Lost jewel revealed as rough diamond

By the time Hollywood got around to making a film of Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel The Natural, baseball people would tell you, it was already obsolete. The notion that a gifted athlete could disappear into the netherworld, only to resurface well into his 30s, simply couldn't happen in an era of modern-day computerised scouting.

This, after all, is an age in which the name of any high school player who can hit a curve ball will occupy space on somebody's database. Scouts from major league organisations have been known to turn up in the stands at my town's Little League games, where they're presumably looking to steal a jump on the competition by being the first to spot a precocious 11-year-old shortstop.

In the more innocent time of Roy Hobbs, Malamud's fictional "natural", it was "finders keepers" when it came to scouting freelance talent. A team could sign its "discovery" and maintain him as a chattel for years to come. The annual June draft has eliminated much of the intrigue, as has the advent of free agency. Today, most organisations pool scouting information, and a baseball club can sign an amateur prospect off the street only if he hasn't been drafted by anyone else.

It is largely in the hope of finding one of these diamonds in the rough that major league teams continue to employ "bird-dog" scouts at all.

When the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were founded as an expansion club five years ago, one of the team's first moves was to engage the services of former Philadelphia scouting director Doug Gassaway. Gassaway, in turn, hired a "bird-dog" scout named Benny Latino, assigning him the territories of Louisiana and East Texas.

During one of their early meeting, Latino recalled to Gassaway having several years earlier watched an incredible 12-year-old ballplayer he described as "the greatest Little Leaguer I've ever seen".

Latino had watched for years, hoping the youngster would surface on the roster of some local high school, but he seemed to have disappeared without a trace.

A year or two ago, as he made his spring rounds through the Bayou country, Latino began to hear stories of a strapping young fellow who was making a name for himself playing weekend baseball in what was described as a "beer and crawfish" league, made up primarily of 30- and 40-year-olds, down in the sugar-cane country.

When he decided to go have a look for himself, Greg "Toe" Nash turned out to be the Little League phenomenon he had recalled seeing a half-dozen years earlier.

Nash, it turned out, had dropped out of school in the eighth grade, and never played organised baseball again, which explained why he had disappeared from the game's radar screen. By baseball standards, he did not exist.

By now he had grown to 6 ft 6 in and weighed 225 lb (16 st 1 lb). Latino persuaded Nash to come north for a workout. He watched the 18-year-old Nash play against the Rays' Appalachian League affiliate, and only one question remained on his mind: where to play him?

Like Hobbs, Malamud's mythical creation, Nash was a pitcher (Latino clocked his fastball at 95 m.p.h.), but he also hit towering home runs, one from each side of the plate, that afternoon. All that was missing was the hand-hewn bat Roy Hobbs called "Wonderboy".

Since Nash was 18 and had not been drafted, the Devil Rays were able to sign him straight away, which they did. The $30,000 signing bonus may have been paltry by today's standards, but for Nash, who was living in poverty with his girlfriend, Charlene Suttle, and her two children, it seemed a fortune.

In short order he had acquired an agent, was dispatched to Florida to work out with the team's Instructional League club, and is due to report for spring training in a few weeks. The most talked-about rookie in years, his Cinderella tale has already been the subject of numerous magazine and television profiles.

But a tale that seems too good to be true probably is, and within the last few days Toe Nash's rags-to-riches story has sprouted some serious blemishes.

Nash might have disappeared from baseball's radar screen for six years, but for most of that time he had remained highly visible on that of the local constabulary. The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported last Sunday that Nash had been arrested five times in the past 10 months alone.

Three of the arrests were for drugs (marijuana) and motor vehicle infractions; another stemmed from a domestic dispute in which he and Ms Suttle had filed charges and counter-charges.

(Neither, evidently, was that blissful little relationship all it was cracked up to be. As Philadelphia Daily News scribe Bill Conlin recounted yesterday: "Toe Nash was living in a trailer with his girlfriend. Not that there was anything wrong with that, of course. The kid turned 18 last February. His girlfriend also turned 18. In 1978, that is. She is now 41.")

The fifth charge against Nash could be more troublesome: according to the Ascension Parish sheriff's department, he and an accomplice badly beat a man and then robbed him as he lay in the street, choking on his own blood.

Nash had to go to court and obtain permission to attend a hitting camp in California this week. The judge allowed him to make the journey, but only after the Devil Rays accepted responsibility for delivering him back to the jurisdiction. The case, in which he is charged with felony robbery, has yet to come to trial, but the latter-day "natural" faces up to seven years if convicted. So much for the "can't-miss" prospect.