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Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe … It Is For LesterMay 21st, 2008
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Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a down-on-your-luck screenwriter languishing away in the bottomless depths of the unjust Hollywood caste system. You’re miserable, depressed, and desperately trying to regain the talent and sanity you once had—if you ever truly had it at all.
But then, an epiphany hits you in the dead of the night like a surge of untapped creative energy. You can’t sleep. You have to write. Because the idea stuck in your brain that has launched into ceaseless jumping jacks won’t let you do anything else.
And then, in the midst of this artistic euphoria, let’s say you draft up this amazing baseball narrative about a top-notch pitching prospect that debuts at age 22 only to find out mere months later that he has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
With his career derailed in the immediate future, a long, hard road back to good health, let alone the big leagues, now awaits the young athlete—the perfect inspirational plot-line.
So, if you were writing this script, you’d then wonder how to end it. Sure, he’d battle back from cancer and certainly win his first start back in the majors, but how would you cap off the script, ensuring that no eyes were dry when the credits started to roll.
Would you have him winning the World Series clincher just ten months after completing radiation treatment?
Or would you have him tossing a no-hitter for the film’s final climax?
Well, against better judgment, you decide to have the protagonist accomplish both feats. But hey, you’re excited, and you can’t wait to pitch your yarn to the motion picture bigwigs … plus, you really want to quit working as a used-car salesman in Santa Monica.
Of course, to your dismay, the execs would shoot down your fiction in half a nanosecond.
“Take it to Disney,” the fat cat from Universal would exclaim, not knowing that ABC security had already shooed you off their premises an hour beforehand.
“Yeah, that doesn’t sound convoluted, trite, and unoriginal,” the major player over at 20th Century Fox would sarcastically howl as he hustles you out of his cushy office and puts Sly Stallone on speaker to discuss Rocky VII: Balboa vs. The Nurse Practitioner.
Hell, even the animators over at Pixar would find it implausible … and they just CGI’d a tale about a sewer rat named Remy who becomes a gourmet chef.
Oh well, better luck next time. For you, it’s back to the hopeless task of selling that used 1976 Chevy Camaro with the hideous chrome bumpers that has been collecting dust for the past two decades.
But, you see, the aforementioned saga concerning a cancer-surviving pitcher who goes on to shine on the grandest of baseball stages isn’t the creation of some banal writer that has seen one too many inspirational sports movies in his life. Rather, it’s the real-life story of Jon Lester.
A Storybook Story
Instead of trading for Johan Santana this past off-season, Red Sox general manager Theo Epstein chose to keep a collection of young talent that included the 24-year-old Lester, their seemingly storybook left-hander.
And on a chilly Monday night in front of a packed and wild Fenway Park crowd, Lester backed up the front office’s conviction by pitching his way into the annals of baseball history and larger-than-life lore after no-hitting the Kansas City Royals.
Improving to 3-2 on the year, Lester allowed only two baserunners, walking Billy Butler in the second inning and Esteban German to open up the ninth. Striking out nine in all, including Alberto Callaspo to end the contest, Lester captured his first career complete game in impeccable style.
Shortly after Lester put the finishing touches on the 18th no-hitter in Red Sox history, the hard-throwing lefty and a teary-eyed Terry Francona embraced each other along the first base foul line.
“He just said he was proud of me,” Lester said of the congratulatory hug. “I’ve been through a lot the last couple of years. He’s been like a second dad to me. It was just a special moment right there.”
When the media relayed Lester’s comments to Francona during his post-game press conference, the manager’s eyes nearly welled up again.
“I take that as a huge compliment,” Francona said in response. “He’s a wonderful kid, not because he threw a no-hitter. He’s a good kid because he’s a good kid. We’re proud of him all the time, but to watch him do that tonight was beyond words. To see him do that, you feel like a proud parent. I know we have no right to say that, but it’s probably how we feel.”
And Francona wasn’t the only proud surrogate parent to express amazement at Lester’s latest accomplishment.
“Jon has lived a full life at age 24 for what he’s endured, overcome and experienced,” pitching coach John Farrell told reporters after Lester’s remarkable effort. “And he has such a bright future. When you look at his attributes, both physically and mentally, you can envision him being a premium starter in the big leagues for a long, long time.”
Now, a no-no is just one game—but if Lester has truly turned the corner, the Sox could be scary for a long time as well.
Further Random Observations and Blabberings
It’s rare, you know. Not just a no-hitter, but when a pitcher, in general, enters that semi-mystical zone that can transform a good athlete into a great one or a great athlete into an immortal.
Lester, working about twice as fast as he normally does, just pounded the strike zone all night. Consistently throwing in the low-90s with his fastball, Lester touched 96 miles per hour in the ninth inning, including on his final pitch (No. 130 on the night) to fan the pinch-hitting Callaspo—who, at that point, must have felt like he was facing Steve Nebraska out there on the mound.
Throwing first-pitch strikes to nearly every hitter he faced, Lester only required one real defensive gem, a Jacoby Ellsbury diving stab of a rocketed liner to center off the bat of Jose Guillen in the fourth inning.
And Lester’s cutter was just phenomenal. For the first time since hearing about how devastating it was in the minors, Lester’s bread-and-butter pitch was absolutely electric, inducing plenty of weak contact and befuddlement from opposing batters on their way back to the dugout.
After nearly no-hitting the Toronto Blue Jays at the end of April, Lester has been on quite a roll. Over his last five starts, he has pitched 34 and one-third innings, compiling 26 strikeouts to 12 walks while allowing just six earned runs on 18 hits—good for a 1.57 earned run average. True maturation or a hot streak? Stay tuned.
Also, think about this: the last two pitchers to throw a no-hitter in the majors have donned the Boston “B”—Lester, of course, last night and Clay Buchholz last September. No-hitters may be fluky in one sense—Bud Smith and Jose Jimenez say hello—but the achievement certainly does speak volumes about Boston’s player development system when the two highly touted young guns in the organization pull off the pitchers’ coup.
Finally, you may or may not like the Red Sox, but something like this should go beyond fandom. In the span of a year and a half, Lester has battled back from cancer, won the clincher in the World Series, and pitched a no-hitter. Now, I’m sure, more than anything, Lester wants to be treated like just another pitcher, but his story is pretty damn special—Hollywood material, indeed.
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