Oct. 11, 2004
Matt Senk felt sick to his stomach. He had just watched the Yankees complete their 12th-inning comeback in Game 2 of the ALDS on Wednesday night, and before the television broadcast signed off, it finished with one painful scene for Senk.
Inside the Yankee Stadium visitors' dugout, the camera caught Minnesota Twins closer Joe Nathan sitting alone on the bench, staring into space. Senk, who coached Nathan for three seasons at Stony Brook University, could barely contain himself. Senk is a fan of all New York teams, but he's an even bigger Nathan fan. And this hurt.
"When they went to commercial before the inning, they showed him running out to the field with a real look of excitement on his face. I saw it," Senk said by telephone Friday. "I think he wanted the ball as badly as [Twins manager Ron] Gardenhire wanted him to have it, that he felt he wanted to be out there to finish off the game."
Nathan had pitched more than one inning this season only once and had never pitched more than two. But after Torii Hunter broke the tie at 5 with a solo home run in the top of the 12th, putting the Twins three outs from taking a 2-0 lead in the best-of-five series, there was no one warming up in the bullpen. It was Nathan's game to finish.
"When he got the first out right away, I thought to myself, he's going to do this," Senk said. "But when it got away from him the way it did, my heart started breaking and my stomach dropped. I must admit, it was a physically sickening kind of feeling."
Nathan never wanted to be a pitcher. He grew up in Middletown, about an hour north of the city, and played shortstop for Pine Bush High School. Senk would like to take credit for recruiting him, but in actuality, he took him based on the recommendation from his college roommate, Jeff Maisonet, the assistant coach at Pine Bush.
The Twins list Nathan at 6-4 and 216 pounds, but when he arrived at Stony Brook as a 17-year-old in the fall of 1992, he was 6-1, 170, Senk recalled. But he had an arm.
Senk tried to convince him to become a pitcher, but Nathan refused, preferring to be part of the action every moment at shortstop. He didn't like the down time. It wasn't until his junior year that he finally agreed to pitch, but even then it was as a closer. The rest of the innings, he played shortstop.
Nevertheless, Senk said the starters pitched so well that season that Nathan didn't even pitch three full innings.
San Francisco drafted him in the sixth round in 1995, played him at shortstop for a year in the minors, watched him hit .232, then told him the following spring he was a pitcher. Nathan refused, and when the Giants wouldn't budge, he quit baseball. He returned to Stony Brook to earn his degree in business management and worked as a groundskeeper at Hauppauge Country Club.
But in that year away from baseball, Nathan figured out what he wanted to do with himself. Senk said Nathan came back to Stony Brook "upset and disillusioned" but left a "very different person." Nathan felt it was time he gave pitching a try.
"It was nice to get school done first and foremost," Nathan said Friday as he stood on the Metrodome field while the Twins took batting practice. "That experience made me realize this is where I wanted to be, what I wanted to do. Before I finished school, that was still a question mark. I didn't know if I wanted to pitch. But that helped me make my mind up to come back and give pitching a 110-percent effort, which was what I did."
Eight seasons and one right shoulder surgery later, Nathan certainly is glad he returned. He was one of the top closers this year, converting 44 of 47 save opportunities and enjoying stretches in which he pitched 29 and 21 consecutive scoreless innings.
Senk isn't worried about the loss festering in Nathan's mind. Neither is Nathan. "Whether you have done well or haven't, the beautiful thing about this game is you play every day," he said. "There's always going to be another day, no matter what. The quicker you put things behind you and come to the park ready, the better."
Staff writer Steven Marcus contributed to this story.
