Saturday, February 11, 2017
Player agent Elwood P. Dowd gave Astros GM Jeff Luhnow an oil painting of himself with his top pitching prospect, Harvey Pucca, yesterday. The painting now hangs in Luhnow’s office, while he mulls whether the Astros have any interest in signing the guy that some are now already calling “The Rapid Rabbit.”
Baseball agent Elwood P. Dowd dropped by the office of Astros General Manager Jeff Luhnow on Saturday to see if he could interest the Houston AL club in the services of a rookie starting pitcher by the name of Harvey Pucca.
“Let me give you an original oil painting of Harvey and me for your walls, while you’re thinking about it, Mr. Luhnow,” Dowd blithely continued during the early moments of his spiel. “After you see Harvey throw some of his stuff down there on the floor of MMP in a short while, the painting will help you remember who you were watching. It should also give you pause to think: ‘Wait a minute! The long-eared tall guy in the painting upstairs is the real painter here! He can find any corner of the strike zone that the worst umpires can also see – and without the help of an attached GPS!’.”
Harvey Pucca showed his stuff to Luhnow, all right. His repertoire includes:
- a moving fastball that approaches 97 MPH on average. (“That Pucca fast ball had more hop on it than any pitch I’ve ever seen on a right-pawed rookie starter prospect,” Luhnow said. As a matter of clarification, Luhnow pointed out later that Harvey Pucca was also the first right-pawed pitcher he had ever seen.)
- a 92 MPH slider that Dowd has tagged as Pucca’s “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah” pitch.” (“At the very moment this pitch reaches the plate and the batter thinks it’s going to ‘Zip-A-Dee-Du-Dah’ at the last second,” Dowd says, “the ball ‘Zip-A-Dee-A’s’ instead – and the batter’s swing misses it by a mile.”)
- an 80 MPH change of speed pitch that leaves the “paw” looking and feeling to the batter exactly like a 97 MPH fastball that is heading for the center of the plate. (Nuf sed.)
“Young Harvey here has an interesting philosophy about his pitching style,” agent Dowd also explained to Luhnow. “He calls his approach a variation on the old “Carrot and Stick” philosophy. Harvey thinks of the ball as the carrot and, of course, the bat as the stick. It’s the batter’s goal to make sure that the bat and the ball meet early and often in each game. It’s the pitcher’s goal, of course, to either keep them from meeting at all, or more practically, to get the batter to only hit balls that have a greater chance of becoming playable outs as ground balls or short distance fly balls.”
Harvey also communicated through Dowd that he has other pitches he could add to the mix, but that right now he’s confident that the three that are present in his current playbook are enough to get the job done by a country mile.
Is there a chance that the Astros might take a chance on a talented out-of-the-blue mythical creature like Harvey Pucca in 2017?
Jeff Luhnow told us that he was impressed by what he saw in Harvey Pucca, but he quickly added that he needed to take some time to think about whether the Astros’ current needs for superior starting pitching were worth the risk of using money to sign an unproven, and, yes, legendary talent like Harvey Pucca.
Let’s hope for the best on this one, Astros fans.
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Publisher, Editor, Writer
The Pecan Park Eagle
Houston, Texas
The Pecan Park Eagle 
February 12, 2017 at 3:51 pm |
There might be a problem actually getting to “see” Harvey unless you are as pure in heart as Elwood P. Dowd. The “rabbit’s” name comes from the Irish word, puca, which means spirit or ghost.
We like to think of Harvey as a local, created by Mary Coyle Chase in her home at 532 W. 4th Avenue in Denver’s Baker Historic Neighborhood–Harvey’s birthplace, so to speak.