by John Klima
June, 2006

The letters inevitably arrive in April. They come from different points across America, but all ask the same thing.

"Dear Paul: You were the first $100,000 bonus baby," one started, as if Paul Pettit had forgotten. It is a classic fan letter to a baseball player, a sugarcoated attempt at knowledge disguised, as a friendly ruse for a signature. "I am sorry that you didn't play in the majors longer, but it still means something to have been there. If you have a photo to autograph for me, I would like it. Thank you."

They all end with the same question, and sometimes, the letter writers even say please. The letters always find their way into Pettit's garage at his home in Hemet, the place where the walls have been covered with photographs from his career, but this is no shrine. You can find his photos by his workbench, where his tools are neatly organized, next to the dusty set of golf clubs. Time and bad knees have caught up to him, he said, and he stopped playing a few years ago. He is 76 now, and on the kitchen table is a pillbox with his daily medications.

He takes the time to accommodate each letter, but sometimes it strikes him as funny that someone wants the signature of a pitcher who won one lousy game in the major leagues 53 years ago. It is as if they are waiting on a young man's promise as a pitcher long since lost.

"The only thing I can think of," he said with a laugh as he walked past images of former teammates, some now gone, the happy faces of ballplayers confined to black and white images, "Is that someone thinks it's worth something."

There is tremendous irony in his statement. Once, his signature was worth more than any other high school player in the history of the game. In 1950, he made a deal that shook the baseball industry and served as a precursor to the way modern athletes are bought and sold.

For years, he autographed copies of the photo of him wearing his Narbonne High uniform in 1948. In that photo, he stands tall and proud. The photo is taken from an upward angle, so the young man looks poised and polished. He looks strong and powerful, unaware what $100,000 in 1949 would mean for the rest of his life.

"That's my favorite picture," he said. "I was just a young kid who happened to be able to throw a baseball."

He happened to be able to throw a baseball so well that he was the first $100,000 bonus player. His legacy is not as a pitcher with one major league win, but as a cautionary tale.

Here, days after major league baseball's annual amateur draft, when many promising baseball players expect the future to unfold as planned, Pettit is a living reminder that no matter how certain one's career looks, there are no guarantees.

His wife, Shirley, walked in. Pettit stopped to look at a framed mural of Forbes Field, a montage made up of all the names of the Pittsburgh Pirates who played there. Pettit can never remember where to find his name, but Shirley, his wife since 1950, knows exactly where to look.

She pointed at the front column, and there is Pettit's name. He smiled. She always knows where to find him.

If you listen closely, the stories are all here. There is a photo of George Pettit, a native Englishman who arrived in Los Angeles in 1909 with a love of soccer and not much else. He quit school and never became a rich man, but he always found a paycheck and a soccer game. He spent 20 years working as a milkman, and when he was 35, he married a nurse from Philadelphia named Valerie.

The couple had a daughter, Valerie, followed by a son, George William Paul, who was born at the height of the Depression, on Nov. 29, 1931. "I got Paul," he said, "Because my mother thought it was a lucky name."

His father worked in the alphabet soup programs, gaining employment in the Works Progress Administration as a landscaper at Fort McArthur in San Pedro. In 1941, the family moved to the low- rent Harbor Hills housing project in Lomita where, by 1950, no family was allowed to have an annual income of more than $3,000.

Growing up in Lomita made Pettit cherish what little his family had. George's only son understood the value of modesty, a trait that would serve him well in a career he did not predict.

"We weren't dirt poor," Pettit remembered, standing in front of his Mercedes. "But we didn't have much extra to spend, either."

Occasionally, Pettit recalled, there was just enough to walk to the movie theater. Sometimes, if they were lucky, they would get to watch "Flash Gordon" serials, directed by Frederick Stephani, a wonder kid with a flair for the future.

Pettit has only one photo of Stephani because the man is a mystery. Ambitious and clever, Stephani arrived in Hollywood in the early 1930s from the University of Bonn and Heidelberg Film School, one of a generation of European filmmakers who recognized Germany was changing.

Neither Pettit nor Stephani could have foreseen that, in 1950, they would make a deal that would begin to change the way baseball does business. Pettit, in unassuming fashion, signed an agreement that made professional baseball players question their own value and the right to determine their own careers. Stephani, the Breeze believes, became the first amateur player agent in baseball history. It led leading baseball executives, such as Branch Rickey, to urge owners to accept an amateur draft, which was instated in 1965, partially in an effort to curb bonus payments, a decision that had the opposite effect on signing bonuses.

The deal angered baseball owners, who feared losing control of players and resented negotiating with agents.

Baseball is a business of unspoken truths, and in judging the trajectory of Pettit's own career, it is difficult not to speculate that he was blackballed nearly 10 years later when, having reinvented himself as a power-hitting first baseman, he nearly hit his way back to the big leagues. But instead of a stirring end to a struggle, Pettit was left to languish in the minor leagues.

The decision he made as an 18-year-old high school pitcher was one of the first signs that a new era was coming. He did this as a teenager, not to challenge authority, but because he recognized the rare opportunity to help his family escape from life in a housing project.

Instead, Pettit would only be remembered as the pitcher who turned in one major league victory for $100,000, but his story is about more than a signature. Like finding his name hidden within a mural of a long-gone ballpark, Pettit's truth lies somewhere in a black-and-white past.

The Lefty from Lomita

His fastball came out of a folktale.

"There hasn't been a schoolboy pitcher around like him for a long time," Branch Rickey told the Los Angeles Times. "He's the Bob Feller type, definitely, and maybe by this time next year a lot of people will know it."

High school hitters rarely stood a chance. Pettit threw a no- hitter against San Pedro as a Narbonne sophomore in 1947, his first of six no-hitters in three years. He went 16-0 for a semi-pro team in Hermosa Beach. In the summer of 1949, he threw three consecutive no-hitters: one in high school and two in American Legion, racking up at least 18 strikeouts in each game.

Pettit's reputation was sealed when, as a senior in 1949, he took the mound against Banning High and pitched a game he never forgot. "I had that little extra fastball," he says. "Confidence was abounding."

Pettit gave up four hits and struck out 27 batters and won the game, 2-1, in 12 innings. It was the most strikeouts in a California high school game since Walter Johnson in 1905.

The late Howie Haak, then a young Brooklyn Dodger scout, was stunned.

"I saw him at his best and never saw his equal," Haak told Pittsburgh writer Les Biederman in 1954. "He had a major league curve in high school and just blazed his fastball by all the batters. If the other team hit a ball in the air, it was a big event."

Pettit was the best pitcher from Lomita since the Dodgers signed Erv Palica out of Narbonne as a 16-year-old sophomore in 1945. He had been sent to Ebbets Field courtesy of scout Tom Downey.

You couldn't miss Downey, who barreled into town driving his two- door, baby blue Cadillac. Former players claim he kept a liquor cabinet in the trunk. When the Dodgers played in the 1947 World Series, Downey had originally signed four of their starters. In 1944, Downey had signed a promising multi-sport athlete from Compton, Duke Snider.

Downey was a former Mexican League pitcher with a reputation for making deals under the table, according to players who knew him. Downey centered his attention on finding a way to bring a wad of Pirate owner Frank McKinney's Indianapolis bankroll to Pettit's pocket.

"Downey was real good," Pettit says. "Real supportive. He just thought I had all the potential in the world."

For a scout, discovering a hard-throwing, 6-foot-2, 205-pound left-hander is like finding an oasis in the desert and having to pay for a drink.

"I knew my value," Pettit said. "I was going to sign for at least $90,000."

Yet in the back of Pettit's mind there were terrible reservations. He had thrown so many innings that he feared the worst. George Pettit had learned how to compile his son's pitching statistics and tallied 945 strikeouts in 545 innings over three years, an average of 181 innings per season as a teenager.

Pettit also kept a secret. He had injured his elbow when he landed awkwardly in a basketball game. He had the opportunity to make more money in one moment than his parents had made in their entire lives. It meant no more menial jobs for George, who was then working as a night watchman. Some days, his mind felt as tired as his arm. He didn't feel young anymore. He was only 18.

"I think he was under pressure in those days," former player and manager George Genovese said. "All eyes were always on him. In a way, it was like the kiss of death, getting all that money."

Deal of the Century

Tinseltown hadn't been kind to Stephani of late. His run as an MGM contract producer ended when, after a string of box office failures, studio chief Louis B. Mayer flicked his cigar ashes at Stephani and never hired him again.

Down on his luck, the best Stephani could find was a freelancing job to write and produce a forgettable movie named "Johnny Holiday". Shot on location in Indianapolis during the summer of 1949, it brought Stephani to the city where McKinney kept his headquarters.

Enter singer-actor Bing Crosby, a 25-percent owner of the Pirates. Though no sources can directly place McKinney meeting with Stephani, and though Stephani and Crosby never collaborated on a film, studio records show that Stephani and Crosby were both under contract at Paramount in the early 1930s.

Unlike Crosby, an avid golfer, Stephani never had any interest in sports. A complete review of his career with film synopsis obtained from the American Film Institute in Hollywood reveals no stories tied to sports.

Rumors swirled that Crosby had helped orchestrate an arrangement between McKinney and Stephani in the summer of 1949 that would allow the Pirates to evade the "High School Rule," prohibiting teams from signing players before graduation. Most observers believed a handshake deal in which the Pirates agreed to purchase Pettit's contract from Stephani was arranged prior to his graduation in January 1950, a move which further added to the firestorm Pettit was about to walk into.

"I felt all along," said Haak, who became a legendary Latin American scout for the Pirates before his death in 1999, "(That) the Pirates had the inside track."

There was precedence. That winter, Crosby had helped the Pirates sign future major league left-handed pitcher Vernon Law to a minor league contract.

Some published reports claimed Crosby visited the family home in Lomita, but Pettit denies that. When Pettit finally arrived in the minor leagues in the spring of 1950, many players believed Crosby had been the instigator, pairing Stephani with McKinney and delivering Pettit to Pirates general manager Roy Hamey.

"Through Bing Crosby, you mean?" said Len Yochim, a former teammate of Pettit's, by phone from his home in New Orleans, La. "That's the big thing that came along with it. He assisted in the signing. That's what we players thought."

Stephani maintained he was in the movie business.

"I long had in mind doing a sports picture," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1950, "But the cost to an independent producer of signing established stars like Pancho Gonzales, Ben Hogan, Ralph Kiner and the like is prohibitive. So I decided to take a chance and sign some promising youngster to a long-term contract."

Even today, Pettit has difficultly describing the eccentric Stephani.

"He was a hard personality to pin down," Pettit said. "He just seemed to be kind of ... well, I don't know. He didn't really know baseball that well, I knew that."

Yet in the fall of 1949, Pettit received a curious letter from Stephani. It would lead to the decision that shaped Pettit's career.

Stephani made a handsome offer to sign Pettit to a motion picture deal, with the sole purpose of re-selling the contract to the highest bidding major league team, while retaining the movie rights to Pettit's life. Stephani, in effect, would be acting as Pettit's agent, a revolutionary idea that outraged the baseball community.

"I have no quarrel with Pittsburgh," Cardinals owner Fred Saigh told the Associated Press. "I just don't like the idea of dealing with agents."

Even with the potential consequences to his career, the offer was too good for Pettit to pass up.

"It was all through Stephani," Pettit said. "He's the one who came to me and said, 'Hey, I'd like to make this movie.' He wanted me to sign a contract for less money and re-sell it. I knew my value at the time. When he finally upped the ante to $85,000, plus $5,000 per picture, up to three pictures, and if we made a life story I got 10 percent, it started to add up. That's why I signed with him. As long as I had the say as to what team I signed with."

That was the question. In an era when owners had the right to control players, what right did a high school player have to choose his own fate?

Stephani made it appear that he was sifting through offers from various teams. Because Pettit's price had soared so high, many teams dropped out. Pettit says he was never sure what teams were really in the running, nor would he admit that a deal was in place before he graduated.

"I liked the Red Sox, I liked the Yankees," he said. "They were all interested, but I can't remember too much."

Added Genovese, who became a successful scout: "I think perhaps they had already verbally agreed to terms, if not (had) an already written agreement somewhere, so it would still not be illegal."

The Pirates had been there all along. Downey had won over Pettit with hints of what was to come.

"I was really interested in that Cadillac," Pettit said. "He said, 'When you sign, you'll be able to buy one.' "

When Pettit graduated from Narbonne in January 1950, he and his father drove to Stephani's office on Sunset Blvd. Paul Pettit sat at the table, surrounded by two lawyers, as well as Stephani, Downey, and Hamey, Pittsburgh's barrel-chested general manager. The deal was to be for $85,000 until the former milkman had the final say.

"My dad spoke up and said, 'We'd like $100,000,' " Pettit said.

There was silence in the room.

"They went outside of the office for five minutes," Pettit recalled. "They came back and said, 'You got it.' "

The photo of the signing is on Pettit's wall. In it, the young pitcher stares up at a grinning Hamey. It is suggested to Pettit that he has the look of a man who has just sold his soul to the devil. Pettit only laughed and moved onto the next picture.

Size, Speed and Cash

There was little patience. Because he was a bonus player who received more than $6,000 to sign, Pettit was required to be on the Pirates major league roster within a year. Mindful of the scrutiny and perhaps leery that Pettit was not at full strength, Pirates manager Billy Meyer expressed concern. "I only hope they don't spoil him before he joins us," he said in 1950.

Pettit said he anticipated some of the attention, but was not ready for the scrutiny. "They could have put me anywhere," he said. "That was (Pittsburgh's) mistake. Part of the problem, when I went to double-A, (was) they put a lot of pressure on me. There was a lot of publicity. There were three newspapers in town and I was in one of them every single day."

There was also the $100,000 question. Though Pettit's contract was spread over 10 years, and though he spent most of his first year's salary to buy a new home for his parents, Pettit learned to live with a label.

"What is to stop any player from putting himself in the hands of an agent?" Yankees general manager George Weiss asked in a 1950 statement. "Someone must determine where baseball law ends and civil rights begin."

The battle lines were drawn.

"As for dealing with an agent, what was Roy Hamey to do?" Rickey, then the Dodgers general manager, told The New York Times. "The agent had the boy tied up. On the boy's part, he had a perfect right to have an agent and it was no evasion of the high school rule if the club did not negotiate ahead of time."

Arthur Daley, the New York Times columnist, reserved a special contempt for Pettit. A yes-man with a typewriter, Joe DiMaggio's ghostwriter, Daley was essentially a publicist for the Yankees. He took several shots, writing as if he was praying for Pettit to fail.

"Lean and hungry fellows make better ball players than rich and fat ones," he wrote in 1951. "It takes a pretty strong character to be able to punish himself and drive himself when he has all that folding money hidden under the mattress."

Some players were encouraged that the system could be compromised. Others were enraged about how much Pettit made beating it.

"I venture to say that when the Pirates paid that boy $100,000, each member of the Pittsburgh club lost about $4,000 in salary," Cardinals shortstop Marty Marion told the Washington Post. "I'm for the up-and-coming young fellow getting all he can out of baseball, but when he deprives those who have already made their mark in the game of making money, it's high time to take steps to stop it."

The most insightful comment may have come from catcher Clyde McCullough.

"He has everything," McCullough told the Post. "Size, speed -- and cash."

While players mulled over Pettit's money, Post columnist Shirley Povich wrote a passage that was prophetic.

"What Pettit's agent did was to expose a loophole in the rules and open up what could amount to a new promotional profession -- signing up promising schoolboy athletes while major league clubs are restrained, and then peddling their contracts to the highest bidder."

The sum and the duration of the contract were considered outrageous. A week after Pettit signed, Ted Williams re-signed for the 1950 season for $125,000, baseball's top salary. When Rickey re- signed his double-play combination of Jackie Robinson and Pee-Wee Reese for the 1950 season, he paid Robinson $35,000 and Reese $30,000. In 1953, the Yankees trimmed veteran left-handed pitcher Ed Lopat's contract from $30,000 to $21,000 when he went from 21 victories to 11 in an injury-shortened season. All of it added up to a burden Pettit would carry for the rest of his career.

"To get $100,000 as a high school kid in 1950," Genovese said, "Would be like giving a high school kid $30 million today."

"It does seem a trifle ridiculous, doesn't it?" Daley asked. "An untried and unproven schoolboy reaps a fortune without having played one game of major league ball -- or minor league ball?"

Even the supportive Rickey, who became Pittsburgh's general manager in 1951, had worries.

"That is the great fault of the bonus in my business," he wrote in his personal papers. "There should be joy in the chase, zest in the pursuit."

In other words, a player should feel compensated by his opportunity alone.

"That's more than I got in my whole life," 63-year-old Grover Cleveland Alexander grumbled to the Los Angeles Times in 1950. Alexander said he signed his first major league contract for $1,500 in 1911. Broke, hard of hearing, and nursing the bottle, the aging right-hander couldn't fathom that baseball would give a high school player so much money.

"I was just working," he said.

Still other players believed Pettit's contract represented the start of a new era. Observed 42-year-old knuckleballer Dutch Leonard in the Los Angeles Times 1951: "More power to them. When I was a kid, I was tickled to death just to get a chance to play. I didn't ever receive a bonus, but baseball has given me enough reward -- a lovely family, a home, some security ... and it took me out of the coal mines."

There was enough attention on Pettit to make him wish he could hide. It didn't help when he labored in a pair of spring training games. He was pitching over his head, a high school boy against experienced professionals, shelled when he should have been learning at a lower level. Some observers began to question if Pettit was ready. The Pirates maintained he was.

"We think that he is capable of playing double-A baseball and we are perfectly content in sending him to the (New Orleans) Pelicans," Hamey told The Associated Press.

Pettit felt the pressure. There was a naysayer for every step, a whisper for every walk, or a breath of optimism for every strikeout.

"They expected me to do well off the bat," he said. "Maybe they thought I was better than I was. I don't know what it was."

True, Pettit had to be in the big leagues by 1951. But why start him at a level where most observers believed no high school pitcher could succeed?

Noted Genovese: "The bonus rule was really unfair to a young player. Many a ballplayer ruined his career, not willfully or intentionally, but for the fact that they weren't ready to play at a high level so soon. Sometimes, you had to carry a kid because that's what you had to do. You put him in, he'd try too hard, and a lot of them got hurt that way."

While looking at the photo from the day he signed, Pettit paused. Perhaps he really had sold his soul.

A Star is Torn

"A lot of guys who go into professional baseball say, 'I need to get a chance,' " Pettit said. "As a bonus player, you get a first shot more than some other guys because the money is invested. I had a shot at New Orleans, but I wasn't handled properly. I started too high. They thought I was ready to pitch at that level but I wasn't. I was 19. Those guys were 25 or 26. They can hit any fastball hard."

Said Yochim, a left-handed pitcher who was one year older than Pettit and his teammate in New Orleans: "That wasn't a league for a young player," he recalled. "I should know. I got raked over the coals."

Pettit's first professional start was slated for a Sunday afternoon against Chattanooga. The fans were roped off in the outfield. Cameras were everywhere. Pettit remembered the isolation. For all the money the Pirates spent, there was no pitching coach in New Orleans to monitor his progress. Pettit was not trained. He was not protected. He was simply handed the ball. It was baseball in the dark ages.

"It was a big pressure cooker," Pettit said. "It probably pumped too much adrenaline in me and I tried too hard. I was just out there firing as hard as I could."

Said Yochim: "He was always singled out. I tend to believe that may make you try harder, press too much."

Pettit pitched seven innings and struck out nine, but after the game, he joked that half his pitches wound up in Mississippi. He threw the ghastly total of 154 pitches, walked 11 batters, and gave up six runs and seven hits and lost.

"I had never walked 11 in my life," he said, still sounding embarrassed 56 years later.

His arm began to bother him. Again, he said nothing.

"I'm not convinced he wasn't already hurt when he signed," Yochim said. "You would seem to think he was supposed to have a blazing fastball to have the all-time highest bonus."

In only his third professional outing, Pettit felt a pop in his elbow. The Pirates sent him to Dr. George Bennett at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, the same physician who treated DiMaggio. But sports medicine in 1950 was primitive. Arm surgery didn't exist. Pettit told the eager press that nothing was wrong.

"I think I started throwing too soon," he said. "There's another example of pressure, of wanting to push it. I didn't have the right medical advice. If I had a cortisone shot or a deep heat, maybe, but they didn't even have that. I thought, in two weeks, I should be fine, but it didn't work out that way."

The Pirates had made an investment, and the Pirates' front office ordered New Orleans manager Hugh Luby to pitch Pettit. It was nearly 100 degrees one night in Memphis, but Pettit couldn't get his arm loose. He didn't say a word, yet grunted each time he threw.

"That was the lowest day of my life," he said. "My arm was hurting so badly."

Luby had been in baseball since 1931. He recognized that Pettit was in over his head. In rushing Pettit, Luby believed they were ruining him. On July 4, the Pirates dismissed Luby.

"I am not telling a tale out of school when I say the Pirates realize now (that) they brought young Paul Pettit up too fast," Luby told the Los Angeles Times weeks after he was fired. "He should be pitching in a Class D league. And by the bonus rule, he must go up next year to Pittsburgh."

Pettit was never the same.

"Even today, I still feel the remnants of that injury," he said. "Right in here," he says, tapping his elbow and forearm.

He finished his first professional season 2-7 with a 5.17 ERA. He would come to the big leagues as a wounded animal.

In his final start of the season, he was pitching in New Orleans against Atlanta. Eddie Mathews, a young third baseman from Santa Barbara, wouldn't let Pettit forget his identity. Facing him in the first inning, Pettit struck him out with a high-and-tight fastball. Moments later, Mathews stood at the top step of the dugout, shouting at Pettit, 'You bonus baby son of a bitch!'

Pettit labored into the 10th inning. "I was just walking around the mound in a daze," he said. "Picture a guy walking around the desert without a drink of water. That was me. I was so exhausted, I think I lost 10 pounds that night. And in the 10th inning, here comes Mathews again, and I tried to get him in that same spot. Now, it was 420 feet to center field and it was a high fence out there. Mathews hit it, and the ball kept carrying right over the Coca-Cola sign."

Pettit laughed heartily when he relived the home run, and it doesn't seem to matter that the ball never lands in the story. The rest of his career would be marked by a mission to become not Paul Pettit, the first $100,000 bonus baby, but Paul Pettit the husband, the father, the ballplayer, the professional. There would always be a nice payment awaiting him before the start of each of the next 10 seasons, but the money wasn't there to make him as rich as the critics would believe. He would always have to work hard to be seen as more than a dollar sign.

"I suppose, that because I had such a tremendous amateur record, I think they felt I was a shoe-in. They thought I was the next coming of Walter Johnson or something," Pettit said. "It just didn't come out that way."

The $80,000 joke

Pettit made his major league debut on May 5, 1951 against the Giants at the Polo Grounds. Meyer put him in the game as an afterthought, an eighth-inning mop-up assignment in an 8-1 loss. Later, he summoned Pettit to meet with Rickey at Forbes Field.

Rickey informed Pettit that the club had placed him on waivers. No one claimed him. At 20 years old, every team in the major leagues thought Pettit's career was over. With no recourse, he began to laugh at the severity of his situation. The laughter grew stronger, and soon, Meyer was laughing.

"I didn't want to be disrespectful," Pettit recalled. "But I laughed because $80,000 was still owed on my contract, and who was going to pick me up? It was quite obvious that no one wanted me."

Pettit began an injury-plagued odyssey that took him from the majors to single-A. While he was in the minor leagues, a transformation of his reputation occurred. Players who had never met him, who assumed that because he was the $100,000 kid thought he might be arrogant, realized that Pettit was as modest as his Lomita upbringing. He may have lost some arm strength, but he'd lost none of his father's sensibilities. Pettit became a working man, and if one hadn't known he was a ballplayer, one could have assumed he was a milkman, a watchman or a landscaper.

"He was the hardest worker you would see," Yochim said. "He did everything he could to get the job done. He was a fine person on a club. Not a guy who would say, 'I got a hundred thousand.' He wasn't chesty and all that. He was none of that. He was just a down-to- earth, hard-working young man."

Pettit went to spring training with the Pirates in 1952, but Rickey decided that Pettit wasn't ready to return to the major leagues. Rickey assigned him to triple-A, the Hollywood Stars, but no matter how Pettit played, some still considered him the bonus baby bust. One L.A. Times headline shouted at him with four simple words: Poor Little Rich Boy.

Hooray for Hollywood

Long before Jack Nicholson grinned courtside at Lakers games, showtime was Milton Berle and Groucho Marx along with an ever- present and never-ending line of aspiring starlets in high heels and short shorts. It was ballplayer heaven.

Pettit pitched for the Hollywood Stars when Gilmore Field was the favorite show in town. "In many ways," he said, "This was one of my most satisfying years."

Satisfying, in part, because he didn't have to be a celebrity. Pettit finished 15-8, but admits that he was getting by with savvy instead of stuff.

There were also days when his hitting ability made his teammates wonder if Pettit was in the wrong line of work. He ended the season with a .320 average. At the very least, he would be able to help his own cause as a major league pitcher. He would get another crack with the Pirates in 1953, and this time, Pettit was determined to become more than the $100,000 kid.

Pettit pitched well enough to make a believer out of an unexpected guest. Pettit had not seen Stephani since the day he signed.

"He came by and saw me at Gilmore Field," Pettit said. "Things were going good at the time and he seemed to be personally interested in my career. I think he was in Spain making pictures at the time, but I don't know. I never saw the man again."

Stephani's last Hollywood credit was in 1957. He was married at least twice. His second wife divorced him when he went to Africa and didn't return for months. Stephani surfaced in the early 1990s, trying to front a production to make a sequel to Casablanca, a project that never got off the ground. He faded into obscurity. There are no known obituaries.

Even Stephani's most mischievous muse could not have predicted the legacy his deal with Pettit would leave on sports culture and business. Every sports agent should pay a commission to the movie man's memory. True, Stephani had a flair for the future, but he never anticipated the creature he created.

One and Done

Catcher Clyde McCullough was disgusted with Pettit's lack of control at the start of the 1953 season. He stomped to the mound and wouldn't give Pettit the ball.

"He came out and said, 'Where'd you throw that to?,' " Pettit said. "I said, 'My arm hurts, Clyde.' He didn't say a word. He just gave me the ball, turned around and walked back to the plate."

When his arm felt good, Pettit proved he could win. He made his first major league start on May 1 against the Reds at Forbes Field. He worked 6 innings and gave up four runs (one earned) and got his only major league win. A day later, it hurt again.

"It was the arm," Pettit said. "The arm just didn't respond. I started that game in Pittsburgh, and I had them eating out of my hands."

Pettit lost his confidence. He next pitched against the Giants at the Polo Grounds and couldn't finish the first inning. He got a start against the Chicago Cubs, who knocked him out of the game. With his arm hurting and his effectiveness dwindling, the Pirates sent him to the minor leagues in June. He came back to the big leagues in September, and pitched well enough to give himself hope despite finishing the year with a 1-2 record and a 7.71 ERA in 10 games. But when he came back to spring training in 1954, his arm still would not respond.

"I didn't know what the hell was wrong," he said. "I just couldn't throw. My arm wasn't hurting, and yet, it was like it was dead. I went to spring training and I didn't even get into a game. They just sent me down."

Pettit wound up in Huntsville, Texas, at minor league camp. It was a Prisoner of War facility from World War II, where players slept in barracks. It was a depressing place. Pettit no longer knew what to expect.

Rickey wondered if the former bonus baby may still have some unforeseen value. Rickey told Pettit that he would return to Hollywood, where Manager Bobby Bragan asked Pettit how he felt about playing first base.

Pettit was at a crossroads. It had been four years since he signed as a pitcher, but his arm had never healed. He made a decision. "As a pitcher," he said. "I couldn't throw the gloss off the ball."

Genovese believes Pettit had a chance to return to the big leagues not as a starting pitcher, but as a left-handed hitting first baseman or outfielder.

Pettit batted .324 with 20 home runs and 103 RBIs at Salinas, and while again playing for Genovese in Mexico City during the 1955 season, Pettit hit .382 with nine home runs and 80 RBIs. He also had a 23-game hitting streak.

In 1957, Pettit's confidence returned. He had reinvented his career as a legitimate power-hitting threat. He had his best season as a hitter, batting .284 with 20 home runs and 102 RBIs for Hollywood. He batted cleanup and played right field. He was 27 years old, seemingly young enough to return to the major leagues and help the last-place Pirates. The Pirates had 22-year-old Roberto Clemente in right field, but Stars Manager Clyde King believed Pettit could hit at the major league level.

Genovese agreed.

"He would have been on my 25-man roster," Genovese said. "Two outs, man on first, here's a man who might tie it up with one swing. You look down the bench and you're not going to put a singles hitter in there if you have someone you think can tie the score. If I send George Genovese, 5-6, 150 pounds up to hit, you think I'm scaring anyone? Paul was put together. Paul was not a shrimp."

As Pettit is prone to say, it never worked out.

When he did not receive an invitation to major league camp, he was devastated. Did he never get a second chance because of how he got his first?

"I don't know the answer to that," Pettit said. "I thought I really had the chance to go back to the major leagues as an everyday player," he said. "You're 26 and you had a good year and you don't even get a chance to go to spring training? What do you think that does to your ego? I just lost my mental edge. I never did well from that point on."

His confidence drained, Pettit retired at age 30 in 1962. He returned home to raise his family and began a teaching career in the South Bay that lasted nearly 30 years.

Like Father, Like Son

For a few dollars on eBay, you can buy his autograph on an index card, but the seller is mistaken. Paul Pettit, the first $100,000 bonus baby, is not a "deceased ballplayer."

Now he knows where some of those autograph requests end up.

The letters always arrive in April, and the price tag follows him into his old age. There is nothing he can do about that, but like his playing days, he lets it go. He's just a former ballplayer now, he said, and the grandkids don't know too much about his career, and that's fine by him.

Pettit gazed at a photograph of himself steaming down the first base line. His leg is outstretched as he makes a final lunge for first base, but the ball is already in the first baseman's mitt.

"This is me, playing at Richmond, Va., being thrown out by half a step," Pettit said. He chuckles and says without a trace of bitterness, "Story of my life."

Shirley came to remind him that it was getting late. "She was the best part of the whole thing," he said. When Pettit signed, someone had the idea to throw in $750 for a honeymoon. Shirley laughed. She said she's still waiting.

There is the value of Pettit. No matter what didn't happen, the people who know him the best say he has remained the same kind of person. This is the fine line of being a professional athlete. Pettit never lost what his father gave him. He worked hard, had a hell of a laugh, and enjoyed the memories. Who knew? The greatest gift wasn't the salary. It was in the satisfaction.