Underdog All-Stars Wright, Duvall show perseverance is as important as talent
The Major League Baseball All-Star Game is about the supernovas. It's about seeing Trout and Ortiz teaming up against Harper and Rizzo with the best pitchers in the game — Sale and Bumgarner and Kluber and Strasburg — on the mound. It's a fantasy baseball draft come to life — the best-of-the-best, all on one diamond.
So what are Adam Duvall and Steven Wright doing in San Diego?
Or, perhaps the better question: who are Adam Duvall and Steven Wright?
Both players are All-Stars, and well deserving ones, at that. They represent the beauty of baseball and its All-Star Game -- second, and third, and fourth, and last-chance guys who make it click and make the list of the league's best.
Call it a fluke, call it unsustainable, call it whatever you want -- Duvall and Wright are forever on the list and the stories behind how they reached Tuesday's Midsummer Classic make it next to impossible to not root for them.
Duvall's nickname is almost too obvious to work. He was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, and is now the first-ever alum of the University of Louisville to be named to an All-Star team. He's also hit 23 home runs in the first half of the season -- tying him for second in the National League.
How could you not call Duvall the Louisville Slugger?
Despite the losses for his team, the Reds, it has been an amazing season for Duvall, who was named to his first All-Star team as Cincinnati's sole representative (teammate Jay Bruce was later added to the team.)
At age 27, Duvall is showing the world what he knew he could do.
Sometimes, it takes a change of scenery to bring out the best in a player.
For Duvall, that meant a trade from San Francisco, who selected him in the 11th round of the 2010 Draft, but came to label him a quadruple-A player, passing him over for regular playing time at first, third, or in the outfield year after year, despite solid play in the minor leagues.
The inability to get regular at-bats at the Major League level with the Giants, and a chance to play closer to home, made Duvall welcome a trade to Cincinnati last July, despite the fact it required him to move from his preferred position of third base to the outfield.
Playing the outfield provided Duvall a chance to have his bat in the lineup every day for the first time as a pro -- it gave him a chance to show that the Giants made a mistake.
It's fair to say a year later, things have worked out for the Louisville Slugger.
After five years of minor league ball, Duvall is enjoying what should be a Rookie of the Year campaign (if not for the fact that he marginally lost his rookie status last year) at the plate, and his glove in left field is among the best in the game -- not bad for a guy who only played the position for one professional game before last year.
This time last year, Duvall was struggling to be a Major League platoon player. Now, he's a surefire starter who only needs to platoon in All-Star Games.
"Did I see it? No," Duvall said of his All-Star berth Monday. "Did I believe I could do it? Yes."
Making Duvall's emergence even more impressive is the fact he's is doing all this while being a Type 1 diabetic.
Duvall was diagnosed with the disease in 2012, a season in which he hit 30 homers in the minor leagues. After being diagnosed, he started to wear an insulin pump, even on the field, to help him control his blood sugar levels.
"It's tough. It's a daily battle. I've gotten better with it, but you're never going to get where there's never any problems. You're going to have your highs and you're going to have your lows, and I think just managing it over the long term is the most important thing," Duvall said. "I think you have to be tough-minded. You have to be able to overcome adversity. That was one bump in the road I had. I thought I did a good job with not letting it get me down. Just trying to staying positive with everything."
Duvall has been labeled an overachiever his entire career -- it's one of the reasons that the Giants didn't trust him with a Major League job -- so there are understandable concerns about whether the former 11th-round pick can keep it up in the second half of the year.
For Duvall's part, he's not in the least bit concerned.
"I've been doing this -- not in the major leagues -- but in the minor leagues, year after year," Duvall said. "You look at my numbers, they've been pretty steady. I think I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing ... and let everything take care of itself."
Like Duvall, Wright needed a change of scenery to find his best. Only in Wright's case, it was a full reinvention, a last-ditch effort that reached its final stop -- if it didn't work with the Red Sox, Wright's career in baseball was done.
A second-round pick of the Cleveland Indians in 2006, Wright started his career as a typical power pitcher. The University of Hawaii product entered the pro game with high hopes but ultimately couldn't push past the Double-A level. Looking directly at the possibility of aging out, Wright turned to the pitch he learned as a kid -- the knuckleball.
First, the knuckleball was an out pitch for Wright, but as the Indians took notice of his ability to throw a spin-free baseball, they supported Wright to become a full-time knuckleball pitcher. (Subtle...) It was a longshot, but it had a far better chance of making Wright a Major League player than the alternative.
In 2012, the Indians traded Wright to Boston. It was a benevolent move -- the Indians couldn't make Wright an elite knuckleballer -- they didn't have the personnel in place, but Boston could help Wright reach his full potential.
Since joining the Red Sox, Wright has worked closely with the best knuckleballer of the new millennium, Tim Wakefield.
"Having him around helps me keep it under control, as much as you can control it," Wright said.
There have been fewer than 30 full-time knuckleball pitchers in Major League history, and while success has followed many -- Phil Niekro won 318 games and Toronto's R.A. Dickey won the Cy Young Award in 2012 when he was playing with the Mets -- the pitch's deliberate unpredictability makes it particularly difficult to sustain success.
A knuckleballer is a bipolar pitcher -- when they get shelled, it's worse than batting practice, but when the pitch is really dancing, they're unhittable.
This season, Wright has been in the latter category more often than not.
He entered the season as the Red Sox' fifth starter -- the pitcher with the smallest margin for error, despite throwing a pitch that has a tremendous variance -- but has cemented himself a Major League job with three complete games, a 2.68 ERA, and a 1.21 WHIP in the first half.
"I never though this year that I'd have a chance, coming into this year, to make the All-Star team -- I was just trying to make the team," Wright said.
Wright is taming the untamable, and he says that'd be impossible to do that without the fraternity of knuckleballers.
Along with Wakefield, Wright works with former Dodger and Ranger Charlie Hough, who won 216 games with the knuckleball from 1970 to 1994.
"I like to get his perspective, I like to get Wake's perspective," Wright said, noting that despite the different throwing motions of each player, the mechanics of the pitch are still the same. "Even when I see R.A., I'll try to talk to R.A. -- Steve Sparks, I'll text him sometimes and pick his brain a little bit."
"Everybody struggled with it," Wright continued. "You see the success over the years, but a lot of people don't understand that there was a lot of struggle during that, before that. I think that's the biggest thing they've helped me out with ... There's nothing I'm going to experience that they haven't been through two, three times ... They know what [I'm going through] in a way that no one else can."
Wright says he's not doing anything different this year to facilitate his breakout campaign -- the success is just a byproduct of another year of experience throwing the knuckleball.
"The key is just trying to be consistent with such an inconsistent pitch," Wright said. "And sometimes you go out there and you just get hit. They're big-league hitters."
Despite his success with the pitch this season and the stark contrast it provides to the power arms the game seems to so covet these days, Wright doesn't believe we're about to see a knuckleball revolution.
"I feel like 95 is the new 90," he said, joking that his 75 mile per hour knuckleball looks weak in comparison. "But there's no team that's going out there drafting a knuckleballer. Usually, you're doing it out of desperation or a last-ditch effort, like me ... I was blessed that the Cleveland Indians gave me all the time I needed and when they traded me to the Red Sox, they had Wakefield, which was a blessing ... The best thing they could have done for me was trade me to the Red Sox."
"There's a lot of organizations that won't be willing to give [knuckleball pitchers] the opportunity. I hope there is. I hope I'm wrong."
"In the end, it's not easy to do -- it's really hard to do. To kill the spin on the ball, to me, was easy. It was learning how to throw it for a strike with 50,000 people screaming at you -- that's the stuff that's hard."
But Wright learned it, with some help from his friends, and Tuesday, he'll be using his weak 75 mph pitch against the best hitters in baseball -- guys who will have seen 95 mph heat all game, guys who have been trained their whole life to hit balls with spin. And in a showcase of the best players in the game, there's no doubt that Steven Wright -- the guy who once couldn't get past Double-A, is going to make one of the game's best hitters look really, really stupid.
