Toe’s Big Feat

Sundays are when they play baseball in Southern towns along the Mississippi River, in a semipro league where not all the parks have proper dugouts or bleachers, where trees and stacks of old tires double as outfield fences.

The Sugar Cane League was started years ago by field workers and men from the oil refineries. Once in a while a player comes through who has spent time in the minors. They play for a little money or a plate of crawfish and turkey necks that people barbecue in drums cookers behind the backstop.

People come from all over southeast Louisiana, from Donaldsonville and Sorrento and up north in Tangipahoa. They come to eat and drink and watch the games. It was a few seasons ago they first saw the kid playing among men.

Toe Nash stood taller and thicker than the others, though he was only a teenager.

For most of the week he hung around the streets, a junior high school dropout who mowed lawns and worked odd jobs. But come the weekend, he hit towering home runs from both sides of the plate and threw fastballs in a sizzling manner reminiscent of Satchel Paige.

The last few seasons, Toe might have been the best player you never heard of, a legend in the Sugar Cane League. He figured to spend the rest of his days there, in an overlooked corner of the game, batting for the glory of Sunday afternoons.

But it turns out that--for better or worse--the story of this remarkable young man was only beginning.

*

Today, not much past his 19th birthday, six months removed from his last game along the Mississippi, Toe will report to spring training with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen in the modern era, not with ball clubs employing legions of scouts and Web sites tracking prospects in Little League. Phenoms do not emerge from nowhere. Switch-hitters with power do not hide out in the Louisiana bayous.

Even the scout who signed Toe sounds like something from a Ring Lardner story. Benny Latino is his name and he talks about his find in a soft drawl. “Like the clock rolled back,” he says. “I don’t know how many people I’ve talked to in baseball who say they cannot believe it.”

Like a fairy tale, he says. But fairy tales don’t come easy and making it as a baseball player is only one of the challenges facing Toe.

An eighth-grade education has hardly prepared him for a crash course in airports, reporters and signing bonuses. He is a young man with a history of bumping heads with the law, mostly nickel-and-dime stuff but serious enough that the next slip will dash any hopes of a pro career.

So Toe feels excited and nervous all at once, and more than a little scared about blowing his chance. Sitting in his agent’s office in Riverside, where he spent the last two weeks preparing for camp, he says, “I know I have a lot to learn.”

It takes effort to get the words out. He is shy around strangers, not the sort to make eye contact. Ask a question and he fidgets, all 6 feet 6 of him draped over an office chair, one long arm resting on his lap, another hooked behind.

So much has transpired, so many twists and turns, he needs a moment to take it all in. His head tilts back, showing a scruff of whiskers on his chin.

“Sometimes,” he says, “it gets confusing.”

*

Go back about seven years, back to a weekend afternoon when Latino took a walk.

The man was a baseball junkie, a center fielder at Southeastern Louisiana until a ligament tore in his knee. He was working part-time as a scout, trying to make a living off the game.

A few blocks from his home in Hammond, La., Latino came upon a Little League game and what he calls “the best 12-year-old I have ever seen.” The boy hit two home runs and struck out almost every batter he faced.

His name was Greg, but, for no particular reason, everyone called him Toe. The scout tucked that funny name in the back of his mind, expecting it would turn up again. And for years after that, when the guys at the local barbershop talked baseball, someone would ask what ever happened to that kid.

“It was like he disappeared,” Latino says.

Toe was living in nearby Sorrento, a poor town of 1,300 where many of the mom-and-pop stores have been forced out of business by a WalMart up the road. He learned baseball there, playing catch in the yard, clutching a broomstick and swinging at bottle caps his father, Charles “Tooty” Payton, pitched at him.

Not long after Latino spotted Toe, things turned sour in the Nash family. Toe’s mother left for Baton Rouge, abandoning him and his father and a younger sister. Toe began getting in trouble.

“I was having problems at my house,” he says quietly. “I took it out on school.”

Twice he was expelled. Next came a stint in alternative school. Tooty, described as a caring man, was too busy earning a paycheck to watch his son all day. And though Louisiana law prohibits youngsters from dropping out before 16, no one noticed when the 15-year-old Toe stopped coming to school.

Sorrento was a place where he could pass the days playing ball or shooting hoops in the park. He could drift from house to house, working here, spending a night there.

“It’s a little small town,” he says. “I’m going to say that everybody’s black down there and kin to you. I was helping them out and they gave me a few dollars.”

Soon, he was living in a mobile home with a girlfriend more than twice his age and twice divorced. While his friends played for the high school team, Toe was giving up on dreams of baseball.

“I really thought it was over,” he says. “I thought I was through.”

At least he had the Sugar Cane League. His uncle, former NBA player John “Hot Rod” Williams, owned a construction company where Tooty worked and sponsored the local team, the Williams All-Stars. They played throughout southeast Louisiana and into Mississippi.

Toe joined at 16 and, though he was much younger than his teammates, he had a strong swing and hands made quick from batting at bottle caps. As the months passed, he made a name for himself.

“Other parks we’d go to, people would come up to me, tell me how good I was,” he says. “There were lots of people in towns talking about how I played.”

Off the field, however, he was hanging around on street corners, getting high.

Last March, the 18-year-old Toe was arrested for marijuana possession and driving without a license, then hauled in again after a domestic dispute with his girlfriend. Soon after, he and a buddy got in a fight at a party, beating up another man.

Prosecutors say that, as the victim lay bleeding on the floor, Toe’s friend reached down and took $200 from his wallet, giving $25 to Toe. That made it felony robbery.

For all his transgressions, local police report that Toe has always been polite and cooperative. The district attorney describes him as gentle, more likely to be led into trouble than to start it.

After the third arrest, Williams sat his nephew down for a talk. The uncle had some experience with the law: Years before, as a star at Tulane, he was implicated in a point-shaving scandal and later acquitted of sports bribery charges.

I will help you, he told his nephew, but you must help yourself. You must grow up, get your mind straight.

Toe cried.

“I knew everything he was saying was right,” he recalls. “I just felt it.”

*

Things were looking up for Benny Latino. The Devil Rays had given him full-time work as a scout and, while he scoured Louisiana and Texas in search of talent, he kept in mind the kid from years before.

Last spring, at a Louisiana State game, Latino sat beside a man who also remembered Toe and heard he might be playing semipro ball. “So I went around looking for him,” Latino says. “Just out of curiosity.”

It took a few tries before Latino spotted him in August at a game in Tangipahoa. The young man had grown into size-18 shoes, but one thing had not changed.

“The first ball he hit went 400 feet or something like that,” the scout recalls. “It went over the treetops.”

By that time, Toe’s life had settled a little. He was staying out of trouble and his uncle had taken him to an open tryout the Pittsburgh Pirates held near Baton Rouge. Thoughts of professional baseball were beginning to dance in his head.

Still, he was taken aback when Latino showed up. Why would a pro scout come to the Sugar Cane League?

Latino asked him if he wanted to play professional baseball. Toe understood that.

The Devil Rays offered a few thousand dollars--and Toe might have signed for no bonus at all--but Williams wanted more money for his nephew. That required a tryout at the team’s minor-league facility in Princeton, W. Va.

“I always said when I was small that I was never getting on a plane,” Toe says. “I always looked at TV and saw plane crashes.”

He overcame his nerves long enough to make the short flight and meet with Dan Jennings, the Devil Rays’ director of scouting. If Jennings was dubious about a prospect with no documented experience past Little League, his interest grew when he saw the teenager walk onto the field, 240 pounds of muscle and unexpected grace.

The team lent Toe a pair of shorts and hit him some fly balls. He stepped into the batter’s box, took a few right-handed swings, hit a few pitches deep. Jennings suggested he spread his feet. The next balls carried farther.

When Toe switched to the other side of the plate, he was even smoother, more powerful.

“OK,” Jennings told Latino. “We’re going to sign this guy.”

Latino shook his head. “Hold on, you need to see something else.”

They put Toe on the mound and he started throwing in a style that, like his swing, was unpolished. “No kind of instruction,” Latino says. But the pitches had life, clocking at 80 miles an hour, then 90, then faster. There were the makings of a curveball.

Jennings turned to his scout: “Is this for real?”

*

This should be the part of the story when everyone lives happily ever after. It is not that simple.

The Devil Rays gave Toe a $30,000 signing bonus and assigned him to fall instructional league in Florida, which meant another flight. Changing planes in Atlanta, he waited hours at baggage claim for suitcases that had been checked through.

Toe missed his connection and called home in tears. Latino had to contact the airport and have someone guide him onto a later flight.

Once in St. Petersburg, there was more to learn. The team eased him along, honing his fielding and hitting, keeping him on the bench until the final games of the season. There were no tape-measure homers, but he showed raw talent and, as Jennings says, “the innocence of that is a beautiful thing to watch.”

The game felt different now--playing on green fields, having his own locker stocked with clean uniforms. Off the field, Toe discovered the marvel of pizza delivery.

“I never tried to order pizza from the phone before,” he says. “They were telling me all about that.”

Soon the media caught wind of the story and his picture was on the cover of USA Today’s sports section. There was talk of a book and a movie. In late fall, Toe returned home a celebrity.

But the old crowd, the old problems, persisted. He was stopped outside a convenience store and found to be in possession of marijuana. When he decided to move out of his girlfriend’s home, an argument ensued.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “I don’t even want to talk about that.”

Friends claim the woman pulled a knife and demanded money. They were both arrested for simple battery, another charge added to the list.

Word leaked out and now the media told a darker story, questioning why the Devil Rays had not conducted a thorough background check. The mythical prospect was looking at starting a jail sentence rather than a baseball career.

*

Larry Reynolds figures he is qualified to be an agent to young ballplayers such as Toe, if only because he grew up among eight children raised by a single mother and grandmother.

“A lot of the challenges these kids are facing,” he says, “I’ve lived through them and I’ve come out all right.”

Sports are part of the reason, he says. Larry played football at Stanford and his brother, Harold, was a longtime major leaguer who now works as an analyst for ESPN.

In the few months since they began representing Toe, the Reynolds brothers have all but adopted him.

The last two weeks they have kept him in Riverside, working him out each day, taking him to church and to movies, which he cannot see nearly enough of. He has opened up, talking more and laughing.

“We’re not dealing with a kid who has that mentality, who is carrying weapons and selling drugs,” Harold says. “It’s an easier turnaround with him.”

Back in Louisiana, Toe has been placed in a narcotics diversion program--what amounts to strict probation. For the next two years, he must keep a curfew and be tested for drugs every two weeks. He cannot be in places where alcohol is served.

The district attorney, Anthony Falterman, knows about athletes in trouble, namely Cecil Collins, a former LSU and Miami Dolphin star whose arrests have ranged from sexual battery to felony burglary.

Toe is a cause for optimism among some in the prosecutor’s office. Hopeless kids abound in the poor neighborhoods of their jurisdiction--they chose to be lenient with this one because he has a chance to make it out. Still, the district attorney worries.

“The only thing he knows is the street and, personally, I don’t think he can make it,” Falterman says. “But I hope he does.”

That is where baseball comes in.

The Reynolds brothers will accompany Toe to spring training in Florida, get him started and hire a tutor to help him study for the high school equivalency exam. The Devil Rays, who are grooming him as an outfielder, will also keep a watchful eye.

“We’re giving him his first real chance,” team executive Jennings said. “This is not a bad kid--he just needs some guidance and some structure in his life.”

Up early, meals with the team, practice all day, lights out at night. It’s a long haul for any prospect and Toe says, in a whisper, “All I’m thinking about is baseball. Just playing.”

In time he might reach the majors, sportscasters comparing him to Roy Hobbs from that novel, “The Natural.” Harold Reynolds gushes: “Walked right off the sugar cane fields. Kevin Costner should eat this up.”

But even if Toe never gets past single-A ball, he might learn something along the way, something about hard work and keeping straight. He might earn a diploma and put a few bucks in the bank. That is what the people around him hope.

And that might be the true magic of this story.