Place an Ad Calendars Classified Forums Sports Weather

sptimes.com Text-only News sections Arts & Entertainment AP The Wire Business Citrus County Columnists Floridian Hernando County Hillsborough Letters Movies Neighborhood Times News Update North Pinellas North of Tampa Obituaries Opinion Pasco County South Pinellas Sports State Tampa Bay TV Times World & Nation  Find your local news section Weekly sections Brandon Times City Times Homes Outdoors Perspective Personal Tech Taste Travel Weekend Xpress Special Sections Arena football Buccaneers College football Devil Rays Lightning Police reports Schools Seniority Subscriber Services Subscribe Renew Help Advertise Place an ad In print Online Market Info Join Us Internships Scholarships Times Jobs Contact us

Beyond the pasture

Toe Nash’s life was tumultuous. He stopped going to school in the eighth grade. He worked odd jobs. When he could, he played baseball, sometimes on a former cow pasture. He hopes the Rays are his way to a better life.

By BILL DURYEA

© St. Petersburg Times, published January 28, 2001

HAMMOND, La. -- The first weekend in July, the Williams All-Stars were on the road for a game against the team from Tangipahoa.

[Times photo: Michael Rondou] Toe Nash takes a cut in the batting cage at Hammond (La.) High. He takes 200-300 swings a day.

Reclaimed from a cow pasture 25 years ago, the Tangipahoa field is about average for the Sugar Cane League. There's a patch of collard greens in straightaway center. Old tires at the edge of leftfield keep balls from rolling into the woods.

The scout pulled into the dirt parking lot in his black BMW and watched for a young man he had been trying to find for the past month.

Barbecue smoke seeped from a drum cooker. Fans climbed into the sagging wooden bleachers.

From beside a tree along the first-base line the scout scanned the players, but none of the uniforms (white with purple pinstripes) had names. Then he caught a glimpse of a T-shirt stretched across a massive back.

"Toe," it read.

"Found him," the scout said.

Toe Nash was about to become a myth, and he was only 18 years old.

Nash, wearing No. 24, was the third batter.

"A major-league body," the scout said to himself -- 61/2 feet tall, well over 200 pounds.

Nash's first hit was a home run that ripped through the topmost leaves of the black gum trees 400 feet from home plate.

The next time Nash came to the plate, he switched sides.

He hit another home run. Nearly 400 feet to rightfield.

"Pinch me," the scout said.

Emerging from obscurity

If Toe Nash had a license to drive the car he doesn't own, it would have his given name, Greg, on it. His aunt Nora nicknamed him Toe when he was 3, predicting he would grow up to have big feet. Now they're size 18.

Until recently Nash lived in a $250-a-month trailer with two friends and no phone. Before the Devil Rays scout discovered him last summer, he had never been out of Louisiana.

Nash has spent his entire life in a part of the Louisiana boot where most everything that is not swamp is a sugar cane field. In places like his hometown, Sorrento, the sugar always leaves, but the people who cut it seldom do.

Several weeks ago, the world beyond eastern Louisiana learned that Nash is an extraordinarily gifted baseball player. There had been no steadily accumulating media hype as he progressed through high school and college. He emerged from obscurity as a fully formed prodigy capable of hitting home runs from either side of the plate and throwing faster than most major-league pitchers.

The head scout for his new employer said, "Toe Nash is Babe Ruth." Newspaper headlines dubbed him "the real Sidd Finch," a reference to the fictional Buddhist monk whose fastball topped 160 mph. Others liken him to Roy Hobbs, "The Natural."

It seems of little consequence to anyone that Nash has yet to swing a bat in a professional game. There already is talk of a TV movie about his life. Numerous book proposals are being entertained, and every major network has requested an interview.

Last week Nash endured his first face-to-face interview. He was so nervous during those 20 minutes that his palms left damp marks on his pant legs.

In March, when he arrives for spring training in St. Petersburg, he will be mobbed by reporters and photographers bent on finding out whether Nash can live up to the hype they have helped create.

Tough times

Last June, Benny Latino had just finished his first draft as a full-time scout for the Devil Rays. Of the 1,500 or so players drafted by the 30 major-league teams, three of the Rays' choices had been players from Latino's territory in Louisiana and Mississippi.

With some time on his hands, Latino decided to look for a boy he had seen playing a Little League game about six years earlier. At 5 feet 10 and 140 pounds, the 12-year-old had towered over his teammates.

"He struck out 17 of the 21 batters he faced," Latino said. "He hit two home runs. They were monsters."

Latino, 34, played second base for Southeastern Louisiana University before tearing ligaments in a knee. Then he went into business but kept his hand in baseball as a part-time scout for pro teams. He had never seen a 12-year-old who could throw 70 mph. Latino figured he'd have little trouble finding a kid named Toe Nash in a few years, when the kid reached high school age.

Even without the unusual name, finding Nash shouldn't have been hard. If he had gone to St. Amant High like his cousin John "Hot Rod" Williams, who starred in the NBA for 15 years, Nash probably would have been a staple of the local sports pages. If he had gone to St. Amant like Ben Sheets, who pitched for the United States at the Olympics in Sydney last year, he would have been scouted by dozens of colleges and pro teams.

But Nash never went to high school.

In the middle of his eighth-grade year, he got into a fight and was suspended. He never went back. What the fight was about is not clear, and Nash is not eager to talk about it.

Life at home was tumultuous. His mother left Nash and his younger sister with their father and moved to Baton Rouge, 30 miles away.

"She used to call," said Charles Payton, Nash's father, "but she don't do that no more."

Toe was 13, three years shy of the minimum age to leave school. He said no one from the school system came looking for him. School officials say they believed Nash had moved to Houston.

"A lot of people sat down and talked to me," Nash said. "They said, "You're a good baseball player, go back to high school, get your books and you'll get noticed.' "

The more time that passed, the more reluctant Nash was to return to school, where he would have been years behind his former classmates.

Instead, he worked to help the family. When he was 16, he cut sugar cane after he moved out of his father's tiny house. Sometimes he worked with his father doing odd jobs for Williams.

"In the summertime I used to make him come cut my grass," said Williams, who moved back to eastern Louisiana last year after retiring from basketball.

When he could, Nash played baseball. He grew out of Little League, so he played sandlot games. He even played on pickup teams that scrimmaged against St. Amant High.

"We always beat them," Nash said. "The coach told me he wanted me to play on his team."

That never happened. Nash's reputation had grown locally, but as far as the outside world knew, he didn't exist.

‘When can I start?’

It took about a month for Latino to find Nash. At a game in Baton Rouge, someone told Latino he thought Nash was playing on "Hot Rod" Williams' team.

The origins of the Sugar Cane League are obscure, but for many decades the men who work in the sugar cane fields and oil refineries along the Mississippi River have gathered on summer weekends to play ball for nothing more than a few beers and a plate of barbecue. Occasionally, a just-released minor-leaguer will be enticed for a few bucks to beef up a roster, but the Sugar Cane League is no one's idea of a stop on the way to the majors.

Nash had been playing for Williams' team since he was 14. All that time he harbored dreams of a baseball career.

"Ever since I was small, I wanted to get to the next level," Nash said.

But as Nash's graduation date passed in May, he feared he might have squandered his best chance.

Williams said he pushed his soft-spoken cousin to get out of Sorrento. "You've got too much talent to be playing Sugar Cane ball," he told Nash.

When Latino saw Nash play in Tangipahoa, he agreed. After the game, he introduced himself.

"You interested in playing professional baseball?" he asked.

"When can I start?" Nash said.

A dramatic change

A few weeks later, Nash and Williams were on their way to Princeton, W.Va., to work out at the Devil Rays' rookie league field.

Nash took 25 swings from the right side and hit 10 balls over the fence. He took 25 swings from the left side and hit an equal number out of the park. Then he went to the mound and threw a fastball that was clocked in the high 80s.

Somebody suggested he use the power in his legs instead of relying on his arm. Before the end of the workout, the radar gun had recorded a pitch of 95 mph. Only a very few major-league pitchers throw that fast.

It wasn't long before the Rays signed Nash to a standard minor-league contract ($850 a month during the season) and asked him to come to St. Petersburg to play in the fall instructional league.

Latino, who had by this time become a minder for Nash, handed him $500 to buy clothes and gave him three of his old suitcases to pack for the flight to Florida.

Changing planes in Atlanta, Nash left two of his bags on board the first flight and went looking for his third bag, not understanding it had been checked through to Tampa.

"My beeper started going crazy," Latino said. "He was in tears. He didn't know what to do, and he was scared to death."

Latino talked to Nash every night he was in St. Petersburg to stave off homesickness. Nash's roommate had to show him how to order a pizza by phone.

On the field Nash was more composed.

"A couple of times when I got up to the plate I was a little scared," he said. But the fields were beautiful, and he had never had his own locker before.

He played alongside Josh Hamilton, who was paid nearly $4-million as the Devil Rays' No. 1 pick in 1999. Nash signed for $30,000. In six weeks his name never once appeared in the paper.

That changed dramatically in January.

A couple dozen pro scouts and agents arrived in Hammond to see a workout of 34 of the best high school players in Louisiana. Latino, who is friends with the coach at Hammond High, was running the workout. Nash was sitting on the sideline waiting for him to finish so they could practice.

Almost everyone left, having seen a promising catcher from Thibodeaux they thought was the pick of the crop. But Larry Reynolds, an agent from California, remained. A month earlier he had been tipped off by the Hammond High coach that there was another player he should take a look at. When Reynolds saw Nash taking batting practice with Latino, he decided he wanted the catcher and Nash as clients.

"When I got to see him play, that's when I was sold," Reynolds said.

Reynolds told his brother, former All-Star Harold Reynolds, the story of how Nash had been found. Harold Reynolds, an analyst on ESPN's Baseball Tonight, told colleague Peter Gammons, who put the story on ESPN.com Jan. 11. More than 3-million logged on to it.

Love of the game

When Toe Nash swings a bat, everything makes noise except him.

Late one afternoon last week, he stepped into the batting cage at Hammond High. The baseball team was thundering up and down the stadium steps as Nash pulled on his batting gloves and a T-shirt that read "Beisbol."

Soon the metal spring of the pitching machine was clanging, launching 83 mph fastballs every 15 seconds.

Nash watched a ball thump into the netting behind him before he stepped onto the dingy mat next to home plate.

He whipped his black 34-ounce bat through the strike zone, meeting the next ball with a fat slap that sounded like clay thrown onto concrete.

The balls made a light scratching noise as they hurtled into the loose nylon mesh. The hinges of the net squeaked as the machine began its automated windup.

But Nash was silent. He didn't grunt at the moment of contact. He didn't miss. He didn't foul off. He didn't hit any balls into the ground.

"It's ridiculous," Reynolds said, smiling as Nash switched to the left side of the plate and began to execute the same compact and graceful swing. "He's got such quick hands."

"That's something you can't teach," Latino said.

Occasionally, the men encouraged him, but Nash didn't acknowledge them. They offered no advice, and he asked for none. The advice will come soon, and it will come much faster and much less predictably than the balls thrown into the batting cage.

Nash will need to learn to recognize the full array of major-league pitches. He'll need to learn to run bases. How to play the outfield against opponents who aren't afraid to run against him.

He isn't worried about the pressure. He told Latino that compared with the cane fields, playing baseball every day is easy. "I just love being on the baseball field," he said.

"A hungry dog hunts harder and longer," Latino said. "He has no education to fall back on. This is his one shot."

Reynolds said he will provide tutors for Nash during spring training and afterward, for as long as Nash needs to get his high school equivalency diploma. "It's not where you start," Reynolds said. "It's where you finish."

Undoubtedly, the comparisons to Sidd Finch will continue, even though their differences are as glaring as their similarities. Finch, dreamed up for Sports Illustrated by George Plimpton, was a Harvard dropout who traveled to Tibet before toying with the idea of a baseball career. In the end, Finch turned away from baseball, unable to rectify its competitiveness and greed with his Buddhist principles.

Into the future

Nash took about 200 swings before he began to tire and finally fouled one off. He climbed out of the cage and soon was replaced by a few of the Hammond players. Roughly his age, none could match his poise. They fouled off more than Nash, and when they did connect, their swings pulled them off-balance. They chided themselves under their breaths.

They were still fouling off pitches as Toe Nash climbed into Latino's black BMW headed for somewhere beyond the sugar cane.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright