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Most seventeen-year-old ball players worry about whether they will make the varsity nine or not. Julio Urias strives to start on the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The Mexican teenager threw nine strikes in fourteen pitches in the
first inning of a split-squad Dodgers victory over the San Diego Padres
yesterday. Urias struck out two batters on route to a perfect inning. He
allegedly clocks in at 98 miles-per-hour.
The Dodgers signed Urias on his sixteenth birthday. Unfortunately,
most of his $450,000 sweet-sixteen present went to the Mexican club that
had employed him. Urias compiled a 2-0 record with a 2.48 earned-run
average in single-A ball last season. Baseball Prospectus
ranks him at 35 among MLB wannabes. Urias expects to pitch in the big
leagues in 2014. The Dodgers, who limited his innings to 54 1/3 last
season, may have other ideas.
Stats nerds, of which baseball boasts many, go back a half century to
find a pitcher so young entering a major league game. On his eighteenth
birthday, Larry Dierker struck out Willie Mays in his first appearance
in the majors. How long ago was that? He played for the Houston Colt
.45s.
Just how young is the Dodger phenom? I would consult with Beloit
College's famous Mindset List but he's too young for their latest entry
for the class of 2017. Kerri Strug won Olympic gold, the Boston Garden
had hosted its last sporting event, O.J. took his ride in the white
Bronco, and baseball endured its last labor stoppage all before Urias
entered into our world. As the Mindset List
says of college freshman a year older, "Their parents' car CD player is
soooooo ancient and embarrassing," "Captain Janeway has always taken
the USS Voyager where no woman or man has ever gone before," "They have
known only two presidents," and "they may well have seen Chicken Run but probably never got chicken pox."
Jamey Wright may want to keep all that in mind before he enters into a
conversation with Urias. Should the seventeen-year-old pitch for the
Dodgers this season, he might find a fatherly influence in fellow
pitcher Wright. One month before Urias's birth, Wright made his
major-league debut for the Colorado Rockies. Wright allowed just one run
in six innings pitched. He didn't earn his first win until later that
month when he lasted seven innings against the Giants. Eighteen days
later, Julio Urias was born.
Fernando Valenzuela, still precariously clinging to a pitching
career at the time of Urias's birth, made his first start in Dodger blue
as a teenager. In his 1981 rookie season, he helped the Dodgers defeat
the New York Yankees in the World Series. So, the Los Angeles Times
naturally reached out to the retired Mexican pitcher to get his sense
of the fledgling Mexican pitcher. "It's hard to say we're the same,"
Valenzuela told the Los Angeles Times.
"I don't even remember what I was like at that age. But I can tell you
he's a gamer. He likes to pitch. That's the main thing. He likes the
game, he likes to challenge the hitters."
The Times naturally asked Urias about Venezuela, too. Did his father tell him about Fernando? "My grandfather did."
Jeff Reese
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