Forkball

NEWTON -- Jack McGeary was sitting in his living room one night last week, savoring a brief time without books or umpires. His prep school baseball season is finished and he has no exams. Instead, as his senior project, he went back to the fourth grade at St. John's, his old elementary school in Wellesley, to be a teacher's aide.

"It's fun to go to recess again," McGeary says with a smile. "Roxbury Latin for six years has been a tough place. It's nice to end on a relaxing note."

All that will change Thursday afternoon when McGeary likely will hear his name announced on ESPN2 late in the first round of the major league baseball draft.

"It's almost here now and it's real," he says. "It's something I've been dreaming about for a long time."

The dream, though, comes with a dilemma. Does McGeary take the bonus money, which figures to be somewhere around $1.5 million? Or does he take a full ride to Stanford and wait for another signing chance in three years?

Not since Jeff Allison, the Peabody flamethrower who signed with the Marlins four years ago but flamed out amid drug problems, has there been a Massachusetts pitcher with such promise.

"He's really made a name for himself," says Jason McLeod, director of amateur scouting for the Red Sox, who won't be picking until 55th, when McGeary probably will be gone.

McGeary is part of a draft class that is rich both in high schoolers and hurlers. Ten of Baseball America's top 15 players are pitchers, most notably Vanderbilt lefthander David Price, the consensus No. 1 pick.

McGeary, who is listed 27th, is 18th among pitchers, ninth among schoolboys.

"If there was a dearth of lefthanded pitching, that would definitely help his stock," says Baseball America assistant editor Aaron Fitt .

Still, McGeary is viewed as a particular prize for two important reasons: He's lefthanded and he's "projectable," a big, athletic guy (6 feet 3 inches, 200 pounds) who figures to get even bigger and stronger and who has what scouts call "great makeup," the crucial personal qualities that usually determine whether a prospect makes it to the big leagues or washes out.

"What stands out is Jack's passion for pitching and his knowledge of it," says Roxbury Latin coach John Lieb. "He's always working on something and he's never satisfied with being where he is right now."

Right now, McGeary has a fastball that tops out around 90 miles an hour plus a biting curve and a good changeup, all with a smooth delivery. Sooner or later, he figures to have a shot at the majors. That, of course, is the question he'll have to answer before the Aug. 15 signing deadline. Sooner? Or later?

If McGeary signs -- and the offer could come from the arm-starved Yankees, who pick 30th -- he gives up a free ticket to one of the world's most prestigious schools and an undergraduate experience he can't duplicate if he attends after his baseball days. If he doesn't sign, the chance won't come around again for another three years. By then, the offer price might well have dropped.

If McGeary were to blow out his arm in the minors, the bonus would be all the serious baseball money he'd ever see. If he were to do it at Stanford, he'd have passed up seven figures but would have a valuable diploma in hand.

"It's what-if, what-if, what-if," says Jack's mother Rita. "And you don't know."

The what-ifs are the inescapable imponderables of picking high schoolers in a sport where only one in 10 draftees ever makes it to The Show and where more than half of the 2003 first-rounders aren't currently on a major league roster.

"It's an imperfect pursuit," acknowledges Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein.

Drafting collegians is less risky because they have a longer track record.

"We have three more years of evaluating," says McLeod. "See what he's done in the Pac-10, see what he's done in the Cape League. It's somewhat safer, if not necessarily easier, to scout college players."

Still, clubs would rather have prospects in their system as early as possible, bringing them along according to their own plan and at their own pace. College coaches need to win games. Minor league coaches need to develop major leaguers. Which is why clubs will dangle a seven-figure carrot in front of schoolboys to lure them away from freshman English.

Allison got nearly $2 million to sign with Florida but his drug addiction wrecked his career before he ever got to the majors. Last year, he overdosed on heroin.

"That story resonated with a lot of people," says Fitt. "Signed for a lot of money and didn't pan out."

Evaluating high school pitchers, who may perform only once a week against batters who can't decipher a curveball, can be particularly dicey.

"You'll see a kid in a small town pitch a whole game without anybody making contact," says Epstein.

Arkansas prospect Brandon Love , whom the Reds drafted in 1999, was so dominant that rivals were afraid to face him.

"When cross-checkers went to see him, the other team had an agreement that they wouldn't play unless he promised not to throw curveballs," says McLeod.

"The Love Shack ," Epstein recalls with a chuckle. "We loved that kid. He never made it out of A ball."

Sizing up pitchers is even more of a challenge in New England, where the high school seasons start late, end early, and are jumbled by rainouts.

"The first list is due March 15 -- that's laughable," says an American League scout. "Some of them don't throw a pitch until April."

With Roxbury Latin starting April 9 and finishing May 24 (the Independent School League doesn't have playoffs), McGeary had just seven starts this year. So clubs largely are going off his work from last summer in showcase events like Perfect Game in Arkansas, East Coast in North Carolina, and the Area Code Games in California, where he caught everybody's eye.

"Once the summer hit," he says, "that's when it got crazy."

The college recruiters began phoning July 1, the first day they were allowed to.

"We must have fielded 60 or 70 calls the first day," says Jack's father Pat. Jack narrowed the choices to three -- Vanderbilt, Georgia Tech, and Stanford -- and chose Jim Lonborg's old school.

"In the end, it was a combination of everything," he says. "Atmosphere, weather, baseball, academics, social life. And I had a great visit with the players when I was there."

After the recruiting wave was done, the scouts turned up, trying to get a sense of the personality behind the performance and what McGeary's "signability" might be.

"Not many of them asked about it directly," he says. "They'd ask about whether I wanted to play ball, but they never said, 'What's it going to take?' "

The signing minuet goes back a century, but the McGearys needed to learn the steps. They'd been through the college recruiting process with older son Dan, a star basketball player who is transferring from the University of New Hampshire to Harvard. But baseball's double decision is unique.

"I think it would be hard to know much about it unless you went through the process," says Pat. "There was an evolution to it, and we got better at it every month."

The McGearys did their homework. They talked to people they trusted, people who knew how the game before the game is played. And they laid out a timeline that would keep things orderly and sane and let Jack complete his senior year with minimal distraction.

"I was just trying to keep things normal," he says. "And I was able to keep it off in the distance a little bit."

That was his high school coach's goal before the spring began.

"My focus was for Jack to have a good senior season and enjoy it," says Lieb, whose varsity tied St. Sebastian's for the ISL title. "So we sat down and talked about how to manage it."

Lieb kept the scouts informed by e-mail, and on average, there were 30 at every game Jack pitched.

"I'd tell them, 'He's pitching Wednesday at Thayer,' " says Lieb. "The technology really helps."

McGeary had a stellar season, going 5-1 with an 0.88 ERA and 80 strikeouts in 40 innings, and was named the state's Gatorade Player of the Year. Seeing a forest of faces behind the plate pointing radar guns didn't faze him.

"Jack dealt with it remarkably well," says Lieb. "Once the game started, he was able to block everything out. He handled it as well as I can imagine anyone his age handling it."

McGeary had been through it all during the summer showcases, but he was a bit surprised to see so many scouts still coming by. What they wanted to confirm was that he was the same pitcher he was last year and that the nonpitching shoulder he'd separated twice since wasn't a hindrance.

"I talked to a lot of scouts who saw him and they said he's fine," says Fitt. "He kind of solidified himself as a back-of-the-first-round guy."

That means a seven-figure investment, which is why the scouts began doing more personal research.

"People we know would be asked, 'What do you know about Jack? What kind of kid is he?' " says Rita.

It's something like an FBI background check, and the McGearys can see the reasoning behind it, given the stakes.

"I can understand that, because given the stories you hear, it's a huge risk," says Rita, and Jack agrees.

"It seems like that's what they should be doing," he says.

The more money that clubs will have to ante, the more they want to know, and as draft day approaches, the talk turns to specific dollars. Though Pat says he didn't use the term "life-changing money" for the figure it would take for Jack to forgo college, he says it's accurate.

Projectability works both ways. The question for the player and his family is how to calculate the trade-off. What is three years at Stanford (assuming Jack signs after his junior season) worth over a lifetime? Odds are that it would make a seven-figure difference, even if he never plays pro ball.

"What is it worth for Jack to give up Stanford?" his mother wonders. "You're giving up going through that undergraduate experience when you're 18, which you can never get back."

Signability is a particular issue for Stanford-bound players because the idyllic lure of "The Farm" is so strong that the school rarely loses a recruit to a bonus check.

"It'd be pretty unusual if some club bought him out of Stanford," says Fitt, who covers the colleges for Baseball America.

It's an annual issue for Mark Marquess , who's been at Stanford for three decades and coached Mike Mussina and Jack McDowell. He tries to stay out of the decision.

"I can't get involved and I shouldn't," says Marquess, who says McGeary is a "special" recruit. "That's a personal and family decision. All I can do is explain what his Stanford experience will be like for those three years."

He also can explain that three years on The Farm won't derail McGeary's dream.

"Statistically, we can show him that just because you go to Stanford or any college doesn't mean that you can't play in the big leagues," says Marquess, who has had 18 players in 20 years taken in either the first or Compensation A rounds, including righthander Greg Reynolds, who was tapped second overall by the Rockies last year. Tim Lincecum , the Pac-10's best pitcher last year from Washington, now starts for the Giants.

Playing for a Division 1 school isn't a bad apprenticeship -- Marquess likens the best programs to Double A ball. Rich Hill, the Milton native who pitches for the Cubs, improved significantly at Michigan.

"He benefited a great deal from it," says Matt Hyde , who recruited Hill when he was an assistant at Ann Arbor. "When he came out of high school, he was a raw, thin lefthander who was just beginning to throw the curveball. When he came out of Michigan, he was more mature, he had grown physically, and he'd gotten more polish to him."

McGeary knows what awaits him at Stanford, and he's also had a taste of what he'd get in the minors after a summer spent playing for a Georgia traveling team and living on a bus.

"It was the first time I'd been away from home, at least for that long," he says. "You're in a situation where you have to succeed and you don't have the people you're comfortable with there. You have to buy your own food, do your own laundry. No Mom."

All McGeary has to do now is wait until Thursday and see who picks him.

"Unlike college, I don't have a choice," he says.

The choice comes after his name is called and the negotiations start.

"It's all under the category of leverage," he says. "A senior in college has no leverage because he has no decision."

The decision McGeary has will be to choose between prime rib and filet mignon, with a good chance to have both eventually.

"Stanford is probably the best backup plan you can have," Jack McGeary figures. "As a backup plan, that's better than a lot of people's actual plans. That's comforting, I guess."