There were 31 kids in Oswalt’s class and roughly 130 kids in the entire high school, so he had his teammates recruit kids to field a full team. Roy, a sophomore, pitched. Brian, a senior, played second base. The Lions played 40 games in three seasons. Roy pitched 38 of them.
“There was no such thing as a bullpen,” he said. “You started and finished.”
The school had an established football program. Oswalt played four years as wide receiver and defensive back for the team, which produced NFL players such as Alvin McKinley (Panthers, Browns, and Broncos defensive lineman, 2000–07) and Dennis McKinley (Cardinals fullback, 1999–2002). He enjoyed the sport, but he wasn’t big enough to keep playing it. Some thought he wasn’t big enough to keep playing baseball, either. He was just 5-10, 155 pounds as a senior, so nobody thought a whole lot about him as a major-league prospect.
Baltimore Orioles part-time scout Kenny Dupont seemed to be the lone exception. He watched Roy pitch five or six times in high school and liked what he saw. In fact, he filed a report with the Orioles about the small right-hander from middle-of-nowhere Mississippi. He told Baltimore to give Oswalt a look, despite the fact he hit only 86–88 mph on the radar gun.
“They actually laughed at me,” Dupont said. “They said he was too small. They said he had bad mechanics. They said there would be too much wear and tear. They did not project him to be a 90-plus guy. They told me I was crazy.”
The Orioles could feel comfortable in their evaluation of Oswalt because nobody else considered him a prospect, including Division I colleges. Having nowhere to go, but wanting to play baseball, Oswalt enrolled at Holmes Community College in Goodman, Mississippi, about 50 miles from Weir.
Dupont, who coincidentally became the pitching coach at Holmes, always believed Oswalt would throw harder once he started concentrating on baseball, which is exactly what happened. Oswalt dedicated himself to the game. He would walk to one side of the field with a five-gallon bucket of baseballs. He would long toss to the other side of the field, collect the balls in the bucket, and throw them back to the other side. Even in the rain.
“He was the hardest-working guy I’ve ever coached,” Dupont said in the summer of 2011.
Oswalt cleaned up his mechanics and started to throw 90–92 mph as a freshman. The Houston Astros selected him in the 23rd round of the 1996 draft and offered him $50,000 to sign. He did not immediately sign. The Astros maintained rights to Oswalt until two weeks before the 1997 draft. In the interim, the little right-hander’s fastball had jumped to 95 mph. Houston increased its offer to $500,000. Roy signed.
He was on his way.
Or so it seemed.
Oswalt developed calcium deposits in his shoulder in 1999, which forced him to miss the first month of the season with Class A Michigan. He rehabbed the shoulder, rejoined the team, and felt great before feeling pain in a different part of the shoulder later in the season. The Astros had tried to change his pitching mechanics, which could have had something to do with it. But the pain got worse and worse and he started taking painkillers to handle it. He figured he could finish the season, rest in the off-season and be ready for spring training. But the shoulder hurt like hell every time he threw a pitch. He could barely raise his right arm over his head, and even when he returned to Mississippi in the off-season, simple tasks like reaching the top shelf at the grocery store became difficult.
He figured he needed shoulder surgery.
Before he made the call to the Astros medical staff he had some work to finish on the used Ford F150 he used for hunting. Oswalt knew trucks and cars. His neighbors down the road used to race, so they were always building engines. Oswalt spent enough time there to learn a few things and felt pretty confident he could fix the hiss he heard coming from his engine. It was running when he reached for a bare spark plug wire with his right hand.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzap!
Electricity shot through Oswalt’s body. His hand gripped the wire tighter and tighter. He couldn’t let go, so he did the only thing he thought he could do. He jumped backward. It jarred the wire from his hand and he tumbled to safety.
Shaken from the shock, he noticed something.
His shoulder felt better.
“The next day I couldn’t feel it at all,” he said.
Oswalt told the Astros about his spark-plug miracle, but they were skeptical. A country boy from Mississippi had just called, telling them he had just electrocuted himself, and magically healed his shoulder.
Sure, Roy.
They told Oswalt that time and rest had probably healed it.
“I’m telling you it wasn’t time,” he told them. “It was to the point when I was about to call you to tell you to cut me open and look in there.”
The spark-plug incident provided the jolt to a remarkable career. Oswalt went 15-7 with a 2.21 ERA in Single A Kissimmee and Double-A Round Rock the following season. He went 14-3 with a 2.73 ERA his rookie season with the Astros in 2001, finishing second to Albert Pujols for National League Rookie of the Year. He won 20 games twice, made the All-Star team three times, and finished in the top five in Cy Young voting five times.
He also won the 2005 NLCS MVP Award, which was how he got the bulldozer. He was talking to McLane one day, when the Astros owner casually mentioned he owned a bulldozer and was cleaning up 500 acres of land he owned in Texas.
“When you’re finished with it I wouldn’t mind buying it from you at a discount,” Oswalt told McLane.
They went back and forth about it, but hadn’t finalized anything when McLane ran into Oswalt before Game 6 of the NLCS at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Oswalt was watching film of Cardinals hitters when McLane approached. The Astros had never reached the World Series before and McLane wanted it more than anything.
“If you win this game I’ll buy you a new bulldozer,” he said.
Those words got Oswalt to look away from the screen in front of him. He shot up from his chair and shook McLane’s hand.
Deal.
Oswalt won the game. He allowed three hits, one run, one walk, and struck out six in seven innings to send Houston to its first World Series. Oswalt walked off the mound after the seventh inning and looked at McLane, who was sitting by the visitors’ dugout.
“You better call me in the off-season,” he thought to himself.
McLane called.
“Hey, come pick it up,” he told Oswalt over the phone. “We got you one.”
Oswalt drove home to Mississippi just hours after the Chicago White Sox swept the Astros in the 2005 World Series.
It made no sense to stick around.
He always feels the tug back home. He loves it there. When he is not with his family in the off-season, he is spending free time where he spent much of his childhood—outdoors. Except he no longer has to hoe the watermelon fields or run the knuckleboom. He gets to make up for those countless times when he ran out of daylight and couldn’t go hunting or fishing. At any moment in the off-season Oswalt might be hunting or working land he owns in Mississippi, Missouri, or Illinois.
“Nothing really has changed a whole lot for him,” Brian Oswalt said. “Outside, being around the same things.”
Oswalt owns the Double 4 Ranch near his home in Kosciusko, Mississippi, which boasts 1,000 acres, whitetail deer, gemsboks, blackbuck antelope, and mouflon sheep. Billy Oswalt and Robbie Hall, a cousin, serve as guides for patron hunters. According to Oswalt, a city slicker with almost no hunting experience would have “about a ninety percent” chance of killing something on his reserve.
But that isn’t how Oswalt hunts. He is a little more methodical. A little more deliberate. He selects an animal—not just a buck, but a specific buck—and begins his pursuit.
“It makes it more of a challenge than just a deer coming out to eat and shooting it,” he said.
That’s how he got Eight Ball.
He spent the entire three-month season in 2004 hunting a deer he nicknamed Eight Ball because of its eight-point rack. He never took a shot at
anything else, even deer that were bigger and better than his target. Eight Ball became Oswalt’s Moby Dick. He had photographic evidence of his existence from the night-vision cameras he has on his property. Deer, like most animals, stay in a particular area, but Eight Ball hadn’t revealed himself when Oswalt had been in position to take a shot. And time was running out. It was the last day of deer season and Oswalt was sitting in his stand just before dark. Something told him to get out of the stand and walk to the edge of a ridge.
“I never do that,” he said. “I always stay in the stand until dark. Just something told me to go over the ridge.”
Eight Ball was 15 steps away.
“I could have killed him with a rock,” Oswalt said.
Eight Ball was with a doe. Startled at hearing the hunter, the doe ran away. She passed Eight Ball, blocking the buck’s view. Oswalt raised his rifle and looked through his scope.
He was so close the scope only showed the animal’s neck.
Got him.
“It’s the challenge,” the pitcher/hunter said. “You always have the chance of killing something that’s unbelievable or extraordinary. And I can’t just sit around my house. I talk to guys and they sit around the house for three or four months during the off-season. I’m just not that type.”
So he will climb into his stand and sit there for hours in the off-season.
Waiting.
Watching.
“It’s just the peace and quiet I like about it more than anything,” he said. “It’s you. It’s just you out there. Plus, you’re waiting for that next adrenaline rush.You never know when that adrenaline rush is going to hit.”
The land has given Oswalt’s family plenty over the years, but nature took something back when thunderstorms and tornadoes tore through Mississippi on April 24, 2010. As the rain fell and the wind howled, Oswalt’s mother, Jean, grabbed her Yorkie, Sweetie, and ducked into a closet in the back of her home.
It would be the last time she saw her house in one piece.
Inside the closet she heard what sounded like explosions as a tornado touched down. Her home was being shredded into pieces and tossed like kindling by 200-mph winds. When the storm passed and she emerged, she noticed her husband Billy’s Bible—Billy was on a hunting trip in Missouri when the storm struck—a few feet from her. It was unmarked.
She considered it a sign. Seven people died from the storm, but she survived. A few strong beams around the frame of the closet stood tall and saved her from injury or worse.
Oswalt was with the Astros when he heard the news. He immediately gathered his wife and two daughters and drove eight hours from Houston to Weir.
“Prepare yourself,” Oswalt’s brother Brian told him during the drive. “There’s nothing left.”
The childhood home of Brian, Roy, and Patricia Oswalt, their older sister, had been destroyed in a blink of an eye. Trees had vanished. The landscape had totally changed.
“It looked like a bomb went off,” Roy said.
The loss crushed him. He took pictures of the destruction on his cell phone, which he flipped through nearly a year later in the Phillies’ spring training clubhouse. One picture showed a friend’s banged-up pickup truck, which had been tossed the way a child might throw a Tonka truck from one side of the sandbox to the other.
Oswalt, whose own home roughly a mile away was untouched, immediately got to work. He used the bulldozer McLane gave him to clean up the rubble of his childhood home.
“That was pretty rough,” he said.
Priceless mementos had been destroyed. There were pictures and home movies, some with Roy pitching as a youngster. Gone. Oswalt had given his parents his 2005 National League Championship Series MVP trophy. Gone.
“I actually pushed up pieces of it with the bulldozer,” he said.
The Astros made a duplicate NLCS MVP trophy for Oswalt. The local photography studio that had taken high school portraits of all three Oswalt children still had the negatives on file and made reprints after the originals, which had hung on the wall.
“In a small town, everyone tries to help each other,” said Oswalt, who also used his bulldozer to help neighbors clear rubble. “People have a way of picking right back up. There’s a good spirit in our town.”
Oswalt didn’t feel the spirit in Houston. The Astros had not made the playoffs since 2005, had not finished better than third in the National League Central since 2006, and had not enjoyed a winning season since 2008. He knew he wouldn’t pitch forever and he knew he wouldn’t win in Houston, so he requested a trade during the 2010 season. He made his desires known privately before eventually taking them public.
“He wanted a chance to win before his contract was up and he took it back to the farm,” Houston General Manager Ed Wade said.
Agent Bob Garber told the Astros that Oswalt wanted to be traded to Texas or St. Louis because of their proximity to his home. Wade told Garber he would try to find a match with the Rangers or Cardinals, but he also made it clear he would not force a deal to those teams. Wade had been down that road when he was the Phillies’ GM. Curt Schilling demanded a trade in 2000 and told the Phillies he only would accept a trade to Arizona. Wade sent his ace to the Diamondbacks for the uninspiring package of Omar Daal, Nelson Figueroa, Travis Lee, and Vicente Padilla.
“Lesson learned,” Wade recalled in 2011. “OK, you don’t want to go where we want you to go? Then stay here.”
Oswalt didn’t have as much leverage as he might have thought.
Wade started making calls around the same time the Phillies started making calls. The Phillies were looking for a starter or a reliever, depending on what made the most sense. But they also were struggling, falling seven games behind the Atlanta Braves and a half game behind the New York Mets in the National League East on July 20. So they were making calls about possibly trading Jayson Werth, too.
Phillies General Manager Ruben Amaro Jr. made one of his first calls to Seattle Mariners General Manager Jack Zduriencik, who was trying to trade Cliff Lee. The Phillies had traded Lee to the Mariners in December 2009, but Seattle’s plans to compete in the American League West had imploded and there seemed to be no reason to keep him because he was not going to re-sign with the Mariners once he became a free agent.
“What would it take to bring back Cliff?” Amaro asked Zduriencik.
“It would have to start with Domonic Brown.”
“Can’t do it, Jack,” Amaro replied.
Brown was the organization’s top prospect and the Phillies projected him to be one of their everyday outfielders, potentially as early as 2011. If the Phillies did not trade Brown to get Lee from Cleveland in July 2009 or Halladay from the Blue Jays in December 2009, they were not going to trade him to Seattle, knowing Lee could sign with another team in a few months.
The Phillies and Astros started to talk.
There were multiple reports that Oswalt would not go anywhere other than St. Louis or Texas, which had teams wondering if they might be wasting their time. Those teams asked Wade about Oswalt’s willingness to play elsewhere, and he told them he didn’t know.
“You just need to proceed,” Wade told clubs. “If there’s something that makes sense, then we’ll be in a position of presenting it to him.”
Wade had a feeling much of Oswalt’s demands were acts of gamesmanship. While he might have preferred St. Louis or Texas, based on what had been expressed privately, Oswalt would not kill a deal if it meant staying in Houston. He wanted out.
“He was very vocal about it,” Wade said.
Wade read Oswalt correctly. As Texas and St. Louis faded from the picture and the July 31 trade deadline approached, Wade got a sense from Garber that Oswalt was open to exploring other opportunities, “particularly Philadelphia.”
The Astros needed somebody to replace Oswalt’s arm in the rotation, so the Phillies agreed to send them left-hander J. A. Happ. They also included outfielder Anthony Gose and shortstop Jonathan Villar, a pair of minor-league prospects. The
Astros did not need Gose because they figured they had enough outfield depth in their system. They needed a corner infielder and they targeted Brett Wallace from the Toronto Blue Jays. The Phillies tried to include the Blue Jays in the deal, trying to make it a three-team swap. But Wade, who was talking with Blue Jays General Manager Alex Anthopoulos on other trade matters, took over those discussions and agreed to swap Wallace for Gose separately.
The Phillies believed Happ, Gose, and Villar were expendable because they had comparable players elsewhere in the system. They had more than a season of Oswalt, who would replace Happ. They had Tyson Gillies in Double-A Reading. He made up for the loss of Gose. They knew Villar had a lot of talent, but he was years away from the big leagues and Freddy Galvis could step in earlier.
The Phillies and Astros had agreed on the talent, but they also needed to agree on the money. Oswalt was owed $7 million for the rest of the season, plus $16 million in 2011 and a possible $16 million in a mutual option in 2012. The option included a buyout: $2 million if the Phillies declined their side of the option or $1 million if Oswalt declined his side of the option.
In addition to Oswalt, the Phillies received $11 million from Houston in the deal. That raised some eyebrows around the game, but it was the price rebuilding Houston had to pay to move a veteran who didn’t want to be there, add some young talent, and gain some salary relief.
“It shows you what the market was like,” Wade said. “We took money back on (Lance) Berkman, too. We traded two iconic players and, in order to make the deals work, we had to take back money on both of them.”
That is the price for acquiring young, controllable talent, even when that team is giving up an ace in return. The Astros got Happ, who finished second in the 2009 National League Rookie of the Year voting. They got Wallace, who would be Houston’s first baseman, and Villar, who could be Houston’s shortstop of the future. The Phillies needed some money in return to offset their 2010 and 2011 budgets. They wanted payroll flexibility.
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