Cut by Majors, Pitcher Winds Up at HMS

Matthew McCarthy, a third-year HMS student, kept a journal of his first year in professional baseball. The story does not start with rosy-eyed optimism.

“When I landed in Phoenix, I was met by a man who looked like he had just come from a shopping spree at an Anaheim Angels gift shop,” his journal recounts. “He introduced himself as one of the assistants to the director of player personnel and said there were two other signees that we had to wait for. The first to appear was Ronnie Ray, a wide-eyed 18-year-old from St. Louis wearing a McGwire jersey, who bore a striking resemblance to Elvis. The other player, Felix Nunez, emerged soon after. He was a second-year player in the organization from the Dominican Republic and spoke no English. The three of us nodded at each other and quickly realized that conversation was going to be slim. So the man in Angels regalia took it upon himself to break the ice.

Photo by Graham Ramsay

Matthew McCarthy developed a 90 mph fastball and slider to pitch for the major leagues. Now he is studying medicine and researching stem cells as he trains to be a physician-scientist.

“‘So you’re from Yale,’ he said, looking in my direction. ‘I guess we can talk to you when we have questions about politics and math.’”

Life in the Minors
McCarthy wrote about the odd cultural stew of young southern Baptists and Spanish-speaking Dominicans thrown into the Mormon community of Provo, Utah, where each ball player lived with a host family. On the team bus at 1 a.m., McCarthy spent a couple hours scribbling down what happened that day. “It’s about what it’s like for an average guy to get into the minor leagues,” he said.

As McCarthy was interviewing at medical schools, the journal serendipitously found its way to Jimmy Breslin. The Pulitzer-winning newspaper columnist sent him a cryptically encouraging e-mail about its future as a book. The book remains unpublished, but another compelling chapter has emerged in McCarthy’s life. This one is about him and his friend Craig Breslow, a new pitcher for the Red Sox, and the almost freakish way their lives mirrored each other for a while and came together again this year.

McCarthy and Breslow met at baseball practice their first day at Yale. They worked in the same science lab and became fast friends. As sophomores, they chose the same major. Five days after they graduated in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, McCarthy was drafted by the Anaheim Angels. A few rounds later, Breslow was drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers. For both of them, medical school could wait.

On their way to different spring training camps, they crossed paths in the Phoenix airport. They were each dispatched to their farm teams for the season. They played against each other in the minors. Both were accepted to medical school, and both were released by the teams that originally had drafted them.

That is where their lives diverged, at least for a while. After much inner debate, McCarthy opted to train as a physician-scientist at HMS. He spent his first summer without baseball as far from the sport as he could get: catching fruit bats in Cameroon to evaluate their potential to carry and spread the ebola virus. He is spending one year as a graduate student on a Howard Hughes fellowship in the lab of Hughes investigator Leonard Zon, the Grousbeck professor of pediatrics at HMS and Children’s Hospital Boston.

Meanwhile, Breslow decided to try his luck in the independent leagues, working retail to make ends meet. The next year, he went to an open tryout by the Padres, who signed him for $1. He called McCarthy in Africa to talk about what he should do. “I asked, ‘What do you think?’” McCarthy said. “He said, ‘I think I’m throwing well.’ The difference between us was that [at the end]. I did not think I was playing well. I said, ‘If you give up now, I don’t think you’ll be able to watch a game without wondering. You think you can still play. That’s what dictates everything.’” Breslow began the season in the minors, but was soon moved up to the major leagues. This season, he joined the Red Sox. “He was right,” McCarthy said. “He proved a lot of people wrong.”

Journeymen
The two men talk by phone nearly every day and compare notes. In preseason games so far, Breslow has not given up a run, McCarthy said. Meanwhile, McCarthy won the Derek Bok Teaching Award given by Harvard undergraduates for his laboratory section of the Life Sciences 1a class. The same week Breslow signed 1,000 baseball cards at spring training in Florida, McCarthy injected 1,000 zebra-fish embryos with gene constructs designed to make their red blood stem cells glow green.

In college, baseball and science counterbalanced each other for McCarthy. “Baseball was a great release,” he said. “When experiments didn’t work, I could go out into the field and throw hard. By the same token, when pitching didn’t go well, I could seek refuge in the lab.” Even in the minor leagues, he spent some of the off-season in a Yale laboratory, exploring neuroscience research. Last Saturday, McCarthy took a break from his bench work to give a few last-minute pitching tips to Zon’s daughter, 14, and son, 12, for their respective softball and baseball tryouts the next day.

McCarthy is the offspring of two academics, both college professors who specialized in criminal justice. McCarthy’s dad studies terrorism, which mostly meant the KKK and the Unabomber when he was growing up. His younger sister was also a pitcher and rewrote the record books in softball at Middlebury College in Vermont, he said. “She had better stats than I did every year.” Now, she works as a political analyst for the U.S. State Department.

Baseball might have helped prepare McCarthy for the academic research career he is pursuing. “Baseball gave me an appreciation for delayed gratification,” McCarthy said. “You only take the mound once a week. You spend the off-seasons mastering one pitch. For one small adjustment, you toil in the weight room. In the same way, you spend weeks on advancing a project in a small way, trying for the ultimate reward of publishing a paper or giving a talk.”

Science never returned the favor for McCarthy’s game. “A Yale professor wrote a book on the physics of baseball,” he said. “I read that. All it did was make my job harder. And it made me realize I didn’t want to pitch at high altitude.”

A Hughes Connection
In a roundabout way, a baseball connection led McCarthy to Zon’s lab. McCarthy and Breslow had both worked in the Yale lab of Hughes investigator Joan Steitz. Her mentorship inspired them to choose science as a career even as they shared the mound and major league dreams with her son, Jon, also a pitcher at Yale. At a Hughes investigator meeting, Zon talked to Steitz about Zon’s son, the budding pitcher. Steitz could relate more than most parents, Zon was surprised to learn. Jon Steitz had been drafted by the Brewers as soon as he became eligible at the end of his junior year. (Now he is in law school at Yale.) When she learned McCarthy was coming to HMS, she recommended he look up Zon.

At Yale, McCarthy’s fastball had hit the 90 mph benchmark. He had spent a year developing the second pitch needed for major league consideration, a slider, which ultimately got him drafted. In the Angels’ club, his job was to strike out left-handed hitters. Coaches wanted McCarthy to straighten his elbow by about 5 degrees and release the pitches further away from his body. That way, left-handed hitters would have to twist back to see the ball leave his hand and would have less of an angle to judge the trajectory.

“It got me to do some new tricks with the ball, but I was not able to fully harness it,” he said. “It was like throwing a whiffle ball. Ultimately, that’s why I’m in the lab right now.”

There is no journal for his second season. Only weeks into spring training, he walked into a locker room with 100 other guys looking at him as if he were a ghost. He knew exactly what it meant. A slip of pink paper was posted on his locker with some words on it. Go to the director of player personnel. The director was so upset at kicking him off the team, McCarthy found himself comforting him. “Don’t worry,” McCarthy told him. “I’m going to medical school.”

—Carol Cruzan Morton

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