Like hundreds of island kids before him, Houston Wade began playing baseball in the Little League T-ball program, then progressed through the minors and eventually the Majors league.
Three years in Babe Ruth followed, but then heredity threw a high hard one at the youngster.
“When I was 15, I hit a growth spurt,” Wade said. “I grew 13 inches in a year.”
At that point, he stood six feet, four inches, yet weighed just 118 pounds – “I had no speed, no mass, no anything.”
Not surprisingly, he wasn’t recruited for the Spartan baseball team.
By the time he graduated from BHS in 1999, bytes had replaced bats in his imagination; home pages were more important than home runs, as he envisioned a career in computer networking.
Yet Wade leaves tomorrow to begin his first season in professional baseball – in Kufstein, a small mountain town that’s one of eight teams in Division 1 of the Austrian Baseball League.
Wade’s roundabout route to the pros began after graduation. Intending to enroll at the University of California at San Diego, he moved to the Golden State to establish residency.
Soon afterward, he was involved in a serious bicycle crash, the victim of a hit-and-run driver.
He woke up in the hospital with no memory of what had happened.
Wade came back to Bainbridge to recuperate, and planned on getting his computer network certification.
Then another crash – this one the tech market – wiped out his plans.
By then he’d hooked up with Fred Myers, a local baseball coach, and began helping out with Myers’ Babe Ruth team.
A third baseman and outfielder as a youngster, Wade soon gravitated toward the pitcher’s mound.
“I always wanted to pitch,” he said, “but it seemed that that always went to the coach’s son.”
He quickly discovered that, filled out to 165 pounds, he threw the ball “really hard.” Not quite hard enough, though, because he couldn’t quite reach the 90 mph velocity that pro scouts crave.
But he found an answer in an obscure, wildly unpredictable pitch used by only a handful of professional hurlers.
It was the “killer knuckleball,” which Wade hoped would be his “gateway to the pros.”
With all pitches, the complex physical interplay between force, air resistance, ball rotation and cover stitching determines the ball’s movement on its way to the catcher’s glove.
But the knuckleball is thrown with almost no rotation at all. The resulting, highly varied forces of drag send the ball, in the words of Yale physicist and baseball scholar Robert Adair, on “extraordinary excursions of trajectory” that can confound batter and catcher alike.
For knuckleballers, pitches that appear well out of the strike zone can suddenly veer into the glove. And vice versa.
Wade added his own trick as well.
“I use the tip of my middle finger and one knuckle on my index finger,” he said. “Usually when you deliver a knuckler, you keep your wrist stiff. I snap mine, which gives it more velocity.
“You go for the general direction of home plate, and let the ball do the rest.”
To the pros
Emboldened by his new weapon, he went to a Seattle Mariners tryout in Everett in the summer of 2000, but nothing happened. The following summer, he went into high gear.
“I went to every tryout I could find on the Internet within 500 miles,” he said. That translated into seven or eight tryouts, with the Expos, Reds, Braves and several other organizations.
“They seemed impressed with the knuckleball,” he said, “but my fastball was just 84-86 miles an hour. And there’s a prejudice against the knuckleball. It’s on one day, off the next.”
No one seemed interested, and the dearth of prospects led to a shift in priorities, from pitching to politics.
Wade gave up on baseball, and decided to run for the Bainbridge Island City Council, declaring for a central ward position last fall. But suddenly, he began getting letters from baseball teams in Europe.
“I guess the Major League Scouting Bureau felt I had potential over there,” he said.
By December he had a preliminary contract with a German team.
But he never got a formal contract, when the organization’s main sponsor pulled out and the team went bankrupt.
Then came an offer from the Vikings.
Kufstein, close to the German border in the Austrian Alps and about equidistant from Salzburg and Innsbruck, had an opening for the one foreign player each team is allowed – a Japanese player on their roster had just gained residency.
Sight unseen, they offered Wade a contract.
“A lot of European teams are desperate for American players,” he said, adding that the level of play is similar to an “high A” ball, like the Everett Aqua Sox, or lower AA.
Now, it may be a few weeks before his knuckler begins dancing in the crystalline Alpine air. The snow usually doesn’t melt until April, Wade said, so the season begins at the end of April or beginning of May.
If he feels any pressure, it isn’t apparent.
“If I do well, I could move up to teams in the Netherlands or Italy, where baseball is going crazy,” he said. “They have stadiums with up to 40,000. If I (stink), then I’ll come home.”
Myers, for one, is optimistic about Wade’s chances despite his lack of game-time pitching experience.
“He had a work ethic that can’t be beat,” Myers said. “And he knows a lot about the mental side of the game.
“I hope he does really well.”
It isn’t a get-rich-quick proposition. His contract, which runs through October, provides a monthly salary of 600 Euros, – slightly over $600 – plus an apartment, food, use of a car and airfare.
When he’s not training with the team or playing, he’ll be in charge of local youth leagues and assistant coach for a second division team. While the money may not be fantastic, the opportunity is.
“My main reason for going is the travel,” he said. “I’ve never been to Europe. It’s a lot better than playing in Davenport, Iowa.
“It may not be as competitive, but the atmosphere is more magical. Some of the apartments that they’re considering for me are 400 years old.”
And whatever happens, Wade’s already enjoyed one huge perk.
“I tell people I’m a professional baseball player,” he said. “That’s a very satisfying thing to say.”
