Meredith Sanford: The Real Natural

THE TELEPHONE CALL WAS FROM A FRIEND WHO works for a National League ball club. “I’ve got the player you’re after,” he said.

I had called him weeks earlier, hoping to find a high-school senior, a pitcher, a future big-leaguer. He had produced a dozen names on the spot. “Any of those kids could make it into the major leagues,” he’d said then.

That wasn’t good enough, I had tried to explain. The pitcher I was after would have to be someone special. I wanted to be the first to tell the world about a legend. “What was it you called this player?” my friend was saying now.

I’d asked him to find me a natural.

The pitcher he came up with was Meredith Sanford, six-foot-five, 190-pound right-hander from Starkville, Mississippi. Of course, his statistics were phenomenal: an 11-0 record, 102 strikeouts in sixty-four innings, an earned-run average of less than one run a game. He had already accepted a scholarship offer from the University of Alabama, but a major-league club would surely be drafting him this June. If the money were good enough, he might pass up college and go pro right away.

“I’m not telling you this kid can throw a baseball through a car wash without getting it wet,” my friend said. “He’s still kind of raw. He’s big and he throws hard and he just turned seventeen and he’s going to get better and who the hell really knows? You’re the one in the fairy-tale business.”

At his suggestion, I made my next call to Danny Carlisle, Sanford’s coach at Starkville High School. “I want to come down your way and watch Meredith Sanford pitch,” I said.

“Hey, who don’t?” Carlisle shot back. “Too bad you couldn’t see him last night. Struck out thirteen and didn’t hardly walk anybody.”

“How many hits did he give up?”

“Not a one. His first no-hitter.”

I ARRIVED IN STARKVILLE THE DAY BEFORE MEREDITH Sanford was to pitch against Greenville, Mississippi, with the winner going on to the state tournament. Starkville is in the north-eastern part of the state, about twenty-five miles from the Alabama line. The town’s leading industry is Mississippi State University and its 11,300 students. A weathered wooden sign — MISSISSIPPI STATE UNIVERSITY, A LAND-GRANT INSTITUTION — stands across the road from a low-rise where several dozen cows were grazing. Welcome usda meat-grading trainees, read the marquee at the Holiday Inn. No one will mistake this for tourist country.

“It’s not like it used to be here,” said Meredith’s mother, Sandra Sanford. She is a handsome woman, forty-two years old, a teacher of retarded children in a Starkville junior high school. The two-bedroom home where she and her son live (she was divorced from her husband when Meredith was eighteen months old) is a ten-minute stroll from the Starkville High practice field. In the spotless front room, Meredith’s picture hangs on every wall, and his trophies for basketball and baseball fill a cabinet. One picture is of a group of nine-year-old baseball players. Meredith’s is the only black face in the photo — which is why Sandra Sanford didn’t want him to become a pitcher.

“When I was raised here, you had to go in the back door,” she said. “That’s why I was always protective of Meredith. He was playing in a summer league that was mostly white. And the fathers were coaching their sons. I didn’t think they’d let him play. I didn’t think he’d have a chance to develop as a pitcher. So I said no. I guess I was being defensive, but it was just something I felt. But my son was always telling me, ‘Oh, mamma, it’s not like that now.’ His feelings are different from mine. So I said okay.”

“He could always throw harder than the other kids,” remembered Danny Carlisle as he ran the Starkville team through their final practice. “He’d have control problems — he’d throw it over the backstop — but he could always throw hard.”

Sanford was an all-star in the twelve-and-under Dixie Youth league as soon as he began pitching. Starkville went on to win the state championship in the Dizzy Dean League. In Meredith’s first high-school season, he went 6-2. A year later, he was 10-2. Still, he thought his best chance was as a basketball player. And so he taped Sports Illustrated covers of Dr. J and Ralph Sampson and the North Carolina NCAA champs to the walls of his room.

“I didn’t start thinking about baseball until all the write-ups started happening in the paper,” said Meredith in his slow voice. “Then I got letters from different colleges. Our first game at home, the coach told me a lot of professional scouts were coming. I was excited at first.”

So was the coach. “Last year, a scout from the Dodgers was sitting in our dugout,” Carlisle said. Carlisle was the assistant coach then, delighted to be engaging in serious, high-level conversation. “He asked me, ‘Do you have any prospects?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, that big kid there, Sanford, he’s gonna be a prospect.’ “

Carlisle became head coach this season, and the scouts were waiting for him. “They found out the season started March 1st, and they started calling. ‘When is Sanford gonna pitch?’ I said, ‘He ain’t been out of basketball but five days.’ When he was ready to pitch the first time, I got another call. ‘Would it be worth my while to fly a man in from Kansas City to watch Sanford pitch?’ I said, ‘Hey, he’s gonna pitch a maximum of forty-five pitches. If you want to watch him make forty-five pitches, maybe three innings, you come right ahead.’ “

The coach was standing behind the batting cage, wearing jeans, sunglasses and a T-shirt that was losing the battle to his stomach. The temperature was in the nineties, and most of his players were in shorts and bare-chested. Carlisle, who is white, seemed to have an easy relationship with his seven black players. As they finished their last practice before the big game, he called them together. “Which uniform should we wear tomorrow?” he asked.