It’s never a bad thing to have a local product on the roster.
It doesn’t have to be an actual city native. That’s great, if you can get it. But as long as there’s a strong local connection, that’s enough.
Nationals lefty Mike O’Connor is a Texas native, but having attended high school in the Baltimore area and college at George Washington University, he is sufficiently local for my taste.
His rise to the major leagues was rapid and somewhat unscheduled. He’s up with the big club due to pitching staff injuries and the pressing need for a starter a couple of weeks ago in St. Louis. The success he’s achieved thus far — 2-1 with an ERA a shade over 2.00 — may be fleeting, but already he’s achieved greater big league success than his Colonials’ predecessor in a Washington uniform.
Bespectacled catcher Steve Korcheck was signed by the Senators as an amateur free agent in 1954 off the GW campus. Korcheck starred at linebacker for the Colonials back in the days when they fielded a football team. He was the Southern Conference Player of the Year in 1953 and subsequently drafted by the 49ers. Nats’ trainer Doc Lentz — who had done the same job at GW — convinced Korcheck to pick baseball over football. For a while, it didn’t seem like a mistake. He reported straight to Charlotte and batted a respectable .287 in 50 games. At Chattanooga in 1955 he hit .283 in 71 games and hit .278 in a 13-game trial with Washington. He then spent two years in the Army, where he apparently lost his batting eye.
Korcheck returned to baseball in 1958 and got into 21 games for the Senators. While he could still catch a curveball, he couldn’t actually hit one anymore. He had four hits in 51 at-bats for an average of .078. He fared little better in 1959, hitting .191 at Miami before returning to Washington for 22 games, another 51 at-bats, eight hits and a .157 average. He made his final big league appearance Sept. 27, 1959, and finished his career with a .159 average, seven RBI and no home runs.
Korcheck’s baseball acumen was never in question. He stayed in the game as a coach and administrator on the collegiate level — he recruited current Orioles manager Sam Perlozzo to GW — and was hired by Syd Thrift as an instructor with the Kansas City Royals’ baseball academy.And, while Korcheck and Mike O’Connor have only the GW connection in common, O’Connor’s pitching profile is a textbook example of the philosophy favored by Thrift and Korcheck at the Royals’ academy.
Thrift is a proponent of location and movement. He believes the speed gun tends to distort a pitcher’s true value. The key to pitching is to “get ’em out, not strike ’em out,” and O’Connor, who’s not a real hard thrower, does just that.
If O’Connor can display the same kind of poise and determination we’ve seen thus far — and cut down on the walks — he may spend more time in the Nationals’ rotation than he spent in Foggy Bottom.
Phil Wood has covered sports in the Washington-Baltimore market for more than 30 years.
