Part I in a five-part series on Kevin Tolar’s 19-year odyssey as a professional baseball player.
It didn’t take Kevin Tolar long to realize professional baseball was going to be like nothing he’d ever experienced.
As a ninth-round pick of the Chicago White Sox in 1989, the Mosley High School graduate was embarking on a lifestyle that would span nearly two decades as a professional athlete and take him to the pinnacle of his sport, if only briefly, on three separate occasions.
It all started in Rookie Ball shortly after he’d signed with the White Sox.
“You get there, down to Sarasota, and on Day 3 we’re stretching and a coach said something and I answered ‘Yes sir.’ Right then you realize you’re not in Panama City anymore when he yells, ‘I’m not you’re damned daddy’ and about 17 million cuss words in front of everybody,” Tolar said.
Some teammates were college players, but many of the college juniors and seniors were sent directly to the NY-Penn League. Other players, he said, were as young as 15 or 16.
Tolar was 18, and had no idea his baseball career ultimately would involve 11 different major league organizations and take him halfway around the world.
He’d come by his pitching ability honestly. Tolar’s father, Bill, graduated from Bay High School in 1958.
“He played Class C back then, then jumped all the way to Double-A. He threw 100 mph,” Tolar said.
“At one stage of my career I met a scout with the Reds who had been with the Cardinals who asked me if I was Bill’s son. ‘Your old man, I’ve never seen anyone who could throw as hard as he could,’ ” the scout told him.
Tolar said his father made the St. Louis Cardinals parent club in 1960, but needed an operation for bone spurs on both feet.
Instead, Tolar said, the doctor also went ahead and fused his father’s toes which were a chronic issue from childhood.
“The team put him in Triple-A,” Tolar said. “He could still throw hard, but had difficulty with his balance and fielding his position after the operation.
“My dad got to live his career through me. He had Hall of Fame stuff, but never got to throw a pitch in the big leagues.”
It didn’t take long for the son to show promise on a baseball field.
“When you throw as a young kid something like eight no-hitters in a row and 10 in one season, then you get to high school and you think ‘I’m pretty good, I’ve got this figured out a little bit.’ And then scouts start coming around to your games.”
Tolar was a preseason high school all-American at Mosley as both a pitcher and first baseman prior to his senior season. He was 6-foot-3, weighed 220 pounds and threw 88-90 mph, he said, and occasionally 91.
Tolar also had signed a scholarship to attend Vanderbilt University and play baseball. The White Sox were offering $30,000 and money to cover college expenses should Tolar later opt for that route.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” Tolar said. “On one side is your mother with the value of a college degree. On the other the scout is saying ‘What if he gets hurt?’ ”
Tolar said that he eventually did put the college money to use when attending Gulf Coast State College for a year.
“Then I missed a year,” he said. “What they don’t tell you is that it has to be continuous. If there is anything that needs to be redone it’s that.”
When Tolar opted to take the White Sox offer the advice from his father was to go into it with his eyes open.
“I think he was worried about my maturity,” Tolar said.
The pay starting out in Rookie Ball was $850 a month, but only during the season. There wasn’t any allowance for meal money, Tolar said, because the team fed the players.
Twenty-five years later, Tolar, 43, is working in Bay County and can look back on a career that was often frustrating, sometimes tantalizing, briefly euphoric, but mostly he kept returning to the word struggle to describe the experience.
“I’d been given the ability, but I still had to do it,” Tolar said. “There was a little bit of happiness, but a lot of struggles. It weighs on you. You have to justify yourself.”
Ultimately his career in baseball could be distilled to two at-bats against Rafael Palmeiro and a tweaked hamstring muscle. But more on that later.
“It has nothing to do with your stuff, everything is about the mental ability to handle the ups and downs of baseball,” Tolar said. “I was a pleaser. I thought my way to the big leagues was to have him (pitching coach or manager) believe in me.
“You’ve got to stand on your own two feet. I had a pitching coach (Steve McCatty) in Double-A for Detroit who in my mind is the guy that changed my career. How he got my attention was interesting. He grabbed me by the shirt, pulled me up to his face, and told me I had major-league stuff and a 10-cent head. He said, ‘Listen to what I’ve got to say or you’re going home.’ ”
McCatty simplified things, cut Tolar’s leg kick in half and he started throwing strikes.
“That was the knock on me,” Tolar said.
Tolar had a good pick-off move before the change and lost some of that when he changed his delivery. But he was quick enough to the plate to offset it and hold baserunners, which was crucial as a relief pitcher entering the game in crisis situations.
After a standout stint at Double-A Jacksonville in the Southern League, Tolar moved up the Tigers’ chain to Triple-A Toledo. He went 4-2 there with a 3.30 ERA in 33 games.
Late in the 2000 season he was called up to Detroit for the first time.
“You’ve got to grow up, man up, and be mean as a snake,” Tolar said. “Not off the field, but once you get to the baseball field be as mean as you can be. You have to get to where if I’m in with the bases loaded in the ninth inning I don’t want the No. 9 hitter, I want Pujols at the plate.”
Upon finally reaching the major leagues Tolar became only the second Bay County resident to pitch at that level. He was the last of a prep pitching triumvirate of top draft picks here in the late 1980s that began with Cullen Hartzog of Mosley, who handed the baton to Tom (Tombo) Martin of Bay and finally Tolar.
Hartzog was the No. 1 pitching prospect in the New York Yankees organization in the early 1990s until an injury curtailed his career. Martin had a breakthrough season with the Houston Astros in 1997, bounced around in the major leagues and its fringes and made his final major league appearance for the Colorado Rockies in 2007.
“I give Tombo major props,” Tolar said. “When I was young I thought he was one step away from being a guy I didn’t want to hang around with. But he had that confidence. He took the bull by the horns. That was that X-factor he grew up with that I had to learn as an older player. It’s not fake. You can see real confidence, and Tombo had it.
“I had fear; not from competing, but in disappointing my coach. Just be a man. Stand up to what you’re afraid of.”
Next: In Part II, a decade spent exclusively in the minor leagues drifting from one organization to another.