to sleep in a sewer. When children see me, they scream ‘monster!’ I tried to appear on Nightline once. They thought I was a Japanese invention. They tried to move me with a remote control. It didn’t work, obviously, so they thought I was broken. They folded me in a box and tossed me onto the street,” Morgan says crying. “Mr. Carson can be our salvation!”
Still, Carson brushes off the expectations. “I’m not here to be a savior or anything. I just want to play baseball to the best of my abilities. That Abbot guy who used to pitch for the Yankees,” Carson says, referring to former pitcher Jim Abbot who was born with only one hand? "I want to be like him.”
Erick Blasco agrees. “If he can develop a third pitch, which will be hard because you can’t throw a changeup with his hands, he can become a lights out starter. We can try to see how he fares as a two pitch starter as well. Right now, we expect to be a closer in the minors. He’s our closer of the future.”
The Rockies will be trusting the final outs of their ball games to the hands of Rick Carson.
Trusting their final outs to Old Iron Hands.
Sidebar:
We’ve asked some other famous individuals with metal implants or hand disabilities what they think of Carson’s particular case.
Jim Abbott: It’s always great to see a person who has a disability, and what that person does to overcome it. He hasn’t let having metal hands stop him in baseball, and I think that will make him better off in life.
Edward Scissorhands: People should do what they want to. Why would anyone want to stop his dreams?
Captain Hook: Arrgh!!! First Rick will make hitters swab the decks, then he’ll make them walk the plank! I expect him to amass an arrrrrrmy of K’s!
Jaws: He’ll take some lumps, but it’ll be important for him to dust himself off and keep on ticking.
We sent a reporter to Unimatrix 18 to interview a collection of Borg drones, but he hasn’t been heard from and is presumed assimilated.
“When we first heard about the kid in Baseball America several years ago,“ Blasco said, “We thought it was just a nickname some imaginative friends gave him that happened to stick. We didn’t expect it to be so literal.”
Rick Carson’s nickname wasn’t just a moniker, though. It was a defining description of his baseball blueprint—the fingers that would carve out the precise trajectory and velocity of his pitches, the wrists that would snap for extra bite on his breaking ball, all sending instructions to the shoulder to put the instructions to action—The metallic assembly line of making outs.
No, it wasn’t just a nickname, but the medium for that assembly line.
Old Iron Hands.
It’s a cool spring morning in Pembroke, Vermont. The trees are turning green again, flowers are in bloom, but the last harborages of winter leave their nippy fingers across the New England dawn. Pembroke Academy graduation is two weeks away. When Rick Carson finishes up his final exams, he’ll graduate with a fine birthday present. Being the first round pick of the Colorado Rockies.
He owes that gift to another gift, the fortune of metallic hands. Like the rest of the human population, Carson wasn’t born with hands of iron.
“I used to get made fun of a lot,” Carson says, looking into the distance, perhaps into his childhood. “I’m six-foot-two now, but I was five-foot-two as a freshman and most of junior high school, and real scrawny. My mom was real strict, she would make sure I would be asleep at 9 p.m. every night, and I didn’t watch television that much. Kids used to think I was weird. They made fun of me.”
One time, those kids went too far. A group of bullies assaulted Carson outside his locker forcing him to play mercy. They were so strong they actually ripped Carson’s hands off his wrists. Luckily for Rick, the school nurse/cook/home economics teacher, Betty Frutenschnectburg was nearby.
“I had three choices,” Nurse Betty, who isn't adept at counting, recalled. “I could have called an ambulance, which could take him to the hospital. They may have been able to sew his real hands back, but if they took too long, he could’ve died. Or, I could perform emergency surgery. I wanted to save Rick so I chose surgery.”
Nurse Betty, was later sued for the surgery by four different parties for gross negligence and is no longer allowed within 20-feet of any object that is remotely sharper than a lead pencil, needed something to graft for hands. “I had four choices. I could’ve just tied his wrists into stumps, but that would’ve been boring. I had a hanger lying around, but he would’ve looked like some creepy serial killer. We had some scrap iron lying around from an old locomotive. I took my chainsaw and my scapula and went to work. Next thing you know, he was a work of art.”
He was better than a work of art. “The first thing I did,” Rick remembers, “I went home and my mother screamed for an hour. Then she made dinner, and screamed for a few more hours after we sat down and ate and talked about our day. The next day was a weekend though, so I thought I’d go to the park and play some baseball with whoever was there. I found out that I was throwing really hard. One of the older kids said I should try to join the baseball team. My first tryout, the coach said I was throwing 92 miles an hour. I was like, whoa.”
After some initial bouts of wildness, Carson became a star at Pembroke Academy. He played pitcher and some middle infield, but his pitching was well above his hitting. “I’m still not all that strong, and my bat speed isn’t great, so I stuck to really fine tuning my pitching.” Most of that fine tuning had to come with the nature of having metal hands.
“It’s hard at first, to grip the ball properly. That’s why I was so wild at first. The ball feels so small. But I kept working on it,” Rick says.
“The metal boosts the velocity and hides the ball so well,” he continues. “Since I can’t grip the ball in my finger tips, and have to hold it more towards my back knuckles for grip, the ball gets good natural sink. I fiddled around with my breaking ball and have a real tight slider. It just jets out and spins hard down and away from righties. It’s a late bloomer, kind of like myself.”
Scouts for OSA agree. “That slider isn’t fair. It has the potential to be amazing once he learns to harness it better. His stuff is great, everything is hard and down. Just look at that strikeout total (186 strikeouts in 109.1 innings). It’s ridiculous. If he had another pitch, he’d be a top five pick.”
Another scout disagrees though. “He’s really raw. The stuff is good, but a lot of those strikeouts come just from his hands freaking out these 17-year-olds who are more concerned with making out with their girlfriends anyway. His league isn’t great. I want to see what he can do in the low minors.”
Fans around the league aren’t impressed with the pick. A contingent of Yankees fans who have been making out since the announcement of their own pick, George Klibu, untangled themselves to utter, “That f*****g iron man? He’s not a Yankee so he f*****g sucks!”
Of course Rockies fans were more accepting of the pick. “We’re Rockies so we’re Rock Stars! It makes perfect sense that we draft some heavy metal!” Boris Smirnoff said, making ridiculous air guitar gestures in the process.
Needless to say, both groups of fans we interviewed we’re beyond inebriated
Carson’s critics, though, aren’t just concerned for his team allegiance, stuff and mechanics. There are more fundamental issues attacking the nature of his metal hands.
Eileen Benes, president of Mothers Against Robots is outraged that a person with metal hands could be allowed to play professional baseball. “Listen. If we saw Terminator walking down our streets, we’d arrest him right? Of course we would. We certainly wouldn’t allow him to play professional baseball. Why is this kid given that right?
“Robots are evil. They fight our wars, they corrupt our citizens. What’s to stop this guy from using his hands to choke one of his enemies? He’s a menace. And he needs to pay the price!”
Linda Barnes, an advocate for disabled children laughs off Benes’ paranoia. “He’s a kid who had an accident who has metal implants to help him overcome his disability. He’s not some cyborg who wants to terrorize mankind,“ Linda chuckles in bemusement. “He’s a kid who wants to play baseball.”
“I’m not sure if it’s good for the integrity of the game,” blogger Billy McMillon writes. These steroid clouds have tainted the record books forever. We have no idea what to do with our numbers anymore. Why? Because of artificially enhanced players. If this guy becomes a star, what’s to stop some lunatic from sawing off his hands and making them metallic in order to become a better pitcher. Yeah, there’s a safety risk. Roids carry a safety risk too.”
Barnes disagrees with those sentiments as well. “The effects of steroids are more subtle. Hair loss and acne are minor inconveniences, while artery decay is something that most people can’t see so they assume doesn’t exist. Losing your hands, though, is a much more obvious, and permanent disability.”
Despite the controversies surrounding Carson, one group has already adopted him as a savior. The LMM, or Liberators of Metallic Mutants, has cast Carson as the person who can give hope to humans born with metal deformities.
Morgan White is a member of that organization. His face looks like the tin man’s, and he spruces up his joints with oil every morning. He’s been called everything from a freak, to a natural disaster, to a communist spy based on his birth defect.
“Our group,” he says, “is comprised of people who have to live underground. We can’t live like everyone else. I have to sleep in a sewer. When children see me, they scream ‘monster!’ I tried to appear on Nightline once. They thought I was a Japanese invention. They tried to move me with a remote control. It didn’t work, obviously, so they thought I was broken. They folded me in a box and tossed me onto the street,” Morgan says crying. “Mr. Carson can be our salvation!”
Still, Carson brushes off the expectations. “I’m not here to be a savior or anything. I just want to play baseball to the best of my abilities. That Abbot guy who used to pitch for the Yankees,” Carson says, referring to former pitcher Jim Abbot who was born with only one hand? "I want to be like him.”
Erick Blasco agrees. “If he can develop a third pitch, which will be hard because you can’t throw a changeup with his hands, he can become a lights out starter. We can try to see how he fares as a two pitch starter as well. Right now, we expect to be a closer in the minors. He’s our closer of the future.”
The Rockies will be trusting the final outs of their ball games to the hands of Rick Carson.
Trusting their final outs to Old Iron Hands.
Sidebar:
We’ve asked some other famous individuals with metal implants or hand disabilities what they think of Carson’s particular case.
Jim Abbott: It’s always great to see a person who has a disability, and what that person does to overcome it. He hasn’t let having metal hands stop him in baseball, and I think that will make him better off in life.
Edward Scissorhands: People should do what they want to. Why would anyone want to stop his dreams?
Captain Hook: Arrgh!!! First Rick will make hitters swab the decks, then he’ll make them walk the plank! I expect him to amass an arrrrrrmy of K’s!
Jaws: He’ll take some lumps, but it’ll be important for him to dust himself off and keep on ticking.
We sent a reporter to Unimatrix 18 to interview a collection of Borg drones, but he hasn’t been heard from and is presumed assimilated.