Hanson era with Braves begins

As a kid – as opposed to the 22-year-old geezer he is today – Tommy Hanson had one no-fail way to support his baseball habit.

Not by selling the neighbors subscriptions to niche magazines, the way the other kids did, or rattling a donation bucket at some poor slob in a car who just wants the light to turn green.

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6-foot-6 Tommy Hanson, 22, has impressed the Braves. At Gwinnett, he had 90 strikeouts with a 1.49 ERA. He replaces future Hall of Famer Tom Glavine as the fifth starter.

NOTABLE FIRST STARTS
• Tom Glavine (age 21), Aug. 17, 1987 at Houston: 3-2/3 innings, 6 hits, 6 runs, loss.
• John Smoltz (age 21), July 23, 1988 at New York Mets: 8 innings, 4 hits, 1 run, win.
• Steve Avery (age 20), June 13, 1990 at Cincinnati: 2-1/3 innings, 8 hits, 8 runs, loss.
• Pete Smith (age 21), Sept. 8, 1996 vs. San Diego: 8-2/3 innings, 6 hits, 2 runs, win.
• Kevin Millwood (age 22), July 19, 1997 vs. Los Angeles Dodgers: 5 innings, 7 hits, 4 runs, loss.

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Hanson instead grabbed a pair of goggles and a potentially disfiguring tool and went to work.

“For money for his travel ball days, he’d come to my job and scrap some of the metal,” said Hanson’s father, also named Tom.

“I’d drop him off in the morning – it would still be dark – with an acetylene torch, and he would cut up the scrap rebar in the right sizes and load it on a trailer.

“You could get $300 for four tons of metal – pretty good pay for a 12-year-old.”

That was the first indication that Hanson’s story of possibility and potential is reinforced by real iron.

The Braves are counting on further proof today, when Hanson makes his major league pitching debut against Milwaukee.

What a backdrop to Sunday’s matinee.

There is the whole circle-of-life thing played out on the field’s highest point, one old Tommy – Glavine – being symbolically replaced on the mound by a brand new Tommy.

Then, there is all the anticipation invested in this one start, an almost giddy, child-like, night-before-Christmas kind of feeling among fans who have heard great tales of a 94 mph fastball and a curve that rewrites the laws of physics.

There is a kind of mass hysteria that builds naturally around a 6-foot-6 pitcher who has blinded batters at every level of the minors (most recently, 90 strikeouts in 66 1/3 innings and a 1.49 ERA at Gwinnett). He’s one of the most celebrated young Braves arms since the circa 1990 Steve Avery.

The excitement extends to the clubhouse. “We all can’t wait to see what he can do,” said Kris Medlen, Hanson’s good friend and fellow rookie who was transferred from the rotation to the bullpen with his arrival.

Not a prodigy

For a pitcher who arrives at his major league debut amid such commotion, Hanson hardly was a pampered prodigy. He could take nothing for granted while scaling baseball’s talent pyramid.

A working class guy doesn’t dare assume anything. And Hanson does come from that stock. Someone has to haul the rebar that is the guts of all those California freeways, and his dad did it until it just about broke his back.

Hanson may have grown up in Southern California, but “I’m not really a beach guy.” He lived in Redlands, nearly an hour inland, where the surf never was up.

Complicated? Not really. “My main things (hobbies) are video games and fishing,” Hanson said. “I’m not a big golfer, not a big reader. I’d read about a chapter, put it down and say I’m going to come back to it and never do.”

Quiet, definitely. Laid-back, as Californians can be, but not so much as to be disconnected.

On the contrary, when there is something he wants — like baseball — he can be downright driven.

His junior college coach, Dennis Rogers, has had nine of his players reach the major leagues in his 20 years at Riverside College. He witnessed none of the other debuts. For Hanson’s, he planned to fly cross-country to Atlanta this weekend.

“He’s a special kid,” Rogers said.

Special in a coach’s eyes because Hanson seemed so completely absorbed by the idea of becoming a player that everything he did was a means to that single end.

Asked earlier this season, while still on the farm in Gwinnett, what he’d be doing if not playing baseball, Hanson looked like he just had been asked to explain string theory. No baseball? Utterly unthinkable.

“I have no idea,” he said. “This is what I want to do. This is what I work at every day. I’ve always wanted to play baseball.

“This is what I’m going after 100 percent. If there’s something else I need to do (other than baseball), I’ll figure it out at that time.”

College pays off

When Hanson arrived at Riverside College, he was, in his own words “just another guy who threw in the mid-80s.”

A year later, after hanging more strength on that large frame and gaining the commanding confidence of a starting pitcher, Hanson was taken in the 22nd round by the Braves in 2004.

“Ten out of 10” kids would have grabbed the money and signed, the coach said. But not Hanson. He opted to play one more season at Riverside.

“Every time he picked up a baseball, he got a little better,” Rogers said.

Satisfied with his progress, he signed with the Braves in advance of the ‘05 draft.

“It was never about the money,” Rogers said. “He didn’t think he was quite ready [to go pro]. There were some things he still wanted to work on.”

Hanson wanted to get deeper into games with a more efficient pitch count, Rogers said. He didn’t think he had sufficient command of his fastball on both sides of the plate, nor an effective enough change-up.

And with that extra year, Hanson also was able to gain an extra measure of maturity to handle all the head-turning experiences to come.

So this is how he sounds now, amid all the build-up: “As [Rogers] always told me, you can’t control what anyone says about you. When it comes down to it, you have to go out and do the work. You have to go out and get better. That totally made sense to me.

“If they say you’re a potential front-of-the-rotation starter [which they do of Hanson], that doesn’t mean anything unless you go out and perform.

“The way I look at it, this is where I’m at today. I’m going to do whatever I have to do to get myself better today. Whatever happens tomorrow happens.”

That seems the perfect note to sound, given that major league hitters are even more difficult to cut up than rebar.