Yes, the last name is intimidating, a one-line eye chart arcing across the shoulders of his Braves jersey. Fortunately, Mike Foltynewicz is 6-foot-4 and built strong and can support fully 42 percent of the alphabet on that broad back without a hint of overcrowding.
He is but two starts into his Braves career, so fans are forgiven if they have not yet mastered the name, as Polish in origin as a plate of pierogies.
Foltynewicz treats all attempts with good humor. “People say I should be a hockey player instead of a baseball player with that last name,” he said.
“Rarely do people get it right on the first try. It’s funny to hear what they come up with.”
Teammates who have had a good chunk of spring training and a couple of weeks in the Turner Field clubhouse to decode the name are still working on it.
“‘FULTON-nah-which-its,’ or something. Ah, I have no idea,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said.
“‘FULTIE-sssss-aaa,’ something like that, right?’ laughed shortstop Andrelton Simmons.
As a 23-year-old still looking for a home in the major leagues, Foltynewicz cares most about one guy in the room getting to know him on a solid last-name basis. And that guy nailed it. “FOLT-in-evich,” manager Fredi Gonzalez said.
Or you can just call him Folty. Everyone else does.
If Foltynewicz ever fully harnesses the promise of his right arm, if he can use the power for good rather than to issue free passes to first base, his name someday will roll off the community tongue like honey from a spoon.
For Folty’s voltage is something to behold. He topped out at 98 mph Wednesday against Philadelphia, when he went just long enough and got enough run support to push his record to 2-0. Got his third RBI, too, on a sac fly. Break out a victory polka.
His deep well of pitches was more evident Wednesday than in his first start, against Cincinnati, when his breaking stuff mostly was broken. Witness the second-inning strikeout of the Phils’ Darin Ruf, one of Foltynewicz’s seven for the night. Strike two was a 97-mph heater, strike three a 72-mph sweeping curve.
It’s a beautiful thing when it all works, and getting it to work consistently is exactly the challenge that will decide his future in the Braves’ rotation.
Foltynewicz came to the Braves in January, one of the finishing touches on the team’s dramatic remodel, part of the deal that sent catcher and surefire Hallmark movie subject Evan Gattis to Houston.
So mindful was Foltynewicz of Gattis’ popularity that he tried to hit spring training like a tornado to sweep away the doubts about the deal. And the harder he threw and the more he tried to impress, the more his control suffered. He was sent to Triple-A Gwinnett to start the season.
“I had to believe in myself. I had to tell myself: They obviously traded for me for a reason; they saw what I could do,” Foltynewicz said. “I needed to take it a couple notches down, not go out there and try to throw as hard as I can, try to make my breaking ball a (Clayton) Kershaw breaking ball.”
His rapport with Braves pitching coach Roger McDowell will be vital at this stage, and an exchange during Foltynewicz’s first start illustrates the coach’s creativity when trying to push the right button.
After giving up a pair of singles and a walk in his first inning as a Braves starter, Foltynewicz received a visitor to the mound.
“You’re a golfer, right,” McDowell asked him. Foltynewicz figures he’s about an eight-handicap.
“Well, you’re putting through the break,” McDowell informed him, by way of creating the image of the young pitcher doing too much. Something clicked. Foltynewicz gave up two runs that inning, but then settled in over his next four.
Foltynewicz, the Astros’ top pick in 2010, admits that control “was one of the things that held me back from getting called up over the years.” So go forth and don’t putt through the break, kid. (He walked two Wednesday, half the total of his first outing).
As with so many of those who have such ability from the shoulder down, Foltynewicz may yet be defined by his development from the neck up.
The occasional wildness has been pretty much contained to the ball field. His was, by all reports, an uncomplicated childhood, leading to a young adulthood in which one of the wildest moments may have been going downtown with his mother to get joint tattoos. They both got the word “Family” etched on their left arms.
“His father was supposed to go, too, but he chickened out,” Cindy Foltynewicz said.
They scarcely needed to advertise the bond between the parents and their only child. Their devotion was obvious while raising a baseball-obsessed kid in the Rockwellian-named burg of Minooka, Ill.
His father, Gary, developed tennis elbow without ever hitting a shot over the net. Once he heard a tip about hitting tennis balls into the air to drill kids on catching fly balls properly, Gary took no half measures. He really did perform the drill so much that his elbow ached.
Mom, a former softball player, was one of her kid’s first Little League coaches. With a bucket to sit on, she’d catch some of his side sessions, too, until her middle school son starting bringing an unnatural amount of heat.
“Mom, I can’t throw to you anymore if you don’t hold the glove still,” he told her one day, as she sat behind the plate with a stinging hand and a quivering mitt.
“Well, I’m scared,” she said. It was time to let someone else corral his fastball.
As for Mike, he had an incurable case of baseball on the brain.
His mother would always tell him, “You have to have a Plan B if baseball doesn’t work. What if you get hurt?”
“I’ll just go on the DL (disabled list),” he answered.
He was the boy who cried at the end of practice. “It’s still light out,” he’d sob. “Why does anyone want to go home?”
He held tightly onto his one and only plan, and that is now intersecting with the Braves’ own plan of building a rotation worthy of their Cobb County palace.
“He’s pretty much raw right now. He’s learning on the fly. He’s got power stuff, obviously. He’s just going to get better,” Freeman figures. That, for one, would mean pitching deeper into games than he has managed to date.
If he does trend upward, then by 2017 every last soul in the ballpark will have no excuse not to have mastered the name Foltynewicz as much as his or her own.
