Fisher Cats phenom throwing unhittable smoke

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Barry Sorlio. Photo/New Hampshire Fisher Cats*

MANCHESTER, NH – 107.

There are things known and unknown about Barry “Flap” Sorlio, but radar guns cut through mystery. 

“We’ve clocked him at 107 only twice but he’s throwing 103-105 with regularity,” New Hampshire Fisher Cats pitching coach Jim Czajkowski (Sigh-COW-ski) said from Dunedin, Florida’s TD Park, the spring training site of the Toronto Blue Jays.

Sorlio, a southpaw who will turn 20 in a few weeks, will start his season in the Fisher Cats bullpen, but word is the lefty won’t stay down on the farm for long with that kind of heat. No other major league pitcher has ever thrown a baseball 106 m.p.h.

Fisher Cats manager Cesar Martin was excited but circumspect about Sorlio’s place on the team.

“Four years ago New Hampshire fans got to see Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hit .400,” Martin said. “Our job with Sorlio is both easy and hard. He’s more than a thrower but his lack of professional experience means we’ll have until July 1 to work on making him a complete pitcher. Enjoy him at Delta Dental while you can.”

The pitching-rich Blue Jays are looking to deal a few arms to bolster an everyday lineup that now includes Guerrero and the recently acquired Freddie Freeman and Mark Chapman. Sorlio, however, is on the untouchable list.

“Progress in pitching speed and accuracy has always come in quantum leaps,” Czajkowski explained. “The whip motion that Walter Johnson first showed was perfected by Satchel Paige. Paige never had a sore arm and I’m told his ball just danced. He was the best pitcher period from 1930-1950 and could land his fastball on a dime in the catcher’s mitt. Then look at the pure torque in the deliveries of Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson. The first time the American League saw these guys pitch in the World Series it was like they’d never held a bat in their hands before. Zip. Zip. Zip. Sit down.

“In Sorlio, we’re looking at the three-quarter whip action with the maximum torque propelled by a lengthy stride,” the pitching coach continued.” My job here is to get out of the kid’s way. Messing with his natural gifts can only screw things up. The mechanics are all there. I think he’s the best lefty prospect since at least Randy Johnson or Steve Carleton.”

What isn’t known about Sorlio is the part that doesn’t fall between the foul lines. He doesn’t give interviews and the only photo of Sorlio the Fisher Cats have released has his face almost completely in the shadow, his features an enigma.

No one knows Sorlio better than high-school friend Mickey Redmond who played ball with Sorlio for the Van Meter, Iowa, Bulldogs in 2018-2019. Redmond was thankfully able to fill in some of the “unknowns.”

“Even for lefties Flap is out there,” Redmond explained by phone from Iowa. “When we were kids, he’d take a long-sleeved shirt, cut it off completely below the elbows and then cut it in strips up to the shoulders.  Seems he saw a picture in a baseball book of some guy from the 1880s. No way you could pick up his pitches with those sleeves just flapping. As soon as we hit Little League, cutting the sleeves was gone, but ‘Flap’ stuck.

“Truth be told, I thought Flap would quit baseball forever after senior year,” Redmond continued. “We had this hard-ass coach and Flap wasn’t interested in something if he wasn’t having fun. He quit right in the middle of a game. Balanced the resin bag on top of the baseball and walked off the mound. Oh, he was down. Here we were graduating and maybe it was too much for Flap. College? Military? Job? He felt that coach stole baseball from him and without that he was just lost.

“Funny thing though…About two months after graduation I visited him in his room, really just a corner in his folks’ cellar that he’d carved out among the dead futons, and he was working his way through a stack of old VHS tapes,” Redmond said. “I could see the athletic spark coming back.”

According to Redmond, his friend was now obsessed with wedding his God-given ability with making the mechanics of an athletic act as natural as breathing. 

“I dug through the piles of tapes and there were only two sports in the whole bunch,” Sorlio’s friend said. “Women’s gymnastics and synchronized swimming. Flap told me guys focused too much on power, on what he called Rah-Rah GRUNTING. He said top women athletes excelled because they visualized what their muscles would do, not powering their way through a motion, or making their muscles do anything. Flap said those gymnasts and swimmers were the motion. He didn’t think women athletes should earn the same as men. He felt they should earn more than men.

“Flap saw that as the key,” his friend concluded. “He was convinced that if he could tap into what he called the ‘Source of All Motion,’ and blended it with his ability, he would give baseball his last best shot.”

And then he was gone.

There is no record of it, but Sorlio claims to have spent six months hiking in Canada’s Banff National Park just after leaving Iowa.

He appeared as a walk-on at the Blue Jays Covid-abbreviated 2020 spring training camp and turned enough heads to earn his current contract. Not that he cares about money. In a rare official statement, Sorlio said he’d play for a “bag full of nickels” if he felt like it.

“I faced him twice in those Jays A vs. Jays B intra-squad games that spring,” Guerrero said. “I felt lucky to have gone 2-for-10 with one of those two hits a bloop single. His fastball just sawed my bat in half.”

A sore arm prompted a sudden leave from the Blue Jay’s camp in 2020 but it was literally a blessing in disguise. Sorlio eschewed surgery before hiking the length of the Pacific Crest Trail to clear his head again. He returned to baseball just seven weeks ago after spending the heart of this past winter in Dharamsala, India. There he studied vipassana meditation under the tutelage of the 14th Dalai Lama. Vipassana teaches that by following the breath one can focus the mind. For Sorlio, his delivery became crystal clear. The pitcher knows he will never have a sore arm again. Almost imperceptibly his delivery has changed to float like the proverbial butterfly. 

“As fast as he throws, we look for stress in the elbow and rotator cuff,” Czajkowski explained. “He’s clean as a whistle.”

“How lucky are we?” Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig said in the weeks before the Fisher Cats play ball for real in early April. “With Guerrero and now Sorlio, it’s fair to say that we’re becoming the Baseball Capital of the Northeast. It’ll be an honor to throw out the first pitch when the Fisher Cats play their home opener against the Hartford Junkyard Dogs (sic) on April 12th.”Screenshot 2022 03 31 9.02.49 PM

  • For those of us who love baseball, it truly happens every spring, but “Flap Sorlio” is an anagram for… “April Fools!”
  • Tim Harkness, listed as author, actually played briefly for the terrible 1963 and 1964 New York Mets, but stayed around long enough to see this classic banner unfurled at a night game: “Hit One in the Darkness Harkness.”
  • Van Meter, Iowa is the hometown of Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller, who really threw smoke.
  • The Hartford AA team is officially the Yard Goats.
  • The photo of “Barry Sorlio” is actually some old baseball card
  • This April 1 prank brought to you by John Angelo, baseball fan and literary prankster

 

About this Author

Tim Harkness*

*You've been had by humor columnist John Angelo. Happy April Fool's Day!