Rockford's greatest baseball players: MLB veteran pitcher remembers the road not taken

Editor's note: This is another entry in the Rockford Register Star's exploration of the area's greatest athletes since the end of World War II. We have picked the greatest players in multiple sports like football and basketball. This is the ninth in our baseball series. Links to previous stories are below.

Rodney Myers didn’t pitch much at East High School in the1980s. But he hit .567 as a junior shortstop. He “slumped” to .494 as a senior.

“East didn’t have a fence, so there was no reason to swing your tail off trying to hit home runs,” Myers recalled. “I worked on hitting the opposite way, going for doubles and triples. My senior year, I didn’t play basketball and got into the weight room more. I hit more home runs, but my average dropped. I was pulling the ball more, which was not a good thing for me.”

Myers did the same thing in college at the University of Wisconsin. With the same attitude. Despite being named team MVP as a junior center fielder with 12 home runs, one off the Wisconsin school record, Myers was disappointed to hit .284 after hitting .286 as a sophomore.

“I broke through my sophomore year and started playing right field, but I struggled with the slider,” Myers said. “I didn’t see that too much in high school. I got into the gym that offseason and came in 10 pounds stronger my junior year. I started hitting the ball out of the park. But I started pulling the ball too much. I ended up with the same statistics, only more home runs.”

And that, then, was the end of one of the greatest hitters in NIC-10 history. A home-run hitter who looks back and says he shouldn’t have tried to hit so many home runs. Instead, he became a late-blooming pitcher who had the longest Major League career of any Rockford-area baseball player in 80 years.

MLB pitcher wanted to be an outfielder

Myers played a different position at each level — shortstop at East, outfield at Wisconsin, which dropped its baseball program in 1991, and relief pitcher for nine years with the Cubs, Padres and Dodgers. For Rockford’s all-time baseball team, we put him in the outfield.

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That is fitting, because he wishes he had remained an outfielder.

“If I got a mulligan, I would pick hitting,” Myers said. “It was my bread and butter. I was a good hitter and could have developed stronger. I was still maturing. I really didn’t fill out that much through college. In the next three years, I put on 15 pounds.

“I missed hitting, but you’ve got to turn around: You made a decision, you’ve got to live with it.”

Myers hadn’t pitched much before turning pro. He had a 1.29 ERA as a senior at East, striking out two batters per inning, but only threw 14 innings. In college, he was the Badgers' closer, with 32 saves in three seasons — but an ERA over 9.00 all three years and a career mark of 9.38.

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Still, he picked the mound over the plate after the Kansas City Royals drafted him in the 12th round after his junior season at Wisconsin in 1990.

“As a pitcher, I was terrible,” Myers said. “I was overpowering at times, but my control was terrible. My hitting is what I thrived on. But the scout from Kansas City gave me an ultimatum: ‘You can’t do both. You have to pick one or the other.’ I picked pitching because I figured it was the fastest way to the Major Leagues.

“It was a gamble, because I didn’t throw much in high school and my ERA in college was terrible. My hitting spoke for itself. But I knew if I put the same hard work I did into hitting into pitching it would work out. And it did. I didn’t have the best control that I wanted, but it developed over time.”

At East, Myers was an all-state shortstop as a senior. But despite leading the conference in batting with his .567 mark as a junior, he was only named second-team all-NIC-10 behind league MVP Todd Talamunas, a three-year starter for Hononegah.

“Politics,” Myers said. “It bothered me a little afterwards, but at the time it didn’t mean anything to me. I wanted to win as a team, not be all-conference.”

He was a football star, as well

East was fourth in the NIC-10 during Myers’ junior season, 2 ½ games behind Hononegah. That was East’s best season in an eight-year stretch, from 1984-91. But where Myers really won big at East was in football. The E-Rabs tied Hononegah and Belvidere for third in a brutally strong NIC-10 that year at 6-3, but two of those third-place teams reached the state finals, with Hononegah taking second in Class 4A and East cruising to the title in Class 5A.

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Myers quarterbacked seven games that year for the E-Rabs after senior Mark Milbourn broke his hand in the senior opener. He completed nine passes for 128 yards in a 25-13 first-round playoff win over Boylan, but was limited to being the punter after getting hurt in that game. East then won its next four games by a combined score of 91-17.

“I twisted my ankle on a fake punt against Boylan,” Myers said. “I got the first down, but ended up tearing up my ankle. I was able to punt after that, but that’s all I could still do.”

“He ran for 30 yards,” said Perry Giardini, East’s football coach at the time. “He changed the entire game. People told me it was a great call on the fake punt, but I didn’t call anything. He just ran.”

Myers continued to be a weapon with his feet even when all he did was punt. The right-handed thrower kicked with his left foot and once boomed a 90-yard punt against Jefferson.

“I have never seen anything like that," Giardini said. “Rodney was such a weapon. He would really, really change field position if I had to punt.”

His feet, though, weren’t good enough in college. Supposedly, anyway.

Off to the Big Ten Conference

He was all set to go to junior college in Garden City, Kansas, when he got a late scholarship offer from Wisconsin. He had been lightly recruited until he had a big series against a team of Badgers in a summer league, playing for a combined team from Auburn, East and Harlem in a summer league.

It seemed to be too good to be true at first, but Myers older brother, Rocky, convinced him to go to Wisconsin.

“I’ve never been that kind of a lucky guy,” Myers said. “It was a last-minute thing. What do you pick? Go to a two-year school and transfer or pick the four-year school? I’m not a guy who likes to bounce around a lot. It was easier and more convenient for me to go to Wisconsin. And it was close to home.”

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But he had to find a new home on the baseball field, moving from shortstop to the outfield.

“They didn’t think I had the feet for it,” Myers said. “That’s what I was told: My footwork wasn’t limber enough. I didn’t think so, but what am I going to do? In the outfield, I can just run like a deer, not worry about anything else, just go get the ball.”

Myers had plenty of speed in the outfield, going 20-for-20 in stolen base attempts his senior year at East. And he certainly had the arm for it.

An untrained arm, but an arm that eventually carried him to Major League pitching mounds.

“I didn’t focus on pitching enough in high school and college,” Myers said. “You are always practicing hitting. You had to pick one or the other. And they didn’t have the indoor facilities like they do now and there was no one around to give you technical training. Dan Scarpetta (a former third-round draft pick who has trained local pitchers for 30 years) was just getting out of baseball himself. At East, I tried to get in the gym to throw but basketball was always going on. Even the Y wouldn’t let me in because of insurance purposes.”

Road to the major leagues

So Myers saved his pitching lessons for the minor leagues. They worked. After four seasons as mostly a starter, he became a full-time reliever with the Double-A Memphis Chicks in 1994. The next year year he was in Triple-A. The year after that, the Royals left Myers off their 40-man roster and the Cubs picked him in the Rule 5 Draft. That was the final break Myers needed. He was at Wrigley Field on opening day of the 1996 season.

“Every kid dreams of that,” he said.

Myers spent that entire season with the Cubs and then eight more seasons bouncing back and forth between the minors and the Majors with the Cubs, Padres and Dodgers.

“It was an eye opener,” Myers said. “And then you had the traveling. And obviously the money. Definitely the money. But the travel was elite. You are staying at 5-star hotels and have a per diem. You are catered to like a super star.”

Myers even played in Japan for three months in 2004.

“I was 34 and had been around the block a few times,” he said. “It was weird. They have a whole other technique to the game. I was a set-up guy, but I had to get up in the third inning to do a warmup and stay loose until the sixth, seventh or eighth. And they want you throwing hard. This is why guys blow out their arms over there. I clashed heads with that. The bullpen coach kept yelling at me in Japanese. I kept telling the translator I only need 20 pitches to get ready.

“And if they don’t win the title, they blame the foreigners as the reason why. Everything is our fault over there. And their mounds are terrible. They are all dirt, no clay. The mounds are also lower and now you are stepping into a hole that is six inches deep and trying to throw a ball with a downward trajectory. I don’t know how they can do it.

“But their fans were great. So loud. They had plastic bats they would bang on during games. And they gave you special treatment. If you were the hero of the game, they’d give you a cash bonus or stuffed animals.”

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Myers finished his Major League career with a 7-5 record, one save, a 5.07 ERA and 161 strikeouts in 239 ⅓ innings. His best season was that rookie year with the Cubs, throwing a career-high 67 ⅓ innings with 50 strikeouts and a 4.68 ERA.

And although 18 years after his final game with the Dodgers he’d like to take a mulligan and try hitting instead, his biggest do-over wish is to try to pitch differently.

“I kick myself,” he said. “I relied too much on speed. I liked to throw a two-seam fastball, but coaches would say you are losing velocity. Everybody was into velocity instead of movement of location. They wanted velocity.

“I could throw a fastball that was a bit of a sinker at 92 miles per hour. I could throw a four-seam fastball 95, but it cut on me. I just couldn’t keep it straight enough to hit a spot. Sometimes it leaked back over the plate and I paid for it.

“When I was a starter, I threw a fastball, sinker, slider, curveball and change-up. Once I went back to being a reliever, I never developed a change-up. I kick myself. A change-up is your most important pitch. Unless you are throwing 104, you need something off-speed. Speed differential is what I was looking for, something 5 or 7 or 10 miles an hour slower than my fastball.”

Matt Trowbridge is a Rockford Register Star sports reporter. Email him at mtrowbridge@rrstar.com and follow him on Twitter at @MattTrowbridge. Sign up for the Rockford High School newsletter at rrstar.com.

About this series

The Rockford Register Star has been writing about the greatest area athletes in various sports since the end of World War II. Previously, we have picked the greatest players in football, boys basketball, girls basketball, boys tennis, girls tennis, boys golf and girls golf, as well as greatest games in football, boys basketball and girls basketball.

Their entire careers, spanning from high school to the pros, is considered, but only players from schools that are in the newspaper's current coverage area are considered, so players such as catcher Gene Lamont of Kirkland and pitcher Seth Blair of Rock Falls were not eligible. For baseball, we picked nine position players and four pitchers. All players were picked by sportswriter Matt Trowbridge with input from NIC-10 History Blog author Alex Gary and local coaches. Players who were used at several positions during their career were placed where they fit best on this team.

Pitcher: Drew Dickinson, Freeport

Pitcher: Dan Scarpetta, Auburn

Catcher: Nick Shields, Harlem

First base: Matt Dettman, Auburn

Second base: Sean Lyons, Byron

Third base: Andrew Wilhite, Stillman Valley

Shortstop: Jake Smolinski, Boylan

Outfield: George Feeley, West

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Rockford greatest baseball players: Rodney Myers great hitter, pitcher