Kevin Hickey Is Living Out Another Hockey Fairy Tale

He was just another 21-year-old sweating out summers on the south side of Chicago, working in a steel mill and playing softball at night. And not just neighborhood ball.

This was a game with a 16-inch ball called a “clincher.” No gloves. Playoffs. Crowds. Kevin Hickey was the center fielder for a team called the Bobcats, who won national championships.

Ah, but sonofableep, he had to quit playing because the mill moved him to the second shift. So instead of chasing down flyballs, his nights were spent welding tacks and hooking steel for crane operators.

He was a ballplayer without a game. At least he had a paycheck, but then he lost that, too. The mill laid him off. Tough times and all that. He was one of 75 men told to walk one day.

There was this good buddy in the neighborhood, though, a guy going to the police academy who knew someone on a semipro team. Already, one of his friends from the police academy had hooked on. Pretty soon, Hickey was pitching for them. He didn’t have any money or any place to go during the day, but at least he had a game.

One night, a couple of scouts from the Chicago White Sox showed up. Hickey lost, 2-1, but the scouts liked what they saw. It wasn’t that he was much of a pitcher. He couldn’t even throw a curve. But brother, could he throw hard. The scouts told him to come to the Sox’s tryout camp the next month.

The tryout camp was a day for pretenders at Comiskey Park, a day of dreams lost and maybe one player found with any skill. “Me and 250 guys standing in line with numbers on, like cattle waiting to get slaughtered,” Hickey said. “Guys with bell-bottoms and K mart gloves.”

Hickey stepped to the mound and threw a fastball, that being his only pitch. It hit the catcher square between the eyes. Splat! “I don’t think he was ready for one that fast,” Hickey said.

The scouts asked to see his breaking ball.

“Don’t know what one is,” Hickey said.

“You don’t know what ... ?” they asked, incredulous.

“Well, I know what one is,” he said, “but I don’t know how to throw it.”

He shrugged, hooked his wrist and threw, and the scouts liked what they saw. They signed him to a contract. “Gave me $500 and a book on ‘How to Speak Hillbilly,’ ” he said, the latter because he was assigned to a rookie league team in the metropolis of Paintsville, Ky., located near Swamp Branch, Redbush, Flatgap and Oil Springs. It was the summer of 1978.

Three years later, he was back in Comiskey Park, back in his old neighborhood -- in a White Sox uniform this time. Hollywood would reject the story, of course; too corny. “His rise was very rapid,” said Orioles General Manager Roland Hemond, then the White Sox’s general manager. Pitching in middle relief, Hickey appeared in a total of 101 games in 1981 and 1982.

Near the end of the 1982 season, though, he fielded a ball and threw to second base. His career would never be the same. “We were playing the Twins; Kent Hrbek hit it,” he said. “Pain shot through my arm. The next inning I couldn’t even throw.”

He lasted another year with the Sox, but his arm kept him from throwing as hard as before. He went to the minors, was traded to the Yankees, released, then signed and released by (in order) the Phillies, White Sox (again) and Giants. He pitched in Denver, Columbus, Ohio, Albany, N.Y., and Reading, Pa. Portland, Ore., Honolulu and Phoenix, Ariz. But never in the majors.

“If they gave out frequent flyer mileage in the minors, I could fly around the world now,” Hickey said. “I’ve flown every airline in the country.”

Hemond became the Orioles’ general manager in 1987 and signed Hickey to a minor-league contract a month later. It was mostly an act of kindness. Hickey was 31 with a wife and two kids, working in a state’s attorney’s office in Chicago in the off-season because minor-league money paid the bills, but only that. He was roster padding on a team searching desperately for youth.

At midseason in Rochester, N.Y., last summer, though, his arm suddenly stopped hurting. Just like that. Just as mysteriously as it had begun hurting six years earlier. “If I had any idea ... “ he said.

He finished the year as Rochester’s stopper, and this spring he pitched his way into the Orioles’ bullpen. It helped that he was a left-hander on a team with few. But there also was the night he froze Don Mattingly with runners on base. And the night he broke Fred Lynn’s bat. “He earned it,” Hemond said.

Now the season is two weeks old and Hickey is 33 and his arm doesn’t hurt anymore. He is dancing a damn sweet dance. He has pitched to 10 batters and given up only one hit, that after Joe Orsulak misplayed a fly that would have ended an inning.

He has gotten Wade Boggs twice and George Brett once. He doesn’t throw as hard as he used to, but he has three pitches and mixes them nicely, and, well ...

“It could be a movie, couldn’t it?” Hickey said.