He can laugh about it now, but when two professional scouts hovered around German Marquez that day in San Felix, the young Venezuelan with a gifted arm could sense his knobby knees were rattling.
“I was very nervous. I didn’t throw one strike,” he said, pointing in every direction but straight. “It was like zoom, boom, voom.” Marquez was just 14 years old but already flashing a knockout curveball and a fastball in the mid-80s. A professional career hung in front of him like a lure.
“It was always easy for me to throw hard,” he said.