Wells Well Aware Of Game’s Realities, But Isn’t Deterred
Two statistics must be unsettling to Bob Wells at this juncture of the infant baseball season:
His earned run average - 7.36 after two appearances - and the 83 roster moves the Seattle Mariners made last summer in the space of just 112 games.
This means manager Lou Piniella is at least nine games overdue for his first locker eviction of 1994. And with the franchise’s Triple-A repository now relocated to Tacoma, the M’s need only pop for cabfare when they decide a player needs a change of scenery.
So we don’t really have to remind Wells that the meter’s running.
“I think any day in the big leagues is a pressure-packed situation,” said Wells.
Just as every day is a gift.
Wells has reasons galore to appreciate that, dating back eight years to when he bailed out of Spokane Falls Community College after his freshman season because he thought there was a better way to the big leagues.
Better or not, Wells found a way.
At the moment, the Yakima native remains the No. 4 starter in the M’s pitching rotation - though No. 5, Tim Davis, is the one with oodles more job security and the regular turns. Until the off days fade from the schedule, Wells’ starts may come two weeks apart - or further, if he can’t get extradition on his curveball.
“His breaking ball is rolling,” Piniella reported after Wells’ only start, a 10-1 beating by Detroit 10 days ago. “It doesn’t have that good, sharp bite it had in the spring.”
It was that sharp curve, a 90 mph fastball and four innings of one-hit ball on a brisk Arizona evening that won Wells his rotation spot over Jim Converse.
Resiliency won him the opportunity.
Where do you want to start? The Tommy John surgery that rebuilt his elbow? The 1994 odyssey that saw him pitch for five different teams?
Or the take-a-chance mentality that nudged him out of college in Spokane in 1987?
Wells had helped pitched the Sasquatch to the NWAACC championship with a complete-game victory and two saves in the conference tournament when “a guy I went to school with, Sherman Webb, told me I should go down to California and try to get seen because he thought the chances were limited up here.”
So Wells found a “a little Sunday-Wednesday league” and eventually caught the eye of Philadelphia at a tryout camp in 1988. A broken ankle the following spring delayed his pro debut, but by 1991 he’d made it to Class AA when his right elbow began giving him trouble.
“They sent me home in July to rest,” he recalled. “Then in 1992 I pitched until June and that’s when it snapped.”
He tried arthroscopic surgery, he tried rest, he tried rehab. When none of it worked, he tried Dr. Frank Jobe, the surgeon who made John a household name in elbow reconstruction - taking a tendon from one arm to rebuild the other.
“I wasn’t sure that’s what I wanted to do at the age of 26 - have that kind of major surgery,” Wells said. “But I talked to the Phillies’ head of development and he said if I could come back and throw the ball like I did before, he promised he’d get me to the big leagues. And he did.”
That was last year, when saves in three straight appearances at Double-A Reading earned Wells a promotion to Philadelphia - where he won a game but pitched just five innings before being optioned to Class AAA Scranton. A month later, the Phillies tried to sneak him off the 40-man roster and he was snapped up on waivers by Seattle. He put in another month in Triple A at Calgary before being summoned to Seattle, where Piniella penciled him in for a start on Aug. 13.
The day after the players went on strike.
“It’s kind of a bittersweet deal - you never like to see a team give up on you, and for some reason Philadelphia did, I guess, or they wouldn’t have tried to take me off the roster,” he said. “But then I wind up in Seattle with family and friends near and with a chance to be a starter when I was just trying to make the club.”
The reality is he’s still trying. Every time out.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review