![]() ![]() The fourth time, Sean acquiesces and throws what the receiver wants. On one pitch during spring training with the Stompers, Sean shakes off the catcher three times, but he keeps putting down the same sign. ![]() Even if the batter reads the catcher’s mind, he’ll still be surprised when Sean does something different. In other words, Sean considers the catcher a proxy for the hitter: The catcher is trying to outthink the batter, but the batter is alert to the danger of being outthought. “My line that I told my catcher last year is, ‘I like when you call pitches, because you confirm to me what the hitter’s thinking I’m going to throw,’ ” Sean says. (“The slider’s the one I like,” I hear him remind his battery mate Andrew Parker, semi-sarcastically, before a game.) But he still wants his catchers to call pitches, because he can learn from their suggestions even if he rejects them. “I always know what I want to throw, and it’s difficult for the catcher to be thinking along the same lines as me,” he says. No one else on the Stompers’ staff shakes off signs as often. Sean approaches pitching with the same studious desire to stay one step ahead. After one white-knuckle game, he tells me that he tries to bring the intensity of our Smash showdowns out to the mound. He likes playing me, he says, because he can’t tell what my next move will be. Sean is the best of the Stompers at Smash-pro gaming is his backup plan if baseball doesn’t pan out-but I’m a match for him, thanks to the countless hours I logged as a kid instead of practicing sports. The Stompers’ N64 is always on, from the moment the clubhouse opens to the time when the players start to toss in foul territory before first pitch. Every successful attack drives up an opponent’s damage counter, and the higher the damage counter climbs, the farther a character flies after subsequent attacks-not unlike pitchers, who get hit harder the deeper they go into games. It’s a four-player brawler that pits well-known Nintendo characters against one another in a battle to knock everyone else off the edges of an arena suspended in the sky. I discover Sean’s interest in tactics when we bond over Super Smash Bros., the 1999 Nintendo 64 game that’s spawned three sequels and a fierce professional Smash circuit. He was three credits short of a degree, but professional baseball wouldn’t wait. A few days later, he moved out of the Phi Kappa Tau frat house and set off for Sonoma. 1 team in all of Division III baseball-and took a tough-luck loss, allowing two earned runs over seven innings but exiting with a 6–5 deficit after his defense committed three errors behind him. And two days later, he started against State University of New York at Cortland-the No. ![]() In RPI’s next game, on May 13, he earned a four-out save in a 2–0 victory over Keystone College. On May 9-the next day-he came out of the bullpen to close out a 10–5 win over the Rochester Institute of Technology in the second game of a doubleheader sweep, throwing 20 pitches in 1 ⅔ scoreless innings to send the Engineers to the NCAA Division III Regional Tournament. ![]() On May 8, he started for Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the Liberty League Tournament and beat the University of Rochester, throwing 106 pitches over 7 ⅓ innings. Less than a week earlier, he had been on the mound at Falcon Park in Auburn, New York, trying to take the Rensselaer Engineers to a title. How could a just-turned-23-year-old who was about to become a trailblazer be worried about a bus? “He was so busy, I don’t think he had time to think about ,” Terry says. “And then the next text was, ‘My ride left without me, so I took the bus anyway.’ It was a good experience for him, figuring it out on his own.” “I told him to take a bus to Petaluma, and he was reading online how to get to the bus, and then he texted me when he got there and he said, ‘My ride’s here,’ ” Terry Conroy says. The only thing Sean was “just a little bit apprehensive about,” his mother, Terry, recalls, was how he was going to get from San Francisco International Airport to Sonoma, the last 65 miles of his cross-country trip. ![]()
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