MARYVALE, AZ – Believe Adam Pettyjohn when he tells you that, two years ago, he asked himself this question a thousand times over. What on earth was a 27-year-old left-handed pitcher with major league experience, with no history of shoulder problems, doing in Independent baseball? It’s the land of the released and the home of the dregs, where young scouts take the competition level as an insult to their intelligence, and generally pay more attention to not spilling their tobacco dip cups all over themselves than they do finding a player who might one day return to the big leagues.

There, Pettyjohn was stranded in the summer of 2005. He won 10 games in Long Beach, but as the season progressed, he became disenchanted. For the first time, he thought about giving up. He saw no one giving him a chance and scouts dismissing him, if they saw him at all. Times had been bad before, but in baseball, Long Beach was life at its worst. Three years after he was near death because of ulcerative colitis, his career had come to Independent ball, and he was looking at another kind of an end.

Pettyjohn can smile about it now, which is a good thing, but for a pitcher whose ordeal in baseball is unique to him, it doesn’t mean he’s content. Arm problems can take a pitcher away from the mound, but losing a colon and 70 pounds of blood and flesh does more damage than rotator cuff surgery. It took at least two years for him to begin to regain his body strength. It’s taken him longer to prove that he’s not finished. Healing was the easy part. Finding a team who believes as strongly about his ability as he does has been the challenge. As affable a player as you’ll find, beneath Pettyjohn’s perspective is defiance.

In the sometimes narrow-minded, impatient, ‘we’re-never-wrong’ approach of professional baseball evaluation, Pettyjohn was systematically eliminated because of an illness that few understood and fewer took the time to ask him about. That, perhaps, bothered him more than anything. All a ballplayer can ever ask for is an honest explanation, but nowhere is it written that anyone has to give him one.

He has refused to go away quietly and continues to fight his way back to the major leagues. He believes in the purpose of this journey. He wants anyone who has the condition he survived to know that it doesn’t have to be death sentence. Now 29 and signed to a triple-A contract with the Milwaukee Brewers, his third major league organization in two years, Pettyjohn refuses to accept that his year with Detroit in 2001 will be his last major league season. This journey, then, is about more than a baseball player trying to find a big league job. That would be too simplistic.

“I missed two full years and it wasn’t a performance thing,” Pettyjohn said. “It was just a freakish thing. What I learned is that the first year back (in affiliated) baseball after Independent ball is the toughest. No one knows who you are, where you’ve been, or what you’ve gone through.”

What he went through, both personally and professionally, is part of who he is. That meant pushing back into a business that didn’t care why he was throwing 78 instead of 86 m.p.h. in 2003 or why he was stuck in Long Beach in 2005. The ignorance frustrated him. A radar gun can’t tell you everything.

He caught a break when a bird dog recommended him to former scout Lenny Strelitz, himself a former left-handed pitcher. Strelitz, an agent who co-founded West Coast Sports Management in Pasadena, took a chance. Strelitz helped smooth out Pettyjohn’s delivery, showed him before-and-after video when they threw bullpen sessions together, and convinced the Mariners that Pettyjohn was worth a look.

As it turned out, Pettyjohn was nothing more than a body. He pitched at double-A, and in the gusty Texas League, held left-handed hitters to a .218 average and had an overall 2.91 ERA. He thought he was in good standing, but the fun was just starting. Though he was performing well, he was released in June. Desperate, Pettyjohn agreed to pitch for a team in Taiwan. He was two hours away from leaving for the airport when Oakland called to offer him a triple-A contract on July 13.

Pettyjohn pitched at Sacramento, where he posted a steady 3-2 record and 4.57 ERA in nine starts, but again, he proved he could shut down left-handed hitters, holding them to a .221 average in the Pacific Coast League, which is usually as friendly to pitchers as axe murderers are to the rest of us. Yet Oakland released him after the season and Milwaukee, which likes left-handers as much as the city likes beer, signed him and brought him to minor league camp.

Here Pettyjohn believes he has found encouraging surroundings. Minor League pitching coordinator Jim Rooney has told him that he will lend him to the big league club for spring training games when the opportunity is there. Veteran left-hander R.A. Dickey, also with the club on a minor league contract, told Pettyjohn that he thinks he could stick in the big leagues for a decade as a reliever because his slider is so effective against left-handed hitters. The Brewers have a history of promoting left-handers who perform. Pettyjohn hopes he will finally find that elusive combination of right person, right place, and right time. His confidence is evident, and finally, his body is equal to his ambition.

“I just want a solid, honest look and an opportunity to get back to the big leagues,” he said. “I thought I had that with Seattle last year and the all-star break came and it showed that I wasn’t getting the look that I thought I was getting. That was last year, this is this year. So to me, this is about proving myself. There’s not a doubt in my mind that I can pitch in the big leagues again.”

Believe Pettyjohn when he tells you that this path is not complete. He trusts in the plan, and it’s hard to tell him otherwise. He’s already bounced back far more times than anyone with a rotator cuff scar on their shoulder blade has ever had to. Ask the question a thousand times. The answer is he is not yet finished.