Option Play Down the Line

Stanford baseball Coach Mark Marquess looks at Chad Hutchinson and sees his best pitcher, the owner of a 95-mph fastball.

And then Marquess looks ahead three or four years and sees a young man with a college degree, an athlete financially set for life.

A happier man, but maybe not a pitcher.

Stanford football Coach Tyrone Willingham looks at Hutchinson and sees his quarterback, owner of 3,769 passing yards in 18 games.

Willingham won’t look beyond this week and a game against UCLA.

Hutchinson is approaching a familiar crossroads. He gave up $1.5 million from the Atlanta Braves in 1995 to play quarterback for Stanford, with his springs to be spent in baseball.

“The decision was the hardest I’ve ever had to make in my life,” he says. “I don’t want to think about having to do it again.”

But he has to, because Hutchinson, a football sophomore who has had a redshirt season, is a baseball junior who is eligible for the major league draft in June.

Again.

“It seems like I just got here,” he said Wednesday after a mid-term in Introduction to Law. “How can it be here already?”

And the market has changed. The $1.5 million is pocket change compared to what is out there now.

His live arm had brought scouts swarming to Torrey Pines High three years ago, and that arm made Hutchinson a first-round choice in the baseball draft, No. 26 overall, marked down 10 or 12 spots because of the idea that he might play college football.

He has, well enough to be a two-year starter who already is eighth overall on Stanford’s lifetime passing-yardage chart.

And he has pitched Stanford to 15 wins in 21 decisions.

He was the offensive MVP of the Sun Bowl on the last day of December. He was pitching in the College World Series on the last day of May.

He has done both remarkably well.

He has done neither as well as he could have.

“He doesn’t pick up a baseball until Jan. 6,” Marquess said. “When he has thrown his last pitch, in the playoffs or College World Series, he puts the baseball down and picks up the football.

“The real upside for Chad is that whatever he’s doing now is at the top of his list. There’s no question that he could be a better pitcher than he is now if that was all he was doing. Football people will tell you that he might read defenses better if he had spring ball.”

But he has football and baseball.

For most, it would seem to be a choice between diamonds and emeralds. For Hutchinson, it’s a choice of giving up the emeralds for the diamonds.

“It’s hard, because I just love football,” he says. “I love it even more than I did three years ago. And it would be hard to leave it. That’s the hardest part. I’d like to keep my options open, so that if the NFL wants me . . .”

What to do? It’s like the decision he made three years ago.

And it isn’t.

“It’s harder in one respect because of the success he has had in football,” Marquess says. “Everybody knew about baseball.

“But the flip side is that he is 21 and not 18. So he’s more mature and better able to deal with the decision.”

Scouts will continue to look, knowing the investment probably will have to be higher than in 1995. Few teams were willing to meet the money he demanded out of high school, enough money, he figured, to forgo a Stanford education. And even the $1.5 million, first set as his price, turned out not to be enough.

Now that education is on course, with a degree possible next year, the investment involves forestalling another option. “Major league clubs have to ask, ‘Do you pay the price to have him give up the option of professional football?’ ” Marquess says. “Some teams may back off. Maybe only seven or eight might stay.”

Matt White got $10.2 million to sign with expansion Tampa Bay. Travis Lee got $10 million to sign with expansion Arizona. Neither had the NFL in his future.

There is little doubt that Hutchinson can play in the NFL. A good student, he has the intelligence, the arm, and at 6 feet 5, 230 pounds, the stature to play pro football.

This season, he has completed 142 of 239 passes for 1,635 yards and nine touchdowns in leading the Cardinal to a 4-3 record. He has thrown seven interceptions, but only two since Sept. 20.

He was never better than last season against UCLA, when he completed seven consecutive passes in an 80-yard scoring drive in the fourth quarter to beat the Bruins, 21-20, in the Rose Bowl.

That launched a four-win run through November that put Stanford in the Sun Bowl, where the Cardinal hammered Michigan State, 38-0.

A week later, it was baseball season again, with 106 1/3 innings, 114 strikeouts and an 8-4 record, albeit with a lofty 5.76 earned-run average.

And then football, and so goes the routine.

By Marquess’ calculation, Hutchinson will have until about two weeks before the baseball draft to declare his intentions. He probably will be drafted either way, but major league clubs will be wary of a player who already has spurned $1.5 million to play college football and still has two more seasons.

If he tells scouts he will be a baseball player if the price is right, there will be a scramble to meet that figure, however lofty.

“It’s something I’d like to put off, but I know that I won’t be able to,” Hutchinson says.

“I don’t want it to be about money. It’s about playing, and right now I’m thinking about coming back to Stanford next year.”