Double A tale needs minor adjustments

Throwing Bullets: A Tale of Two Pitchers Chasing the Dream
By Roy Rowan
Taylor Trade Publishing
181 pp.

In a tale of two fledgling minor league pitchers, curiously it's the author who has a flaw in his delivery.

In ``Throwing Bullets," Roy Rowan spends the 2005 season chronicling the triumphs and travails of Francisco Liriano and Justin Olson, teammates on the Double A New Britain Rock Cats in the Minnesota Twins' farm system. The pitch is that Liriano and Olson are opposites -- Liriano the reticent Dominican lefthander who left home to play pro ball at 16, Olson the righthanded, college-educated, All-American boy -- who share one dream: to pitch in the major leagues.

The author's first misstep is his failure to recognize that only one man's dream is likely to be fulfilled. Anyone who could pick a baseball out of a lineup of sporting goods should quickly suspect that Olson -- 25 years old, signed out of the independent Frontier League, and laboring in middle relief -- is an organizational grunt, much more suspect than prospect.

Liriano -- who is currently winning games and acclaim with the Twins -- is a genuine phenom who should be humbling big-league hitters long after Olson has begun putting his kinesiology degree to good use. The claim that Olson and Liriano are ``two of minor league baseball's hottest pitching prospects" is a half-truth at best.

Part of the problem is that while Rowan, a longtime Time magazine staff writer, is a decorated journalist, he's lacking in the fundamentals to write about baseball. He claims to have become a convert to the joys of minor league ball in 2000, when he wrote an article for Fortune magazine on the bush leagues' financial and nostalgic renaissance. But his awkward terminology belies any legitimacy as a fan.

The book's cliche of a title is repeated so often that when Liriano really cranks up his fastball, it is referred to as a ``super-bullet." Any capable hitter is inevitably a ``slugger." And a Red Sox fan will have to suppress a snicker when Mark Bellhorn is described as a ``major league star."

Even more aggravating is Rowan's habit of writing about Liriano in vaguely condescending tones. He's referenced as ``the Dominican" nearly as often as he is called by name, and though the pitcher comes across as pleasant and even placid (one coach describes his personality as ``stuck in neutral"), Rowan makes curious note of his ``ability to conceal his Latin temperament." And is it possible that Liriano's lack of elaboration does not mean that he is ``reclusive," but merely a shy 21-year-old not entirely comfortable chatting in his second language?

Forty pages in, Rowan is still writing in the first person about how he's approaching the book and its subjects. When Liriano is moved up to Triple A Rochester -- a plot twist that might bring some inspiration to the author -- Rowan is content to spend as much time following his progression on the Internet as he does watching him in person.

The finest chronicle of life in the minors remains David Lamb's unsung classic ``Stolen Season" -- it is the Liriano to Rowan's Olson. ``Throwing Bullets" is no prospect.