A Taylor-made new start: Former Rocket Eikenberry now pitching for Iowa junior college
|
|
| Philip Marruffo/pmarruffo@svnmail.com Rock Falls' Taylor Eikenberry goes through his wind up Monday against Newman. |
| Buy Sauk Valley Media Photos » |
Taylor Eikenberry has seen a good chunk of the United States because of his talent for throwing a baseball.
His latest stop in Council Bluffs, Iowa, however, is one he didn’t plan for.
Eikenberry is a freshman at Iowa Western Community College. He is a left-handed pitcher for the baseball team, one of the top junior college programs in the country. The Reivers have qualified for the juco World Series four of the last five seasons, highlighted by a third-place finish in 2005, when the team went 49-13.
“They have great baseball teams here,” Eikenberry said.
A series of unfortunate events forced the former Rock Falls standout to cast his lot with Iowa Western.
As a high school junior, Eikenberry went 10-1 with a 1.92 earned average to help the Rockets to a 33-3 record and second place in the Class 3A state tournament. He was a hot college prospect and settled on Baylor University, a Big 12 Conference power, and he signed a national letter of intent to play baseball for the Bears in November of 2008.
About a month before signing with Baylor, Eikenberry was playing for the Midwest Blazers, an AAU-type program, in a tournament in Florida. It was there he injured his left elbow while pitching.
At first he didn’t think it was a big deal, but it turned out to be. While duck hunting back home, Eikenberry threw some rocks into a lake and felt a sharp pain.
“I’ve never felt pain like that in my life,” Eikenberry said, “and I knew something was seriously wrong.”
Eikenberry had a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his left elbow, but wanted to delay surgery until after his senior season with the Rockets. He was determined to play through the pain, but Baylor’s baseball people insisted he have the surgery sooner, to be better prepared for the Bears’ season.
Eikenberry played one game for the Rockets in 2009, the season opener against Newman on March 23. In a 16-0 victory, Eikenberry pitched four innings, allowing three hits and one walk while striking out nine. At the plate, he was 3-for-4 with two doubles and three RBIs.
Two days later, Eikenberry underwent surgery in Chicago. Performing the procedure was Dr. Charles Bush-Joseph, head physician for the Chicago White Sox and associate team physician for the Chicago Bulls.
After a long summer without baseball, Eikenberry was preparing to go off to Baylor in early August when he received a life-altering visit from a Bears assistant coach. Mitch Thompson made his way to Rock Falls to inform Eikenberry that his scholarship would instead be going to a senior on the team who had expected to be drafted but wasn’t.
“He said they wanted a healthy me, not a hurt me,” Eikenberry said. “It was pretty tough to take.”
With his future suddenly up in the air, Eikenberry contacted his coach with the Midwest Blazers, Andy Stack, to see if he could help out in some way. Stack contacted a friend of his, Iowa Western coach Marc Rardin, to see if he could use a pitcher on the mend. Eikenberry was enrolled a few days later.
The Iowa Western baseball team is 5-4 and preparing for a spring training trip to Arizona, in which it will play eight games in five days. One of those games, on March 18, will be against South Mountain, where one of Eikenberry’s teammates at Rock Falls, Shane Blair, is a freshman catcher.
Eikenberry plans on pitching at some point during the trip to test out his arm. When healthy in high school, his fastball topped out at about 90 miles an hour with good movement and control. He can still throw in the upper 80s, but admittedly has lost some control.
“There’s good days and bad days with my arm,” Eikenberry said. “It’s almost tougher on me mentally than it is physically. I know what I can do, but it’s going to take a little bit more time before I’m able to do it.”
