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Tom Archdeacon: By any name, Bailey has a big-league arm
By Tom Archdeacon
Dayton Daily News
DAYTON | — As soon as you ask him about that first name, he knows what's coming.
"My name's actually David Bailey Jr.," Homer Bailey said. "Obviously my dad's name is the same so, to not mix us up, I became Homer."
Seeing you smile, the Dayton Dragons' pitcher verbally backs you off the plate: "It's not what you're thinking. The name comes from my great grandfather. He passed away a long, long time ago. So it's got nothing to do with Homer Simpson. I know how people bring up that 'D'oh' he always says, but it's no good any more. You want to make something up about my name, you got to go a different way."
And yet, he's the first to admit he had a Homer moment in the off-season while he was driving his new, over-sized 2004 F-250 King Ranch Ford pick-up truck along FM 609, a winding, two-lane Texas highway between LaGrange and Flatonia.
"I loved that truck," he said quietly, lingering on the past tense.
"I was coming back from a work-out in Austin and it'd been raining the whole way. I'd been down that road a million times and I was less than five miles from home when my truck hydroplaned. I remember the back end coming out, trying to compensate and the thing doing a 360.
"I saw I was headed for a ditch and I said to myself, 'Hold on!' I grabbed the wheel as hard as I could and the next thing I remember, I'm looking through the windshield — it was the only window that didn't break — and seeing the ground tumble by three times as I flipped."
Although not bruised, Bailey was heartsick. The truck was demolished. That new Stetson El Presidente 100x he'd bought at an Austin western store was crushed and covered in mud. His iPod was ruined and that .44 Magnum lever action rifle with which he hunts wild pigs had flown off the back seat and into the muck.
But what happened after that is what separates the Dragons' pitcher from the D'oh Man.
Homer Simpson would have had to bum a ride from Barney or Marge or maybe bully Bart off that skateboard.
Homer Bailey went out and got another truck — a new 2005 F-250 King Ranch. That's the difference between being the everyman screw-up and the Cincinnati Reds No. 1 draft pick last year, a teenage bonus baby who was given $2.3 million to sign.
And unlike many of the Reds' million-dollar investments lately, Bailey — whose start Saturday night against Burlington yielded a mediocre six hits, four runs and four strikeouts in four innings — has been showing he may well be worth every penny, and more, of his big check.
"He has the skills to be a (big league) star and he's shown flashes of that this season," said Dragons manager Alonzo Powell.
Taken farther, Bailey appears to be as good as — if not better than — any pitching prospect to come through the Dragons in their six seasons here. And that includes the seven who have made it to the majors.
The 6-foot-3, 195-pounder with the smooth-as-silk delivery just turned 19. The second youngest player on the Dragons' roster has a 3.67 earned run average and — prior to his last two outings — had a string of 20 straight scoreless innings.
Exactly one year ago he was pitching his La Grange High team to its second state title during his prep career. He went 41-4 as a high school pitcher, was named the 2004 High School Player of the Year by USA Today and his entire senior year had become something of a Pied Piper to pro scouts, who followed his every move.
"My last year (at LaGrange), I had a big name nationwide and I remember our very first game, I got to the park and there were 40 scouts there," he said. "When I went to the mound, there were 40 radar guns pointed at me. I knew I had to zone all that out, but I have to admit all the people that came to our games, all the scouts, it made me nervous, but I was better for it. It got me fired up. It fueled me."
Still, the kid who's so good on baseball's big stage is quite the opposite away from the game.
He likes to hunt and fish and is most comfortable in Wrangler jeans, cowboy boots, a western cut shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons and, if not that Stetson, which, by the way, he salvaged, the burnt orange Texas Longhorns baseball cap.
In fact, that's what he was wearing as he sat down a couple days ago and — while sending little brown dribs of Copenhagen into an empty Sprite bottle — talked about everything from chicken fried steak and pit barbecue to drawing a bead on 170 class bucks and .330 hitters.
He grew up on an egg farm — 240,000 chickens, 400 acres — outside LaGrange. His dad was a pitcher of note at San Jacinto Community College and the University of Houston. His mother, Karen, is Hispanic, or, as he put it, "the tallest Mexican woman I know. She's 5-foot-9." And while he understands some Spanish, he said speaking it with his Latin teammates here is a "whole 'nother story."
And unlike a lot of guys in the Dayton clubhouse, he said he had no thoughts of baseball when he was young: "When other guys were starting to play ball, I was dressing up in cowboy boots and trying to ride whatever I could. Cows, you name it, it was like a rodeo deal."
He said he got serious about baseball when he was 12.
"My dad did everything he could," Bailey said. "He found stuff on the Internet, ordered books and worked with me every day. He's my ultimate coach. He taught me how to pitch. And you know something? He's gonna be 50 years old and he still can catch me."
With that Bailey spit and grinned: "I do have to tell you he built this thing with two angle irons, a bar across the top and a net with a hole in the middle. He crouches down behind it, sticks his hand and glove through the hole and the net is loose enough that he can move around for my pitches. But if I put a fastball or curve in the dirt, he's getting a little old and can't get out of the way. Trust me, he's taken a lot of my pitches off the shins, so now the net catches them."
Bailey has a special bond with his folks and said he talks to his dad almost daily and always before he goes out to pitch: "Every single outing, either on the way to the game or while the guys are warming up, I'll call him and say 'What are your words of advice?' He gives me confidence — all mental stuff. He'll say, 'Be a bulldog. Battle. You get two outs, shut the door. Your stuff is good enough to go after them.' "
After all, that's why the Reds made him the seventh overall pick in the draft and why they gave him that money — a sum he never flaunts publicly, but one that makes him shake his head in private:
"I got the first half of the bonus in the off-season and I just looked at the check, then looked at my mom and dad and said, 'You ever seen something like this before?'
"They were like, 'Homer, not many people ever have seen that.'
"The whole thing is something that hasn't quite hit me. I'm not the kind of guy to go out and buy a Ferrari. I did buy a new shotgun — a Beretta Extrema 2 — for duck hunting when we just played in Iowa. But otherwise, I don't spend it.
"A lot of the guys on the team play cards, but I don't really gamble so I don't play. And they go, 'You got all that money and you're not gonna play cards for $20 a hand?' I'm like, 'Well, there's a good chance I'd lose that $20. It'd just be money gone. I'd be mad at myself for just throwing it away."
He doesn't want any more D'oh moments. That's the other Homer.
Contact Tom Archdeacon at 225-2156 or e-mail tarchdeacon@daytondailynews.com
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