The Farm System : Harvey Pretty Much Just Fell Off the Truck to Become One of Baseball’s Better Relievers

It remains a remarkable story.

Bryan Harvey, an outfielder then with Howard’s Western Steer Steakhouse, a slow-pitch powerhouse in Catawba, N.C., answered an emergency call for a country hardball pitcher and changed his life and career.

“If I was back in Catawba, I’d still be driving a truck, working at Howard’s furniture store, playing slow-pitch and clearing $250 a week if I was lucky,” the Angel relief ace said in a Carolina drawl the other day.

Instead, he owns a new hilltop house in Yorba Linda, has a $1,040,000 contract and seems on the threshold of joining relief pitching’s elite with his overpowering fastball and comparably wicked forkball.

“It’s something, getting a second chance to play baseball, let alone being a big league stopper,” Harvey said. “I give thanks every day. It’s why I never get too high or too low.”

There’s another reason he maintains his emotional balance, another aspect of his remarkable story.

Harvey has had to cope with potential trauma at home.

He and his wife, Lisa, have a healthy son, Christopher, 6, but their daughter, Witney, 4, suffers from a rare condition that eluded diagnosis by several specialists until recently identified as Angel man syndrome, a chromosome abnormality reported in only 80 children worldwide, according to the Birth Defects Encyclopedia.

The condition, comparable in some measure to cerebral palsy, causes epileptic seizures, prevents Witney from talking and restricts her mental and physical development.

“We heard recently about a support group in Florida, but apparently there are only two or three children in all of California who have the condition, so we’ve been isolated in that regard,” Harvey said.

“I mean, there’s nothing that can happen on the field to compare with what we’ve gone through with her, but she’s absolutely awesome. She’s always so happy, so loving. We’re just thankful to have her.”

There is no predicting the course of Witney’s future, but it’s obvious she is with her father in his dispassionate approach to tense moments on the mound.

Angel reliever Mark Eichhorn, who formerly teamed with Tom Henke in the Toronto Blue Jays’ bullpen, calls Harvey a Henke clone.

“Most relief pitchers are a little wacko, but Harv’s just a farm boy with a great arm,” Eichhorn said. “I watch him in the bullpen and my own arm starts hurting. He’s at 85 (m.p.h.) after only two pitches, and I top out at 79.”

Battling periods of wildness, Harvey compiled a club-record 67 saves in his three seasons before 1991, in which he is four for four in save chances and has an 0.87 earned-run average through eight appearances.

Dick Radatz, Roger McDowell and Todd Worrell are the only other relievers to have recorded 17 or more saves in each of their first three seasons, but the real measure of Harvey’s stuff is his strikeout ratios of 11.5 per nine innings last year, when opponents batted .201 against him, and 12.8 in 1989.

Harvey’s strikeout ratio of 10.33 for his career is third on the all-time list of pitchers who have thrown 200 or more innings, behind Rob Dibble’s 11.80 and Henke’s 10.38.

“Harvey has the stuff to be one of the premier stoppers in the league,” Seattle Mariner Manager Jim Lefebvre said. “He’s built like a bulldog and goes about it like one. If his forkball is working, he’s almost unhittable.”

Said Angel catcher Lance Parrish: “It’s almost embarrassing, the way he can make a hitter look. He overmatches people when both pitches are working.”

Harvey’s fastball, according to pitching coach Marcel Lachemann, is consistently timed at 92 or 93 m.p.h., and occasionally reaches 94 or 95. His forkball goes 85 to 88.

Said Lachemann: “He throws the forkball harder than a lot of people throw their fastball, which is why it’s so hard for a hitter to lay off.”

Even though they try.

“Now guys are swinging at the first fastball they see because they don’t want to have to look for the forkball,” Harvey said.

“The best thing about it is that even I don’t know which way it’s going to break,” he said, referring to the forkball. “I just spread my fingers and throw it as hard as I can. The more my arm speed looks like a fastball, the better it is for me.”

Harvey has struck out 243 batters in 216 2/3 major league innings. He had 257 strikeouts in one span of 192 minor league innings.

Joe Coleman, the Angels’ former minor league pitching instructor, taught Harvey the forkball in 1985, along with a new delivery that improved the forkball’s break and tends, perhaps, to intimidate hitters. The addition and alteration, Harvey said, enhanced his repertoire, and may have saved his career.

“I don’t think I could have made it with just the fastball, and until I changed my delivery the forkball wasn’t doing anything,” he said. “Now I feel confident to throw it at any time, no matter what the count is.”

The 27-year-old right-hander spins in a manner reminiscent of Luis Tiant, turning his back to the hitter, who can’t like the idea of a pitcher not looking in his direction, especially a pitcher with a touch of wildness.

In one of his infamous moments, Harvey delivered a wild pitch while issuing an intentional walk last year, but his walk ratio per nine innings dropped from 6.72 in 1989 to 4.92 in 1990, and he has walked only one in 10 1/3 innings this year.

Lachemann said it was a matter of refinement and experience. Harvey said he no longer takes the mound with a feeling that people are looking over his shoulder, waiting for the wildness to set in, but he also smiled and added:

“You never want to throw all strikes. You never want the hitter to get too comfortable. “

Said Manager Doug Rader: “Bryan has a much better feel for the strike zone now. He’s much more consistent. Any time you’re put in a win or lose situation it takes time to grow into the role, and he’s doing a good job of it.”

Harvey, of course, is a key. The Angels hope he doesn’t have to go more than an inning at a time, but it depends on the effectiveness of the setup men and their ability to get him into the ninth inning often enough with a lead.

Four save opportunities in 21 games aren’t many, but Harvey said: “I feel like I can save as many games as anyone in the league. The situations should be there and the rest is up to be. My confidence has never been greater.”

For Harvey, it’s what he calls his second chance, since it was only seven years ago that he was hauling furniture and barnstorming the softball fields of North Carolina with the Howard’s team that featured his father, Stan, considered by many, including Stan himself, as the greatest left-handed hitter in slow-pitch history.

“People say that’s what I was and I don’t disagree,” the senior Harvey said, documenting his opinion with an estimated lifetime average of .650 and the national tournament record of 23 homers in 11 games, set at Sacramento in 1978.

His son, Bryan, graduated from Bandys High in 1981 and received a baseball scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, but a year later gave it up.

“I loved baseball, I liked the coach but I couldn’t make myself go to class,” he said. “I realized when I quit college that my hardball career was probably over and that I’d spend the rest of my life driving a furniture truck, but when you grow up in a small town like Catawba, your view of the big picture isn’t the same as it is here.

“I mean, I’d do it differently if I had the chance again. I’d make myself go to class. But that year I quit was the same year we got married and we were real happy. I had a family, I had a job and I was able to play slow-pitch. I was like just about everybody else there.”

Stan Harvey said he tried to talk his son out of quitting college, figuring that would be the end of baseball, but there was a hint of stubbornness in Bryan Harvey and he might have wanted to prove he could eclipse his father’s feats.

“He was a strong young-un,” Stan Harvey said. “He could hit a softball as far as anyone. I think one reason he quit college is that they wouldn’t let him bat.”

Two years after leaving school, on a Saturday morning in the summer of ‘84, having gotten up early to gather apples for a deer trap, Harvey received a call from former high school buddies who were members of a Stan Musial League team involved in a state tournament. They needed a pitcher that day.

Harvey’s hardball appearances had been infrequent, but he took off his boots, put on his spikes and pitched eight innings, losing 1-0 on a passed ball.

The word reached an Angel scout, Alex Cosmidis, who had seen Harvey throw in college, felt he had promise, but elected, like every other scout in the area, not to follow up when Harvey quit.

This time, the report on Harvey was so strong that Cosmidis invited him to a tryout camp two days later, clocked him at 94 on the speed gun and signed him for a $2,500 bonus.

“It was the classic case of the arm behind the barn,” said Cosmidis, who now scouts for the Chicago White Sox. “You can never measure commitment and dedication, but Bryan went on to prove he had both.”

Now he has a lot more, but only the trappings have changed. Harvey still goes back to Catawba during the winter to pump gas at his in-laws’ convenience store, to sit by the hot stove on cold mornings, discussing events.

Stan Harvey, who retired as a slow-pitch slugger after suffering a heart attack last year, has altered the country landscape by installing a satellite dish to watch his son pitch hardball, an improbable dream.

“Every time I see him on TV, it’s hard to really imagine that it’s him,” Stan Harvey said. “I played in front of big crowds at national tournaments and it never bothered me, but now when Bryan is pitching I’m on the edge of my seat yelling at the television.

“I can see, though, that I get more excited than he does. He never changes expression. He’s been that way since high school.”

And now, the “farm boy with a great arm” also has a special daughter to remind him that home is where the heart is.