If nothing else, the Cubs should require Ben Christensen to undergo counseling.
Something is chillingly wrong here–something deep in the psyche of an honors student with a 95 m.p.h. fastball who relentlessly drives himself toward pitching perfection.
You can’t condemn the Cubs for taking a chance on a potential top-10 pick who slid all the way to 26th. The 6-foot-4-inch Christensen is described as “a good kid who made a bad mistake.” He could be a steal.
Perhaps some in the organization quietly believe the “mistake” demonstrated the perfect kill-or-be-killed makeup required to be an intimidating star.
But it also demonstrated Ben Christensen could be a time bomb.
What snapped inside Wichita State’s Christensen as he took his first warmup pitches on April 24? Why did he intentionally throw a ball that struck Evansville leadoff batter Anthony Molina in the eye and could have killed him?
Molina was taking his warmup swings about 24 feet from home plate. He wasn’t looking at or exchanging words with Christensen. The two players–and their teams–had no known history of bad blood.
A tearful Christensen later said he was only trying to throw a warning pitch in Molina’s direction because Molina had left the on-deck circle to get a better feel for the velocity and movement of Christensen’s stuff. “Timing” pitches, it’s called, and it has long been considered hot dog and bush league by pitchers who occasionally have retaliated with stray warmup tosses.
But nothing as remotely cold-blooded and near-lethal as this had occurred in college, minor-league or major-league baseball.
If Christensen’s character matched his competitive drive, wouldn’t he first have warned Molina with a sharp word or asked the umpire to enforce the college rule that says the batter must stay in the on-deck circle until the pitcher has finished his allotted warmups?
It wasn’t as if the Evansville lead-off hitters had been daring Christensen for five or six innings by edging closer and closer to the batter’s box during his warmups. The game hadn’t even started.
And it wasn’t as if Molina defiantly was taking his warmup swings just a step or two outside the box. Because the left-handed batter’s box was on the side of the plate away from Evansville’s dugout, Molina had walked behind the plate and positioned himself 24 feet away.
Many who know Christensen call the throw that badly damaged Molina’s eye a “tragic accident.” Yet a pitcher who finished with a 21-1 career record for a top-10 college team usually hits his target.
Did the Cubs miss theirs?
Their research turned up none of the typical jock flaws. No drug or alcohol or female abuse. No history of violent behavior.
General Manager Ed Lynch said: “This is a kid who for his entire life had been an outstanding person with outstanding character–a national Who’s Who in high school–and for three seconds he made a terrible error in judgment and he feels terrible about it.
“Our people know the kid and the Wichita State staff very well (three Cubs scouts were at the game when Christensen hit Molina), and we believe he’s worth the risk. How many 21-year-olds make a mistake?”
For starters, that mistake cost Christensen around $1 million in signing bonus, down from the $2 million or so he could have commanded as a top-10 pick. But ongoing legal action by Molina could cost Christensen substantially more and his inability to speak openly about the incident has cost him dearly in public portrayal.
Because his attorney has advised him not to talk about the specifics of what happened, Christensen has come across in some newspaper and magazine stories as remorseless.
Yet when Christensen was interviewed by Adam Knapp of the Wichita Eagle soon after hitting Molina, the pitcher was so upset he barely could talk through the tears.
Christensen said: “I didn’t mean to hit him. . . . I couldn’t believe it. It was like everything was going in slow motion. I would never do something like that on purpose.
“I feel so bad for him. It’s not like he saw it coming. All I could think about was if that ball would have been a little bit to the left, or a little bit to the right, I could have killed him.”
Yet “gentle Ben” didn’t appear nearly as contrite the moment he hit Molina and was ejected by the umpire. Christensen’s response–
cursing and throwing his glove–was consistent with his intensely competitive behavior dating back into high school, when he occasionally yelled at teammates for making errors.
He also was known for redoing school assignments, even if the answers were correct, if he didn’t like his penmanship.
In temperament, Christensen reminds scouts of a young Kevin Brown, the raging perfectionist son of an alcoholic who was even harder on himself than he was on teammates. Christensen will criticize himself to reporters for the five hits he allowed in a five-hit shutout.
Christensen also has a reputation for being a little nasty while on the mound, glaring at hitters and backing them off the plate with purpose pitches. That’s baseball. That’s part of why Cubs scouts were so high on Christensen.
Yet what was the purpose of the pitch that shattered Molina’s eye socket?
Wichita State coach Gene Stephenson and pitching coach Brent Kemnitz tried to take part of the fall for their ace, telling reporters they teach all their pitchers to “brush back” any batter who gets too close to the batter’s box during warmups.
But it’s doubtful Stephenson, who has coached Wichita State for 22 years, ordered or even encouraged one of the best pitchers in the country to risk being thrown out of the game by throwing at the head of a batter 24 feet from the plate.
Christensen cost himself–and his team–the rest of the season. The Missouri Valley Conference did the right thing in suspending Christensen. Wichita State was eliminated in a first-round NCAA regional.
It’s possible the fanatically driven Christensen was swept over the edge by college baseball’s frat-like macho. Perhaps he’ll mature and mellow under pro baseball’s eye-for-an-eye code. A big-league pitcher would fear for his life if he did what Christensen did.
Knapp of the Wichita Eagle fears Christensen will be haunted forever by what he did April 24.
“Twenty years from now,” Knapp said, “we could be talking about Ben Christensen being elected to the Hall of Fame, and people would still be talking about what he did in college.”
The Cubs would gladly settle for that.
