Scott Topp Enjoying Baseball Once Again Former Nic Pitcher No Longer Suffering Old Arm Injury

It is hard to appreciate it when you are on the inside. But to an outsider, coming to Coeur d’Alene is like finding a new home.

Scott Topp felt that way when he arrived in 1981 on a baseball scholarship to North Idaho College.

It was a stop he felt was actually a steppingstone to bigger and glorious places.

Now 19 years later, Topp is happy that stone was his final step.

“It’s a six-hour drive from Great Falls, Montana,” said Topp. “I came here to play baseball. Ever since, this is where I call home.”

Topp is a 1981 graduate from Charles M. Russell High School. Its baseball program was nonexistent, and it would have to take a player with extraordinary talent to even garner a look by a college. But for Topp, they came looking.

“We didn’t have spring baseball because the snow stays on the ground too long,” Topp said. “We were still in the gym in April, and that was when we started summer baseball.”

Topp was a pitching sensation. His young arm could hurl a pitch 92 mph. With the speed came deadly pinpoint accuracy.

“I don’t remember my record,” he said. “But I averaged 2.1 strikeouts per inning. I had only 19 walks in 144 innings pitched.”

Topp was honored for his pitching by being named as the starting pitcher for the first East/West All-Star game in Montana. He helped lead NIC his freshman year to a regional playoff berth and drew the attention of talent scouts hoping to get Topp into their major league circus.

In the fall of 1982, the Chicago Cubs sent Bill Johnson, a scout out of Spokane, to see Topp throw. Johnson offered Topp a chance to go to the four-year school of his choice to play baseball, and the Cubs would pay for it, or he could sign and go to the minors right then and there.

Topp signed but had to complete his final year at NIC. That’s when the bottom fell out.

“I started getting some cramping in my forearm,” he said. “I was having control problems. I went to the hospital to have it operated on. But I couldn’t get it done because I had a cyst removed from my tailbone earlier. They said the two wounds could spread staph infection.”

He never had the operation on his arm, and he never found out what was causing the cramping.

“They injected me with fluids to see if my arm would react to anything, and it didn’t,” he said. “They didn’t want to operate on it because they didn’t know what they were looking for.”

Still, Topp with only half his velocity was better than most. He pitched for NIC, but the Cubs rescinded their offer.

“I did good, but not as well as I expected,” he said. “I wasn’t the same overpowering pitcher I was before. I wasn’t in the papers anymore. I wasn’t a highlight.”

In 1983, Lewis-Clark State College baseball coach Ed Chef took a chance on Topp. Topp hoped he would regain his control and was happy to be able to finish his communications degree.

“I had to pay for my books,” said Topp. “They paid for everything else.

His arm trouble continued. He was getting wilder, and unsympathetic coaches were not making it easier.

“I was expected to go five, six innings,” he said. “When I couldn’t do it, Chef got down on me.

It reached a boiling point when Topp couldn’t buy a strike against Eastern Washington University. Topp continued to throw, but felt he was embarrassing himself and his team. His arm kept cramping, and the balls he threw were landing beyond the backstop.

“I called Chef to pull me, and he told me to tough it out,” Topp said said. “After I walked the next batter, I just walked off the mound. That didn’t go over very well.”

He pitched his senior year, sparingly. He lost confidence in his ability and left the game for obscurity.

“I faded away,” he said. “I went into the realm of has-beens.”

He took a job working for a tree-service company in 1986 and was on the road up to five weeks at a time. He didn’t like the travel, but he had just gotten married to Kristi DeWitt, and the money was too good to pass up.

“They would always say pack your bags for four weeks, but they liked to push our buttons and make us stay another week,” he said. “We’d come home for about a week only to get ready to go on the road again. I did that for about nine years.”

Being on the road was tough, but the experience led him to his current job with Senske as an arborist, “a fancy name for a tree pruner,” he says.

“Now I am getting ready to hang Christmas tree lights,” he said.

“This is something Senske started doing a few years ago to make some extra money in the winter, and it just took off.

He also got reacquainted with baseball three years ago playing in the Men’s Adult Baseball League. The cramps are gone, and he once again feels great about the game.

“That is the weird thing. I don’t have that arm problem anymore,” he laughed. “It makes me wonder if it had something to do with all the beer I was drinking at the time.”

He’s also hitting. Like all pitchers, he wants to talk more about his batting. He won the home-run contest during the MSBL All-Star Game at Avista Park, scoring eight points.

“I love to hit,” Topp said. “I never swung a bat until three years ago.”

His secret to hitting is pretty simple: Don’t think.

“If you try to guess what the pitch is going to be, you end up being wrong,” he explained. “You end up getting fooled, and it’s a long walk back to the dugout.”