[舊聞] Kuo draws a crowd at workouts 01/16 …
Kuo draws a crowd at workouts
Young Taiwanese lefty works to rebound from injuries
By Ken Gurnick / MLB.com
http://tinyurl.com/85k2h (原文網址有郭和野茂的合照)
LOS ANGELES -- A catcher's glove was popping the pop of velocity not usually
heard in January. And if that wasn't enough of a tip-off, the crowd that formed
around the Dodger Stadium bullpen during Friday's voluntary workout was a sign
that something special was happening. The pitcher making the noise is trying to
come back from a second Tommy John operation, and his name is not Darren Dreifort.
It's Hong-Chih Kuo, now 22 and in his fifth star-crossed season. The Dodgers
gave Kuo $1.2 million in 1999 to be the first Taiwanese high school player to
sign with a Major League organization. Ever since, there has been a heightened
anticipation surrounding everything the hard-throwing left-hander has done.
It was that way when he made his professional debut in San Bernardino in 2000,
a game that has become something of Dodger minor league folklore. Kuo faced 10
batters in that game and struck out seven. He hit a batter with a pitch and
induced two feeble infield grounders.
Joe Thurston, now fighting for a Major League job, was playing shortstop behind
Kuo that night.
"It seemed like he struck out everybody," said Thurston. "I remember having a
friend on the other team and he fouled a ball off. That was about the best
contact off him -- a foul ball. In Single-A, you just don't see guys throw like
that. It wasn't like they weren't getting a hit. They weren't touching the ball.
And he was doing it so easy. You see guys throwing hard like that, but they're
grunting and working hard. He looked like a natural."
Kuo made it look so easy, in fact, that few realized he struck out the final
batter in the third inning with an elbow that blew out on the previous pitch.
"A scout told me that he could have pitched in the big leagues that night, and
he was only 17," said Dino Ebel, Kuo's manager at San Bernardino. "But I
remember that last at-bat and he threw a 98-mph fastball and stepped off and
shook his arm a little. Then he reared back and threw another 98-mph fastball
and struck the guy out and walked off the mound and said he felt something."
Kuo, 6 feet and 200 pounds, then underwent his first Tommy John elbow
reconstruction. He pitched in only seven games each of the next two seasons.
But Kuo would later say that the arm never really felt right, leading to a
cleanup operation after the 2002 season.
But during the 2003 Spring Training, Kuo's elbow blew out again. So Kuo, who
lockers at Dodger Stadium directly across from Dreifort, became the second
pitcher in the Dodger clubhouse to undergo a second Tommy John elbow
reconstruction.
In four years, he has pitched in 15 games and undergone three operations.
Nonetheless, the Dodgers protected him from exposure to the Rule 5 draft in
December, because they believe he still has a good shot of fulfilling the
promise.
Which brought him to Friday's workout, throwing off a "flat" mound in the
bullpen, under the watchful eyes of manager Jim Tracy and pitching coach
Jim Colborn, along with Dodger Asian Operations officials Acey Kohrogi and
Vincent Liao, who scouted Kuo when he was on the Taiwanese National Team.
"It feels good," Kuo said of the elbow after the workout. "It feels better
than ever. Awesome."
When you are going on your fifth year of injury rehabilitation, you really
have nothing, if not hope. Kuo said he has been counseled frequently by
Dreifort, which is by design.
"Who better to help him understand what he would go through?" said Pat Screnar
, the longtime Dodger physical therapist who is overseeing Kuo's latest
comeback. "It's 10 months out from the surgery and he's just started throwing
to a catcher, but so far it's going well."
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