Rewind to this time one year ago and life looked very different for former Fowler High School (Colo.) Grizzlies standout Luke Hochevar.
On Oct. 30, 2014, following a full year off from playing baseball after tearing his UCL during spring training, Hochevar was a free agent. The team he’d spent his entire professional career with, the Kansas City Royals, had just given him the green light to shop his wares. The news came one day after the Royals had just lost a heartbreaking Game 7 of the World Series to Madison Bumgarner and the San Francisco Giants. Hochevar, a member of the Royals organization since 2006, was looking at a future that might not include the only big league team he’d ever known – one he’d been with though times both very bad and finally very good.
One year later, as the clock turned over from Nov. 1 to Nov. 2, 2015, Hochevar was pitching two innings of no-hit relief for Kansas City in extra innings of Game 5 of the World Series. When the Royals broke out for five runs in the top of the 12th inning, Hochevar was about to become the pitcher of record in the deciding game of Kansas City’s first world title in 30 years.
“This is what you dream about when you’re a little boy,” Hochevar told Kansas City’s KMBC following the game. Those dreams chase all the way back to the small town of Fowler – population 1,169 as of 2013 – in Otero County in southeast Colorado.
Hochevar was born in Denver, but Fowler probably seemed like the big city compared to where he spent most of his youth. Even further east than Fowler is Wiley, Colo., where the Hochevar family raised Luke along with a brother and sister, before high school. Wiley, which is just out side Lamar, Colo., is less than an hour drive from the Kansas border and less than 100 miles from the Oklahoma border (yes, Oklahoma borders Colorado).
How small is Wiley? There were more people in the first twenty rows of the section above the Royals dugout at Citi Field in New York on Sunday night than there were registered as residents of Wiley, Colo. in 2013. And through the move from Wiley to Fowler, and then eventually on to the University of Tennessee where he won 15 games and set a school record for strikeouts as a junior, that dream never went away.
Even last year, after he had been thankfully re-signed by the Royals on a two-year deal that would keep him in their bullpen, the dream remained intact.
“When you first get drafted, that’s your vision, that’s what you see yourself doing, pitching in the World Series,” he told the Kansas City Star in January.
Hochevar carried that dream through the down times that began his career in Kansas City (a combined 277 team losses from 2007 to 2009) and all the way to the very difficult 2014 season, personally, as his team finally broke through and made it to the World Series where he was resigned to watch from the bench as he recovered from Tommy John surgery.
“…I’d rather experience what we experienced last year like I did, then never experience it healthy,” he told the Star. “If my role was to put on my pom poms every night and lose my voice, so be it. It was the stinking World Series.”
Sure, it stunk that he wasn’t playing. But Hochevar remained positive, and that positivity finally paid off in the biggest possible way. The importance of Sunday night’s victory, and of Hochevar’s role in it, was not lost on Royals manager Ned Yost.
“I couldn’t have written a better script than ‘Hoch’ getting a win for this game,” he said in his postgame press conference, “after everything he’s been through … I’m extremely proud…”
The town of Fowler, where Hochevar was the 2A player of the year, three-time all-state selection and four-time academic all-state standout, as well as an all-state player in basketball, has to be extremely proud, as well.
