Dickey Lets Fly

On April 26, 1978, Greer Stadium hosted its first professional baseball game, and among the 8,156 fans who walked into the brand new stadium that day was 3-year-old Robert Allen Dickey, holding tight to his father’s hand. Dickey doesn’t remember that game, but he has fond memories of many subsequent days and nights at Greer as a boy, eating ice cream from miniature team helmets, watching Skeeter Barnes, Steve Balboni, Willie McGee and Don Mattingly from the cheap seats, and playing cup ball—“Wad up a paper cup and use it as the ball”—with friends in the area outside the left field fence.

From that inauspicious start, Dickey went on to become a local legend in baseball circles. At Montgomery Bell Academy, he made the high school varsity baseball team in eighth grade, and as a senior in 1993 he pitched the maximum allowable innings to help Big Red to the state championship title. He went on to a record-setting career in three years at the University of Tennessee. After a losing debut against the powerhouse University of Miami team during his freshman season, he bounced back to win 15 consecutive games.

Now, 29 years after his first trip to Greer, the kid from Antioch is back (and expected to pitch Friday night). When Dickey trots out to the mound wearing his No. 14 Sounds jersey, there are many fans in the stadium who recall the seemingly tireless young pitcher from MBA and UT. But in ways that go beyond the toll that years of repeatedly hurling a ball 60 feet 6 inches takes on a body, R.A. Dickey is no longer that pitcher. Though he may be back on familiar ground, he finds himself in all new territory, with an optimistic but realistic eye on his future.

“Part of figuring all this out has been accepting that the R.A. I was, I’ll never be again,” he says, sitting in the home dugout before a game. “The beginning of this season [he started the year 1-4 before being sent to the bullpen in mid-May], I was still trying to be who I was. It takes a certain amount of courage to leave that behind. That’s tough, but that’s the decision I had to make. On the other hand, I don’t want to overthink it. It’s just baseball. I believe there’s an element of what I’m doing now that’s philosophical, and a part of it that’s just the way the ball bounces.”

R.A. Dickey’s parents divorced when he was 7 years old, and he spent lots of time with his maternal grandmother, hanging around gymnasiums and ball fields. His mother’s younger brother was Rickey Bowers, a standout basketball player with MBA and David Lipscomb University. He followed Bowers to MBA, enrolling in seventh grade and going on to play basketball, football and baseball.

“I enjoyed MBA, and I had friends there, but I didn’t get real close to anyone,” he says (though in his senior year, he began dating his future wife, the former Anne Bartholomew, the sister of a classmate). “I tended to hang out with other guys who were on financial aid and came from divorced families. I was a little bit of a loner, and I kept busy with sports. I wasn’t the best athlete, so I worked hard at it.”

He was recruited by several schools but chose UT so his family could see him play. In three years there, his record was 38-10 with a 3.40 ERA, the most wins in school history.

In June 1996, following his junior year, he was the first of the Texas Rangers’ two No. 1 draft picks, and a handshake deal promised him $875,000 to sign. A routine MRI revealed—to everyone’s surprise—that Dickey had no normal ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow. The good news was that he would never have to have Tommy John surgery—designed to repair the damage pitching causes on that ligament; the bad news was the Rangers were spooked, and Dickey ended up signing for only $75,000.

He was pragmatic about the costly turn of events. “I was just glad to get to play,” he says. And play he did, making steady progress up the minor league ladder. In 2001, he had a cup of coffee with the parent team, and then spent all of 2002 in AAA Oklahoma. In 2003, he made a serious bid for the American League Rookie of the Year, appearing in 38 games, going 9-8.

But it wasn’t enough to guarantee him a spot in the Rangers rotation, and he continued commuting between Oklahoma City and Arlington. “I always had pretty average stuff,” he confesses. “So I felt like I had to do extra things, field my position, hold runners well, be flexible.”

In 2005, Dickey’s flexibility took an entirely different turn, as he embarked on the path that would take him away from the R.A. he was, to the R.A. he hopes to be—one of the few major league pitchers whose primary pitch is the knuckleball.