It’s a Small Town, After All

October baseball is filled with stories of stolen signs, but none quite like this.

At the woodsy edge of this 660-person town that produced the Angels’ best starting pitcher, there is a marker that speaks to the amazement of it all.

It is adorned with a painting of a generic left-handed pitcher in a blank uniform.

Next to the painting are the words, “Home of Jarrod Washburn, 1992 Webster Graduate, Professional Baseball Pitcher.”

A simple exercise in civic pride, certainly. Except, when the sign was commissioned several years ago, while Washburn was still a minor league pitcher, there was a problem.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know he was left-handed; nobody ever told me,” said Joe Connor, the artist who doubles as a mechanic at his family’s gas station down the street.

That sign, featuring a right-handed Washburn, was destroyed. Connor drew another one, a lefty. But shortly after it was stuck into the ground, somebody stole it.

“I wonder if some people were mad that we were giving this kid special treatment when he hadn’t really done anything yet,” Connor said.

He shrugged, put down his wrenches, picked up his brushes and painted a third sign.

It was stolen too.

“Little jokesters must have thought they were real funny,” said Kim Johnson, school district accountant.

Last year, the crime still unsolved, a fourth sign was painted and hammered down.

Then, in this brilliant but harsh land where everything must be earned, something dramatic happened.

The sign stuck. The little jokesters left it alone.

It’s still there today.

“And I know what you’re thinking,” said Kelly Carlson, who owns the nearby carpet and tile store with her husband. “You’re thinking, ‘Holy moly.’ ”

Something like that.

A likeness of a Southland hero planted at the edge of a town with no stoplights?

A painting of a man who has thrilled millions guarding a community consisting of two blocks?

Jarrod Washburn will be on the mound for the Angels at Edison Field tonight in tiebreaking Game 3 of the American League championship series against the Minnesota Twins

But, holy moly, part of him will still be here in the northwest Wisconsin forest, standing sturdy in a hometown that had as much chance of producing a major league player as the Angels once had of winning the World Series.

“It is amazing,” said his father Mike, sitting across a wooden table, sipping coffee one recent morning in one of two diners in town. “We didn’t know how good he was. We didn’t know what good was.”

Good, today, is being the left-handed ace of what has become baseball’s most exciting team.

Good is being the team’s best starting pitcher in a decade, winner of 18 games during the regular season.

Good was fashioning a dozen-game winning streak, the longest in the majors.

Good was winning the clinching game in the division series against the New York Yankees last weekend, giving up only one earned run in five innings, despite being exhausted.

But back then?

Growing up in a modest lakeside home nestled in the trees nearly nine miles from the center of town, Washburn, now 28, understood a different definition of the word.

Good was learning to pitch off mounds as high as coffee tables, in ballparks with dirt infields and tree-studded foul lines, during seasons that were short and obscure.

Good was learning to hit by batting golf balls into the lake behind his home.

Good, for his father, was recently noticing that one of those golf balls had washed ashore.

“I thought, ‘That ball must have been on the bottom of that lake for more than 10 years,’ ” Mike said. “Talk about full circle.”

So it has been for his son, who, with more than his distinct northern Midwest accent and scruffy beard, carries the town with him like a shield.

“Doesn’t matter where I go,” Washburn said. “I’m never leaving there.”

Everyone talks about how well he pitches under pressure.

But to him, pressure is accidentally skidding your old car into a remote ditch on the way to an important high school baseball game.

“I remember he called me and said, ‘Dad, I wrecked the car; it’s in a ditch. I just left it and walked to the game,’ ” Mike recalled. “I said, ‘Well, OK.’ ”

Everyone talks about how Washburn never seems scared.

But to him, fear was boarding an airplane for the first time when he was 20.

“People ask me how Jarrod has adjusted,” said teammate and friend Scott Schoeneweis. “I tell them, ‘Compared to that first plane ride, I don’t see how anything else would be a big deal.’ ”

*

To examine Jarrod Washburn’s roots, one needs only to look at his father’s cap.

A red Angel cap, it is stained black around the rim and visor.

Mike is a machinist at the town’s only factory. He wears that cap every day to work.

“It’s simple stuff here,” Mike said. “You get a job, you raise a family, you build a home, you take care of things.”

And you never really think your child will become a professional athlete.

It just doesn’t happen here. At least, it never had.

For one thing, how does anybody find it?

About a two-hour drive northeast of Minneapolis, Webster is in a different world.

Cross the St. Croix River into Wisconsin, drive through Alpha and Falun, make a left turn at Siren, then disappear into the trees.

When Washburn was growing up here, the nearest mall was 65 miles away. The nearest movie theater was 30 miles away.

Washburn’s parents are among the many here who do not have cell phones, because cell phones don’t work in these woods.

Neither does pretension.

There is a reason that last season, Washburn was the only Angel who criticized the club’s constant promotion of the Rally Monkey.

“We don’t go much for that sort of stuff around here,” Mike said.

Although Washburn’s parents have a Rally Monkey wrapped around the base of a family-room lamp, they don’t actually use it.

“We don’t go shaking it or waving it or anything like that,” said Mike.

Washburn’s parents have a standing invitation to attend playoff games--Jarrod even called last week and told them he was one computer click from putting them on a plane for the weekend Yankee series.

But, although they visited him at several ballparks, including Edison, during the year, they turned him down.

“I told him, thanks, but don’t push that button,” Mike said. “I can actually see the game better on my big TV. Instant replays and all that. Nobody standing in front of you pounding a balloon.”

That down-to-earth attitude makes it even more amazing that the rest of the world found his son.

“He always played ball; we always rooted for him. We don’t see anything different now,” said his mother Dawn, a bank teller.

Back then, though, a couple of things happened.

First, there was the videotape.

Rusty Helland, Washburn’s coach at Webster High, knew that the baseball star of his 28-person senior class was something special.

But he also knew that because of the weather, which limited the team to a summer season that began after baseball’s annual draft day, virtually no scouts would find him.

This was a kid who was so gifted, his childhood friends wouldn’t let him play unless he did it right-handed.

This was a kid who became such a feared youth league hitter, he was once intentionally walked 14 consecutive times.

Once he reached high school, this was a kid who once struck out the first three hitters of a game on nine consecutive strikes, prompting the umpire to turn to Helland and say, “I’ve never seen that before.”

Nobody in these parts had, so one winter day during Washburn’s senior year, Helland hustled him into the gym with his catcher and brother Ryan.

With a hand-held video camera, Helland ordered Washburn to start pitching.

He sent the videotape to the coach at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, Tom Lechnir, who immediately wanted to recruit him.

But because baseball season didn’t start for months, Lechnir drove up to watch him play ... basketball?

Washburn made 18 free throws that night, and the coach was convinced.

“Wanted him to play baseball for him but had never seen him pitch in person,” Mike said with a smile. “I guess it was those pressure free throws that did it.”

Three years later, his parents heard his name being announced on something other than a scratchy public-address system for the first time when the radio blared that he had been taken in the second round of the draft.

Eight years after that, the women were pausing between frames at the town’s four-lane bowling alley Tuesday to stare at the old TV as Washburn’s team battled for the American League pennant.

“After Jarrod, the second-most famous person in this town is ... I have no idea,” said bowler Vicki Tolander, although she may fill the bill after her recent 528 series.

On the verge of taking his team to its first World Series, Washburn is embedded here in the tiniest of worlds.

Remember when he would ride his bike to youth league games, the nine-mile country trip punctuated by a dip in the Yellow River?

Remember the time he got such a bad case of poison ivy, the doctors gave him a shot of steroids? And in that day’s high school game, he hit two home runs and had six RBIs?

Folks also remember how, earlier this year, Washburn’s name was leaked in unproven allegations of sexual assault.

They just don’t talk about it.

“We know Jarrod, we knew it didn’t make any sense, we knew it would be proven wrong, so nobody ever said a word,” said Bev Johnson, one of his former grade-school teachers. “We all figured the woman got paid to say what she said.”

It is all good and neighborly here, this place where the only fast-food joint is closed during the winter and a mini-mart advertises bait leeches.

Kelly Carlson has put Washburn’s name on the marquee outside her carpet and tile store, not only for Jarrod but, “for his parents, who drive by here every day, so they can see it.”

Al Steiner, a machinist who also happens to be the mayor, is thinking about a “Jarrod Washburn Day” if the Angels continue to advance. It’s not like Washburn won’t be here. He lives in a house with his wife and son here during the winter, and just bought 160 acres nearby.

“We’re pretty much removed up here to be Angel fans,” Steiner said. “But you look around here lately and you see a bunch of red caps.”

Maybe they are black around the edges. Maybe they are worn backward while the wearer is driving a tractor. Maybe they are changed for orange or camouflage caps on weekends.

They are red caps nonetheless, dotting the pines and birches like yellow ribbons as folks watch grandiose October baseball for a glimpse of a neighbor. In a small town leaving the light on.

Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.