Mark Prior hadn’t had to do a whole lot of waiting in his career until this spring.
Perhaps for that reason, one of baseball’s outstanding young pitchers wasn’t one of the world’s best patients. Coping with the injuries that sidelined him for the first two months of the season was as challenging as mowing down any high-powered lineup.
“Every time I was out walking around, it was, `How you doing? How’s the injury? When are you coming back?'” Prior said, “and a lot of times I didn’t have an answer for them. Then you start thinking, gosh, am I letting myself down? Am I letting them down?
“I finally got to the point where I accepted it and I was just trying to make sure I did everything I needed to do to get ready.”
Prior was ruminating in the Lansing Lugnuts’ clubhouse after his second rehabilitation start on a cold, damp evening in late May. He was in Class A ball, a grade he skipped on his way to the majors, to get himself in shape after the long layoff resulting from an inflamed Achilles’ tendon and a sore elbow.
That start went as planned, as did another at Triple-A Iowa, and Prior is set to resume his place in the Cubs’ rotation Friday against Pittsburgh. He arrives in the nick of time for a team whipsawed by injuries, and none too soon for the 23-year-old ace himself.
Prior, who ascended so quickly to the majors and used velocity and location to dominate National League hitters last year in his first full season, discovered there was only one speed possible in rehab: gradual. He adapted to it but never did get used to the daily scrutiny, reports and rumor that made his already tedious time on the disabled list somewhat of a torment.
Private and guarded by his own description, Prior is inclined to get hot and itchy under the bright lights. Though he is learning to deal with the attention that accompanies his talent, he doesn’t trust it to serve him in the long run. Instead, he puts his faith in his own instincts and the people who have known him the longest.
“My family of friends, my true, true close friendships with people, I probably have five or six,” Prior said over lunch in his hometown of San Diego before spring training began. “I think that’s a lot. Until you’re someone I know I can trust, I’m real standoffish.
“But I know [recognition] is part of where I am, and I love being here. I love what I do. I love where I play. I don’t want to be anywhere else. It just takes a little time to get adjusted. I’d rather be admired and noticed than not be admired and noticed.”
It has been a heady ride since Prior’s senior year of high school, when he defied conventional athletic wisdom by turning down a $1.5 million offer to sign with the New York Yankees and going to college instead.
Last year his path seemed vindicated as he compiled an 18-6 record with a 2.43 ERA and 245 strikeouts, including a 10-1 run after recovering from a midsummer base-running injury that idled him for three weeks. He won two playoff games and finished third in the NL Cy Young Award balloting.
Prior has broken bread with role models Nolan Ryan and Randy Johnson. His off-season social engagements included a dinner at the White House with a half-dozen other players, executives (including Cubs President Andy MacPhail) and their wives, organized by political columnist and part-time baseball wonk George Will.
Yet fellow Cubs pitcher Matt Clement says Prior refuses to mount the pedestal people set before him.
“He’s a normal person,” Clement said. “That’s the most impressive thing about him.”
Others who have known Prior longer say he won’t allow fame to unravel him thread by thread.
“Mark doesn’t want to compromise who he is to make everyone else happy,” high school teammate Al Gomez said. “He does not get caught up in that whole superstar thing. He can sometimes come across as arrogant, but he’s actually very humble and confident, not cocky.”
Prior has some firm ideas about how to keep a steady grip on his good fortune. He believes in routine and misses very few workouts. He is largely immune to flattery and has no trouble declining requests for appearances or interviews if they might detract from his rigorous conditioning regime.
“He’s not a press mongrel, that’s for sure,” Cubs manager Dusty Baker said. “If he could have two faces–his field face and his street face, where nobody would know him–that would be fine with him.”
Pitching coach Larry Rothschild, whose voracious reading habit Prior admires, said Prior’s public reserve comes from his desire to keep things in context.
“People who are uncomfortable with [celebrity] are uncomfortable because they realize that this is a game and they’re not changing world history,” Rothschild said. “Mark is very aware of the fact that there’s life beyond baseball.”
Prior’s injuries left a couple of national magazine covers on the cutting room floor this spring, but one of the few silver linings in his situation was embodied in a photograph that appeared in many newspapers last month. It was a rare out-of-uniform shot of the camera-shy Prior, showing him in a cap and gown, accepting his University of Southern California business marketing degree. He earned the credits he needed this spring, but he would not have been able to attend the graduation if he had been healthy.
“Kids look up to us ballplayers in general, and for me to go on the [Cubs’ preseason] caravan and say it’s important to read–I think now I can really say that with a little more conviction,” Prior said. “I got my degree. Am I going to use it? I don’t know. But at least I feel like I’m a better person because I have it. A little bit more complete.”
Prior carves out personal space where he can. His dinners with friends are sacred. He leaves his cell phone in the car and flees to the golf course (he is a 10 or 11 handicap). He is ultracompetitive there, at video games and even at the plate, where he hit .250 and drove in six runs in 72 at-bats last season.
He concedes that he has a hard time unwinding and said his honeymoon in Hawaii was “probably the first time I ever really relaxed.”
Not that he’s complaining. Prior frequently applies the word “fortunate” to himself, as in, “I was just fortunate to grow up in a town where there were a lot of good baseball people.”
But Prior’s rapid development wasn’t happenstance. As a boy, he had an unusual ability to absorb and implement the guidance he got from older men. Those mentors form a sort of absentee posse who ride shotgun with him every day
“Especially in this day and age, it seems like everyone’s out to get something,” Prior said. “And that’s why you should take the people you know, or you knew before you are where I am now.”
High school a touchstone
University of San Diego High School upperclassmen eat lunch on a lovely terrace perched on a hill overlooking Sea World. The Pacific Ocean glimmers just beyond. Seagulls wheel overhead, scavenging for leftovers.
Nearby is a small gym with a stage at one end, worn, honey-colored wood floors and walls covered with championship banners earned by the Dons.
The Catholic school–enrollment 1,400–fields 56 teams in 27 sports, including sailing, surfing and water polo. Among its alums are 1950s tennis star Maureen Connolly and golfer Phil Mickelson. A dozen USDHS baseball players have been taken in the pro draft over the last 20 years.
Prior played high school basketball with Bill Walton’s sons and baseball with Oakland A’s pitcher Barry Zito. He belonged to the German Club and Campus Ministry and made good grades “without having to grind, like some people,” his wife, Heather, said teasingly. They began their romance in an advanced-placement calculus class and were married across the street from the school at the university’s Founder’s Chapel last November.
“Uni” High remains one of Prior’s touchstones. He returns occasionally to visit and talk to students. Gomez, an assistant coach who helps run a baseball camp there, said when the boys quiz Prior about their fantasies of money, mansions and hot cars, he steers them toward other topics.
“I think he feels fortunate to have this gift, but he doesn’t feel his gift is any bigger than anyone else’s,” said Dick Serrano, Prior’s high school coach.
But a good deal of Prior’s education took place elsewhere.
It started at home, as the youngest of Jerry and Millie Prior’s three children. From Jerry, a financial consultant and one-time Vanderbilt football player who graduated from Loyola Academy in Wilmette, Prior inherited an assertive nature and muscular calves; from his mother, an educator, thoughtfulness and a trace of her southern accent.
“I got the best of both worlds,” he said. “Mom’s laid-back attitude, which is what I’m like away from the field, and my dad’s gotta-get-it-done, gotta-get-there-now. More than anything, they were supportive. If I had wanted to be a piano player, they would have found the best way for me to be the best I could.”
Prior is protective of his family and requested that they not be contacted for this story.
“My parents raised three of us, and I don’t think they should have to single me out,” he said. “I want my parents and my brother and sister to see me as a son and a brother and not a Chicago Cubs pitcher.”
His parents made sure he and his siblings got high-quality instruction. Prior sometimes believes this is misconstrued and gets irritated when he thinks he is being portrayed as all mechanics and no soul.
“There was a comment made during the playoffs that I’ve been `groomed’ for this day,” Prior said, pronouncing the word with disdain. “Which is the biggest bunch of b.s. I’ve ever heard. I was not groomed to be a major-league baseball pitcher. I was groomed to be a good person.”
When Prior was in junior high school, he began attending weekend basketball clinics run by ex-NBA player Jim Brogan, who stresses goal-setting and motivational techniques.
“First one there, last one to leave, always wanted to play one-on-one,” Brogan said. “He was a pain in the butt.”
Brogan made young Mark shoot free throws with his eyes closed. “Vision comes from the heart,” he told the boy. Prior eventually warmed to the idealism. He and Brogan talk regularly about his objectives, and Brogan still suggests a “word of the week” to post on his fridge.
When Prior mutters to himself on the mound, Brogan is one of few people with a clue to what the conversation is about.
“I’d love to tell you what he’s saying, but it would violate confidentiality,” Brogan said.
As a teenager, Prior began taking pitching instruction from junior college coaches Randy Abshier and Jay Martel, who taught at the time through the San Diego School of Baseball.
“He was a man at 14,” said Abshier, the pitching coach at Grossmont Junior College. “He knew what he wanted and he knew how long it would take. Our relationship was down to earth. I didn’t have to sit there and feed him lines and be his buddy-buddy.”
In high school, a chance meeting led to Prior’s involvement with former major leaguer and pitching sage Tom House.
Prior was pitching against House’s son’s team, “getting his doors blown off,” House said. Jerry Prior happened to be sitting two seats away from House and one thing led to another.
After the game, the father introduced the pitching coach to his son with the words, “Tell him what he needs to do.” House recommended mixing in a few more changeups and breaking balls. Ultimately, he became Prior’s adviser in matters “mental, physical, nutritional and biomechanical,” as House put it.
Prior now serves on the board of advisers and conducts a camp for House’s National Pitching Association, a teaching group and clearinghouse for information on the science of pitching.
The early groundwork meant that by the time Prior got to the big leagues, Rothschild’s job was “more fine-tuning than anything,” the coach said.
“He’s what I would call `good coachable,’ in that he’s not like a piece of putty,” Rothschild said. “Some guys want to please so much that they lose sight of who they are and what they need to do, and Mark never does that.”
When Prior was a USC sophomore, House asked his friend Nolan Ryan to call the young pitcher on the eve of a big game. Prior, convinced the message was a prank, played it for his friends to try to find the culprit before he realized the Houston area code was legitimate and returned the call.
When the two met face-to-face at an awards dinner, Prior was so nervous he barely touched his food–“More nervous than I was at the White House,” he said.
Prior cherishes his talks with Ryan, Johnson and other pitching luminaries.
“I’m a fan of the game just like anybody,” he said. “I’m a nobody compared to those guys. It’s an honor.”
House likes the fact that Prior has retained some gee-whiz.
“He knows he’s good, and he knows he’s making a difference, but he hasn’t put all the pieces together that he’s one of those guys,” House said. “I know, if he stays healthy, the kind of numbers he’s going to put up.”
Game 6 bleakness
The last time Prior pitched at Wrigley Field, he didn’t so much walk off the mound as get washed away by a torrent of runs when the Marlins pounced on the openings presented by fan interference on a foul ball and an Alex Gonzalez error to blow open Game 6 of the NLCS. It was one of the few times all season that Prior couldn’t make things work.
Months later, everyone is still curious about what was going through his head in those bleak moments. Prior doesn’t resent the questions and answers them straight-up.
“I wasn’t on cruise control, but I was pretty much in charge of that game,” he said.
“I should have stepped back to make sure I gathered myself. I felt like I almost got panicked. I made good pitches on certain people, but there was probably 90 percent conviction on the pitch instead of 100 percent because I was still thinking about what had happened.”
Like others around Prior, Rothschild is convinced the experience will only enhance the pitcher’s toughness.
“When you have his kind of stuff and his makeup, you get through those things,” Rothschild said.
In January, before Prior knew anything was amiss physically, he thought out loud about the way his duties have increased from season to season: 130 innings pitched his last year at USC, 170 in 2002, 230 last year.
“This is the year you’ll feel if there’s any effect from last year,” he said then. “I don’t think there will be, but I’m not promising there won’t be.”
The comments sound like a portent of doom now. Prior laughed ruefully when his words were read back to him in the Lugnuts’ clubhouse, but he doesn’t like simplistic answers.
“I wouldn’t change one thing about last year,” he said. “There’s no reason to. Is my ankle bothered because of that? Maybe. Is my elbow? Probably not. My elbow is probably from me trying to push it too soon after the ankle. It’s tough sometimes to determine whether you’re pushing the envelope. The only thing you can really do is prepare and try to make take the right steps so you’re prepared to handle the workloads.
“It was tough for somebody like me to swallow because I feel like I train hard, I try to prepare, I’m not a guy who wastes a lot of time in the off-season. I get after it. I’m never going to get those two months back. Now the only thing I can do is try to get a couple extra years in and make sure I prolong my career.”
