John Miller, a Belgian-American journalist, and a player/coach for the Brussels Kangaroos, is in his fourth year of writing Old World Pastime, a take on baseball as lived in 21th century Europe.
The New York Yankees Friday gave 17-year-old left-handed pitcher Luc Roeland from Luxembourg a $2.6 million signing bonus, a record for so young a pitcher, and for a European signing.
The contract is a watershed moment for Wanton Mechanics, a revolutionary school of pitching theory based on new atomic research by Swiss physicist Van Marslias. « Again, the Yankees show they’re ahead of the curve by grabbing the purest human representation of this new school, » says baseball analyst Peter Gammons.
As the quality of pitching in the Major Leagues has shot upwards following the end of the steroid era, teams are bidding to find players who can exceed today’s eye-popping velocities. Aroldis Chapman of the Cincinnati Reds has been clocked at 105 mph.
Now, in a fantastic fusion of science and an exceptional human physical specimen, the Yankees are raising the bar by following the new pitching theories of Mr. Marslias, a staff engineer at the Large Handron Collider, the world’s pre-eminent particle accelerator complex near Geneva.
It was Mr. Marslias’s work colliding sub-atomic particles at the LHC, which has a circumference of 17 miles, that showed him that the best way to develop supersonic arm motion. « The quark experiments showed us there were ways of triggering microscopic atomic fusion in the throwing arm, » he said. « But you just needed to find the right body type, and somebody without too many pitches already in his arm. » His paper, « Wanton Mechanics », was published in 2009 in the Journal of Applied Sciences. He just needed a ballplayer.
Enter Mr. Roeland, the shy, unassuming 5ft6 son of a dog trainer from Ettelbruck, Luxembourg, pop. 7,500. His paternal grandfather, Wolfus, was a German circus juggler who fled his troupe in 1943 rather than return to Nazi Germany, where he would have almost surely been conscripted into the army. From Wolfus, he inherited seven-inch fingers, and a left arm that, right before release, can bend backwards at the elbow 79 degrees. With the success of pitchers like the Giants’s Tim Lincecum and Royals lefty Tim Collins, size is now less of an issue, say MLB scouts.
Ettelbruck had a baseball team, the Fishes, briefly after World War Two, but it was destroyed in 1954 to plant a vineyard. So Mr. Roeland grew up playing team handball and vloetsen, a quaint local sport that involves throwing dead fish across the Moselle river on the Luxembourg border. He holds the world mark for throwing a mackerel 415 feet on the fly.
Mr. Marslias, who became obsessed with baseball after a vacation to Baltimore in 2005, spotted Mr. Roeland at a 2008 team handball tournament in Strasbourg, France. « I heard this sound – woosh — and he had scored a goal from the other end of the court without anybody seeing the ball, » says Mr. Marslias. «I’m not a professional scout or anything, but I knew this kid belonged on a mound. »
He invited the young man to his laboratory, and, in a story that mirrors Mr. Lincecum’s Boeing engineering father tinkering with his mechanics, set about sculpting his delivery using atomic quark theory. The results were eye-popping. After a week, Roeland was hitting 94 on the gun. His top speed is now 97. « And the best part is that, following this theory, he’ll be able to throw 290-300 pitches a game, and pitch every third day, » says Mr. Marslias.
On March 30, he called the Yankees, who dispatched a scout to evaluate Mr. Roeland. « We knew right away, this was a good investment, and we need to be on the cutting edge of this new pitching theory, » says Yankees general manager Brian Cashman. « It also shows that Europe, with its mix of science and culture, and its history as the birthplace of the empiricist paradigm, might just be the future of baseball. »
Mr. Roeland will now report to the Yankees’s single-A team in Tampa, FL. Given the porous state of New York’s starting rotation, he could land in the Big Apple before September, says a person familiar with the matter.
How do you think Roeland will do? I’m always curious at oldworldpastime@gmail.com