“Oh tell me why, there are no alibis.” – Sammy Hagar

I have a new favorite New York Yankees’ baseball player.

He’s no relation to Sammy Hager, and trust me, I don’t like using the words “favorite” and “Yankees” in the same sentence together either. I’ve never been a fan of the Bronx Bombers, but today I will make an exception for one solitary player in pinstripes. With no apologies whatsoever to those of you who want to hail Aaron Judge or love robo-pitcher Gerrit Cole or are mesmerized by the bulging biceps of Giancarlo Stanton, my favorite Yankee is a six-foot-four slender, sidewinding southpaw pitcher named Tim Hill.

Who?

If you’re a Yankees fan, then you know. If you don’t, Hill is a middle innings to late innings reliever the Yankees deploy for an inning or so in tight games, many times to face tough opposing left handed hitters. But the toughest left handed hitters don’t compare to the nasty heater the game of life has already thrown at Tim Hill. The toughest left handed hitters don’t hit as hard as cancer, and Hill knows. Losing a father at any age is tough, and Hill lost his father to colon cancer when he was only 17.

Tim Hill was a decent baseball player, and I use the word “decent” because his best scholarship offer to play after pitching for Granada Hills Charter High School in Los Angeles was Palomar Community College in San Marcos. Not exactly SEC baseball. He only played at PCC one year before bouncing to another junior college in Colorado. That short stint didn’t work out and he found himself back home and working for a local moving company before being persuaded to take another stab at baseball.

He joined Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma for two seasons where he pitched admirably enough earning NAIA All-American honorable mention. It was good enough to draw the attention of the Kansas City Royals, who drafted him in 2014 with the 963rd pick in the 32nd round. The MLB draft is now only 20 rounds if that tells you anything. At 25 years of age, Hill was the oldest player selected in the first year player draft so not much was expected of him, and just a short time later Hill was dealt another blow.

Nine months after being drafted, and nine years after his father had passed, Tim Hill was diagnosed with colon cancer.

The doctors removed half of his colon and put him on eight months of chemo. By the time he had completed eight months, the six foot four Hill had dropped to 150 pounds. He was given a clean bill of health in January 2016 and began working himself back into baseball shape. He gained 65 pounds in two and a half months and was back in minor league camp a year after his diagnosis.

In 2016 and 2017, he spent good chunks of time with the Northwest Arkansas Naturals, a AA affiliate of the Royals located about five miles from my house in Springdale, Arkansas. There’s a good chance I even saw Tim Hill pitch at some point during one of those seasons, but I don’t specifically remember him. He earned a spot on the Royals’ 40 man roster in November of 2017 which earned an auto invite to spring training. Hill made the Royals major league opening day roster and promptly made an inauspicious debut with the Royals on opening day, March 29, 2018, by hitting the first batter he ever faced in the major leagues, the Chicago White Sox’ Leury Garcia.

From there, Hill was traded to the San Diego Padres in July of 2020. Hill became a free agent in 2023 and signed a one year deal with the White Sox before being released on June 18th this season following a 5.87 ERA with 13 strikeouts in 23 innings. Two days later the Yankees signed him, and four months later Hill may be the surprise of a shaky Yankees relief staff that has done just enough (as of this writing) to put them on the verge of a trip to the World Series. A career 3.99 ERA pitcher, Hill’s ERA is a career-best 2.05 over 44 innings pitched since joining the Yankees.

Whether he’s pitching over his head right now, or he’s just figuring things out in a Yankees uniform, one thing has become apparently true to me. Where can I get a Tim Hill jersey?

“Winner takes it all
‘Til he breaks the fall
In time, he’ll make it over the top”

In 1987, Giorgio Moroder was hired to be the music supervisor of a Sylvester Stallone movie called “Over the Top.”

The phrase “over the top” refers to an arm wrestling technique used to gain leverage against your opponent. It’s also a term for a traditional baseball pitcher who’s mechanics of throwing a baseball are sometimes referred to as throwing over the top. Tim Hill is not your traditional pitcher. Tim Hill is not your traditional baseball player. He’s a sidewinder, a submarine style pitcher. A pitcher that releases the ball at a point and angle many players are not accustomed to seeing, because there aren’t many big league pitchers that throw like he does. Hill doesn’t run a triple digit fastball by hitters. In fact, he has a very average to below average fastball usually topping out in the low 90’s. He has some good breaking balls, but more than anything he’s fun to watch and he’s fun to cheer for.

“Hey
You listen when I say
There’s a dream
Oh, that’s coming true today, yeah”

Moroder offered today’s song to then Van Halen lead singer Sammy Hagar after original choice, Asia’s John Wetton didn’t sound “mean enough” when he sang it. The song made a little noise on the U.S. Rock Tracks chart (#3), but only peaked at #54 on the Billboard Top 100.

If you’ve never seen this Stallone movie that bounces somewhere between a father-son action drama and an anthem for the world of arm wrestling, then do yourself a favor and watch it sometime. You’ll need some intestinal fortitude to survive the first part of the movie, because the kid in the movie is about as annoying as any kid in any movie ever made, and this is not Stallone’s finest work, but at least you get a decent payoff when it hits the arm wrestling championships in the latter half of the movie. And how many movies have you ever watched with arm wrestling subject matter in it? Ok then.

In the meantime, with a little help from Sly, here is the video with some footage from the movie for the song, “Winner Takes it All”…

Thanks for reading, check out Tim Hill pitching for the Yankees before the season ends, and just remember: “The world meets nobody halfway. When you want something, you gotta take it”

sincerely,

the80s