The MLB scout who saw something in the relentless Mike Fiers
For a reason he doesn’t quite understand even today, and against his usual better judgment, Charlie Sullivan gave the young man his business card. The kid said he was a pitcher, was a friend of a friend, seemed short on luck, and Charlie was a baseball scout.
So, yeah, behind the backstop at Deerfield Beach (FL) high school’s baseball field, he shook hands and went into his wallet and relinquished a phone number that, far as he knew, in the absolute worst scenario, would saddle him with a new best friend. For, like, ever.
Baseball dreams tend to run big, after all, to run desperate, to inspire the sort of behavior that could run a scout clean out of his mind.
“Very rarely,” Sullivan said, would he commit an act of such blind faith.
A professional scout shows up at a high school field and suddenly everybody’s a pitcher.
“In that instance,” Sullivan said Wednesday afternoon, “maybe it was the introduction. A mutual friend. You know what, maybe it was a gut feeling. He seemed an authentic baseball guy. Maybe I just caught wind of that. He was, I think, a little down and out and it was an opportunity to lend a helping hand.”
A couple of weeks later, Sullivan’s phone rang. Of course. It was the kid from Deerfield Beach, only he was maybe 23, and he wanted to throw for him. Sullivan said to meet him at a park in a couple of days. He gave him the address. And, oh yeah, bring a catcher.
“I don’t have a catcher,” Sullivan told him.
It was the first time Sullivan, then with the Milwaukee Brewers, saw Mike Fiers throw. This was a few days before the 2008 MLB draft.
“He needed more time to develop,” Sullivan said.
There was something, though.
“I told him to let me know where he ended up in the fall,” he said. “And we’ll see.”
Charlie Sullivan grew up playing baseball in Greenwich, Connecticut, went to Duke and then Vanderbilt, and was an infielder for several years in the minor and independent leagues. He didn’t hit much, gave up the sport just before it gave him up, and took a job as an area scout for the Brewers a couple of years later. He started in 1999. His first draft was in 2000.
Maybe because the game had become hard for him by the end, maybe because he’d developed a soft spot for guys whose desire seemed to bubble from their ears, Sullivan was drawn to the baseball rats. He liked the way they felt about the game. He loved the way they lived it, how they improved, how they figured out ways to win.
This guy Fiers, he’d survived and then recovered from a terrible car accident that had left him all but broken. He’d left Cumberland College in Kentucky for Division II Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale. He’d gone out of his way to say hello to a scout, to get a number, to follow up, to bring his own catcher.
This was Charlie Sullivan’s kind of guy. His kind of ballplayer.
So a year later, on the second day of the 2009 MLB draft, Sullivan’s phone rang again. It was the Brewers. Their pick in the 22nd round was coming.
“We’re ready to take Fiers,” the voice said. “You good with that?”
Sullivan grinned.
“Yes,” he said.
Fiers went 676th overall. He threw his first professional pitch as a 24-year-old.
On Monday night in Oakland, Mike Fiers threw the second no-hitter of his career. When Fiers sat afterward beside his catcher, Josh Phegley, in the postgame press conference at Oakland-Alameda County Stadium, he smiled, he laughed, he praised his catcher and his defense, and then something caught in his throat and dampened his eyes.
“I wasn’t too high on the charts,” Fiers said. “I was a guy throwing 88, 90 mph and down in South Florida, so I was one in a million down there. I want to thank Charlie Sullivan, a Milwaukee Brewers scout, for giving me the opportunity and putting in a good word.”
From a handshake and a business card, a decade ago.
Sullivan, 49, is with the San Francisco Giants now, in international scouting. He’d taught himself Spanish in his 20’s, when he’d traveled alone in the offseasons to Chile, Argentina, Spain and Colombia. He met his wife, Ena, in Colombia. They have two daughters.
He woke up Wednesday morning at his home in Weston, Florida, not far from that handshake. He opened his computer and saw that it had happened again, that Fiers had thrown another no-hitter, and then Sullivan read his own name in a story about it.
“It’s been great,” Sullivan said. “But it’s because of mornings like this morning, when I wake up and see that. I’ve been fortunate. I really don’t look at it like I did a good job with Mike Fiers. I look at it like Mike Fiers made me look good.”
The job can be a hard one. On Wednesday night he was preparing to leave for more time in the Carribean, looking for more players, projecting more 16-year-olds into grown men. The best among them don’t tend to walk up and stick out their hands and ask for your number.
Fiers has a 57-58 record over the better part of nine seasons. He has never been an All-Star. His career ERA is 4.11. Tuesday night’s nine scoreless innings shaved this year’s ERA to 5.48. He has thrown two complete games in 162 starts. He made the most of those. He is good some nights, great on a few. Hitters generally find him difficult to manage, but, clearly, tend to get over that, too.
But, then, maybe, in order to appreciate Mike Fiers, you’d need the whole story. The courage. The relentlessness. The fastball that was special in ways velocity would not define. The manner in which he competed. How he chased it, lived it, needed it, and brought his own catcher too. And the scout who saw it all.
“I couldn’t have predicted that he would, well, you know he was the first one to get to the big leagues out of that 2009 class for us?” Sullivan said. “Man, he always had a special place in my heart. It is a hard job. And we miss a lot. And that makes this all the more gratifying.”
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