Left-handers are supposed to have nine lives.
Mark Mulder just had two baseball lives of modest length. But going into Oct. 2013, he was long gone into the diamond afterlife.
The former mainstay of Oakland’s early 2000s Big Three with Tim Hudson and Barry Zito hadn’t been a regular part of a rotation since 2006 in St. Louis and hadn’t thrown a pitch since 2008. He’s got two years under his belt as an ESPN baseball analyst and two more years on a contract with the World Wide Leader.
Now Mulder, 36, has a minor-league contract with the Los Angeles Angels. If his southpaw wing isn’t clipped at all, he’s got a shot at the Halos’ rotation.
Huh? Try to digest all of this. It doesn’t compute much at face value.
Mulder is trying to come back to pitch after a 5 1/2-year absence, and almost eight since he was an effective starter. I’ve never heard of such a resurrection, Mulder hasn’t, and Angels scouting director Hal Morris – a former capable Big League first baseman – hasn’t.
I go back to one memory of the Mulder fadeaway on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2007 at Busch Stadium. A struggling Mulder threw absolute garbage at a hot Cubs team in a 4-2 loss, giving up all the runs and seven hits in three innings, while walking three and fanning nada.
This was a man without a future. Two shoulder surgeries during that time seemingly killed that arm. And now he’s going to be a starter, sans knuckleball or trick pitch, after all that time and at an age respectfully called your baseball dotage?
“I’m out to prove people wrong,” Mulder said. “I’m out to have my kids see what they’ve never gotten to see what their dad did. Those are the motivating factors that are most important.”
What makes the story stranger is the planned comeback has nothing to do with some kind of elixir or long-term rest restoring his shoulder’s vitality, or regaining velocity from long ago. Mulder’s fastball averaged 89.5 mph in his prime. And that’s the speed he showed LA special assignment scout Tim Huff in a series of tryouts for teams that have spring training near Scottsdale, Ariz., Mulder’s home.
All that sparked Mulder’s delayed-Lazarus act was moving his hands from his mid-section to his face. Simple. And the arm responded almost immediately.
Mulder watched Dodgers reliever Paco Rodriguez separate his hands near his face as he began his delivery in the playoffs. A light bulb went on. Mulder tried it. The arm that he claimed never hurt, but simply was DOA when he threw, came alive.
“I had no intentions of this ever happening,” Mulder said. “I still have two years on my ESPN contract. (Watching Rodriguez) I literally just stood up in my living room. I did it a couple of times just standing there and it felt really good. I went out to my back yard a couple of days later and threw a ball against (the wall) in my basketball court a couple of times, and was amazed at how good it felt.”
“Then I called a buddy of mine, met him at a park, we played catch and it’s even better. Here it is eight weeks later, I’ve thrown off a mound a dozen times. I didn’t say a word to anybody for a month, or five weeks. Every time I threw it got better and better.”
Like the very concept of rising from the baseball dead, Mulder has no good explanation other than the changed mechanics why his arm responded so quickly.
Huff liked what he saw, Morris helped process the information, and the Angels have a familiar, albeit ghostly, name to fill out a challenged rotation. If Mulder sticks, it’s the next-best thing for Mulder’s young family to playing locally with the Diamondbacks. Anaheim is just an hour’s flight or five-hour drive from home.
“Mark has always been a tremendous athlete and our scouts were very impressed with how he threw the ball in his workouts, particularly given the amount of time that had passed since his last professional outing,” said Angels assistant GM Matt Klentak.
Mulder stepped up his workouts in mid-January, reporting to the Angels’ complex in Tempe, Ariz.
“We are all hopeful that this will turn out to be an exciting and successful comeback story,” Klentak said.
Nobody expects a return to the “old” Mulder, yet who knows in this athletic occult story. Mulder, Oakland’s second pick in 1998, out of Michigan State, was 21-8 in his second season with the A’s in 2001. He then went 51-24 from 2002 to 2004 as he helped the A’s reach the playoffs in four consecutive years. A trade to St. Louis and a 16-8 season in 2005 followed. Then the bottom dropped out.
Such decisions as whether he’d continue getting in shape in the minors or work out of the bullpen can be left for later in March. For now, Mulder simply is enjoying baseball mortality again.
“People ask what happened,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t care what happened. All I know is I am throwing the ball better than at any point when I was with the St. Louis Cardinals.
“I go to spring training, I go to Anaheim, they say, ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ at the end of camp. So what? I always said to people I’d never come back unless I knew I had the stuff to get big-league hitters out with.
“I truly believe what I have right now I can get big-league hitters out. It’s getting my location back, getting that muscle memory back to where I don’t have to think about anything on the mound but throwing the pitch where I need to.”
This is as close to a real-life version of the film versions of Angels in the Outfield. There’s nothing wrong with an uplifting, borderline-supernatural story when we’re trying to flush away all the devilish characters in the game. May you pitch ‘till you have gray hair and wrinkles, Mr. Mulder.
