An Early Leg Up

The ball comes out of his left hand as if launched from a camouflaged silo.

In effect, it is.

With an arsenal stretching from a 94-mph fastball to a 76-mph changeup, with a delivery that is all limbs, 6-foot-4 Dontrelle Willis turns, lifts his right leg almost shoulder high, wraps his arms above his head, looks skyward as if he’s Fernando Valenzuela packaged in the windup of Luis Tiant or Vida Blue or Hideo Nomo, then uncoils in the manner of a striking snake, the ball suddenly emerging from a distance far closer than 60 feet 6 inches.

Talk about twist and shout.

“Well,” said Chipper Jones, the Atlanta Brave left fielder, after facing the Florida Marlins’ 21-year-old sensation for the first time Wednesday night, “he has great stuff, deceptive arm angles and doesn’t fall into any predictable pattern. He’s going to overpower a lot of people. We’ll have to see what adjustments the league makes against him.”

Good luck. For now, Willis continues to trash the advance scouting reports, exuding energy, enthusiasm and emotion, generating a verifiable buzz in the baseball wasteland of South Florida, heading (if there’s justice) right from his double-A team in Zebulon, N.C. -- from which he was summoned May 9 because of a Marlin rotation crisis -- to the All-Star game in Chicago on July 15.

He is one of only four pitchers (Paul Dean, Mark Fidrych and Valenzuela were the others) since 1920 to win eight of their first 10 major league starts before the age of 22, and he is now 8-1 with a 2.13 earned-run average in 11 starts, 7-0 and 0.94 in his last eight.

The repertoire and delivery -- “You can’t separate one from the other because they go hand in hand,” pitching coach Wayne Rosenthal said -- can be measured by the back-to-back strikeouts of Javier Lopez and Julio Franco in the fifth inning of a one-run, eight-inning stint against the Braves.

He froze Lopez with a sub-80s changeup and got Franco swinging on a mid-90s fastball. He has 68 strikeouts in 71 2/3 innings with only 21 walks.

That poise amid rookie pressure and the expanding buzz (“He gets even tougher and doesn’t rattle in jams,” Manager Jack McKeon said), and his genuine humility in response to the success and big league environment (“I try to remember that my worst day would be somebody’s best day,” Willis said), have had a pronounced impact on the Marlins.

“It’s almost like when the Dodgers had Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale,” the 72-year-old McKeon said. “They lifted the entire club. They made everybody behind them a little better. That seems to be the way it is with Dontrelle.”

The way it seems to be is the way it is. He has won friends and influenced people.

“Am I impressed? That’s an understatement,” third baseman Mike Lowell said. “I’m very impressed. Here’s a 21-year-old kid out of double A who brings a certain respect and certain awe with him but is not afraid to compete, and that’s very important.

“I mean, it’s not normal, jumping a whole level to get here and yet being so polished without looking polished because he’s all arms and legs in that delivery. He’s got a game plan and sticks to it. Time will tell, of course, but he should get even better with more experience and command.”

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Amid the empty orange acreage of Pro Player Stadium, the Marlins were averaging 12,980 before drawing 30,634 for Willis’ start against Atlanta, including the second largest walk-up sale (9,023) in club history. Not since Wayne Huizenga dismantled his 1997 World Series winner have the Marlins attracted this much attention. TV ratings double when Willis starts, interview requests pile up, and an appearance at a local restaurant creates a line out the door. A local columnist even wrote that Willis is rivaling Dan Marino for impact on the Miami scene.

“Look,” said Willis, standing tall at his locker, “all of this is flattering, and I’m happy to get the recognition, but I’m no Dan Marino. I don’t think I’ll ever have that impact. I don’t think I’ll ever be Vida Blue. I just go out and be me, have fun.

“I’m living a dream, and I’m very appreciative. I never thought I’d have this kind of success this quickly, but I’ve got to keep my head straight. I have to remember where I am and how fast the game can turn on you. I have to go about it like I always have. I’ve got to get my work in and throw every game as if it’s my last. I have to think about what people would be saying if I was 1-8, not 8-1. I have to stay humble.”

He has printed a one-name reminder under the bill of his cap -- Joyce, for Joyce Harris, the mother who raised Willis alone in Alameda, Calif., her son never knowing his father.

“Everybody has a story, and I don’t want mine turned into a sob story,” Willis said. “It’s enough to say my mother was there for me when others weren’t.

“She didn’t have it easy and could have folded. There were a lot of times she would have liked to stay home from work but didn’t. You watch what she went through, the adversity she handled, and you can’t help but learn from it. I mean, the experiences I had then make me appreciate what I have now. She was an inspiration and still is. She was the blessing in my life.”

Harris, 45, is a welder and 12-year member of Ironworkers Local 378. She has literally worked her way up from apprentice to crew foreman, scaling the Golden Gate Bridge and some of the Bay Area’s tallest buildings to do her job and make it possible for Willis to scale the heights he now is.

“I can’t believe how quickly this has happened for a kid no one knew two months ago,” she said by phone, “but my thing is with just how level-headed he still is, how humble and respectful. Those are the things I’ve tried to instill.”

Many relate how the message took.

Reliever Tim Spooneybarger and his wife offered Willis a place to stay when he first came up, figuring he was only a fill-in until injured starters recovered, sending the border back to double A. Now, he’s afraid to evict Willis from that second bedroom on the chance it might terminate his run of success.

“If you took 10 guys and they had the success he’s had so quickly, with all the media attention, nine of them would be real jerks,” Spooneybarger said. “It’s unbelievable. You can’t tell the difference with Dontrelle between the day I met him and now. That says a lot about his character.”

Then there’s McKeon, 51 years older than Willis. The manager recalled going to the mound in a recent game and saying something close to, “Darn it, Dontrelle, throw strikes,” and his young pitcher responded as if addressing the father he never knew.

McKeon shook his head in reflection and said, “I’m yelling at him to throw more strikes and he’s saying something like ‘Yes sir, I will sir.’ I’ve gone to the mound thousands of times in my career and never had a pitcher call me sir. He’s a class kid with a lot of respect for everybody. His mother did a great job.”

Joyce Harris may have had an impact in another way as well. She was a softball catcher for 27 years (“I’ve got the knees to show for it,” she said, laughing) and has been a baseball fan forever, going to Oakland A’s games with her parents to root for Joe Rudi and Reggie Jackson as a member of “Reggie’s Regiment.” Her adrenaline-pumping son isn’t sure he plays because his mom did, but he remembers watching her, seeing how much fun she was having, and “maybe in that aspect,” he said, “it’s rubbed off.”

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Joyce Harris watches on the big-screen television that was a gift from her son. She and her sister, Sharon Peskett of La Crescenta, will be attending the All-Star game if Willis gets an expected invitation.

The windup that was his own creation and not modeled after anyone already has received national attention, of course. It was a street creation basically, the product of a game Willis played with friends growing up in which they tried to strike each other out.

“The problem,” Willis said, “was that the older and bigger we got, the more balls we lost, the farther we hit them. I couldn’t strike anyone out any more, so I tried to do things with my windup that would cause deception, throw the other guys off. It’s the key really. You’ve got find an edge, some way to get hitters off balance.”

Trying to get better control of this new delivery, he painted a strike zone of sorts on the back wall of his house, near a window to his mother’s bedroom, knowing he’d get in trouble for it, which he did, although Harris modified her anger every time the banging woke her up at 6 or 7 in the morning.

“At least I knew where he was,” she said, not sure where he was headed because there were those in baseball who told her Willis would never get drafted if he insisted on using a windup that was so unorthodox, a windup that prompted roommate Spooneybarger to sigh and say, “I wish I had one just like it.”

At Encinal High in Alameda, coach Jim Saunders refused to tamper, and Willis was taken in the eighth round of the 2000 draft by the Chicago Cubs, receiving a $200,000 bonus, only to be traded with Julian Tavarez to the Marlins in March 2002 for pitchers Matt Clement and Antonio Alfonseca, the Cubs filling needs with a veteran starter and closer while the Marlins dumped payroll again.

“I was stunned,” Willis said of the Cubs’ decision to trade him so soon after drafting him. “I kept wondering if I had done something wrong.”

He hadn’t then and hasn’t since.

In fact, he had a 27-5 minor league record when called up by the Marlins, including 4-0 at Zebulon, where he refined the changeup that has become a pivotal complement to his fastball and slider.

With Willis at 8-1 now, the Marlins resist a temptation to chide the Cubs.

“I can’t tell you that we knew he’d be this good this fast,” Florida General Manager Larry Beinfest said of the trade, “but we did know that he was a big left-hander with a lot of upside. Several of our people remembered him from high school and had liked him then.”

For Willis, who works fast, high-fives teammates as they run off the field with him at the end of half-innings and doffs his cap to the standing and applauding fans behind the dugout (“He has the kind of charisma that baseball needs more of in its young players,” McKeon said), he might have known this was going to be a special year even before spring training started.

Driving 65 mph on a Palo Alto highway in February, a rear tire blew on his new car, causing it to flip five times before coming to a stop. Willis emerged without a scratch, enhancing his reputation as a young master of deception.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Only the Beginning?

Dontrelle Willis of the Florida Marlins, off to one of the best starts by a rookie pitcher, is among this season’s National League leaders in several categories. A look:

*--* CATEGORY STATISTIC RANK Record 8-1 8th (in wins) Win Percentage 889 1st Earned-Run Average 2.13 2nd Strikeouts Per 9 Innings 8.54 6th Walks Per 9 Innings 2.64 23rd Strikeouts-to-Walk Ratio 3.2 to 1 6th Hits Per 9 Innings 7.79 15th Opponent Batting Avg 239 21st Shutouts 2 2nd

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First Impressions

The rookie records of some pitchers with similar starts to their careers or pitching styles/characteristics to the Florida Marlins’ Dontrelle Willis:

*--* Name Team Year W-L ERA IP H SO BB GS CG Paul Dean St. 1934 19-11 3.43 233 1/3 225 150 52 26 16 Louis (N) Mark Fidrych Detroit 1976 19-9 2.34 250 1/3 217 97 53 29 24 Vida Blue Oakland 1969-70* 3-1 4.46 80 2/3 69 59 30 10 2 Fernando Dodgers 1981 13-7 2.48 192 1/3 140 180 61 25 11 Valenzuela Luis Tiant Clevel 1964 10-4 2.83 127 94 105 47 16 9 and Hideo Nomo Dodgers 1995 13-6 2.54 191 1/3 124 236 78 28 4

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*Blue maintained rookie status in 1970 because he pitched fewer than 50 innings in 1969.