Thanks to Alex Belth, I recently started enjoying Pat Jordan's work. Well, that's not entirely true. It turns out that I have read a ton of his Sports Illustrated articles over the years, and thanks to The Vault, you can too. Jordan was a can't-miss pitching prospect who missed, luckily for us, as he turned to writing and ended up as a literary giant with thousands of stories and eleven published books. "The Suitors of Spring" is a collection of some of Jordan's early SI articles, some autobiographical.
It was originally published by Dodd and Mead in 1973, then a 1974 Warner paperback edition. If you're interested in more, stop by patjordanstories.com, there's a bunch of material there, including links to all of his SI stories.
The bird dogs came first. They just appeared one spring day in your sophomore year of high school as if drawn by odor of freshly cut outfield grass. On that day you knew for sure that your fastball, which had slowed considerably in the jump from a Little League to a high school mound, had once again begun to smoke like a burning pine. You knew also that your life would never be the same again. Baseball was no longer a game for you from that day forward. It was, instead, your career.
They were called bird dogs because they sniffed out talent, although the name does not do justice to the men. The bird dogs were kindly old men in plaid shirts and string ties. They owned taverns and hardware stores, and once had even played ball with Kiki Cuyler and Georgie Cutshaw. Now in their last years, they measured out the weekday afternoons at an endless succession of high school baseball games. They were always easy to spot, even from the mound, since few adults bothered to watch the meaningless games your coach let you pitch as a sophomore and because they always stood directly behind the home-plate screen, as if they would not feel comfortable unless viewing the world through a maze of wire triangles.
Copyright notice: Excerpted from chapter one of The Suitors of Spring, published by Dodd and Mead. ©1973. All rights reserved.
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