Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Columnist Ron Kantowski: Young Palo Verde pitcher is the real deal

Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.

These are what I like to call the "Jim McKay Days" for a local sports columnist. As in there's a wide world of sports stories out there worth telling, if you can just find them.

On Tuesday, one those stories was a winsome 16-year-old, blue-eyed blonde working on her suntan in the middle of a softball diamond in Summerlin. With the temperature pushing 100 degrees and the sleeves of her jersey rolled up in tank-top fashion, Palo Verde High's Lindsey Callaway was catching some serious rays.

She also was throwing some.

Callaway struck out 12 of the first 14 Mojave batters she faced. She was so dominant that when one of the Rattlers fouled one her rise balls into the screen, her teammates cheered.

With a 12-0 lead and just one strike away from a perfect game, a Palo Verde fan watching intently from a lawn chair called for a change-up. The Mojave hitter had fouled a couple of Callaway's good fastballs into the first-base dugout, and the spectator figured the batter, in that she was beginning her swing in the on-deck circle in an effort to catch up to Callaway's heater, would be a sitting duck for the off-speed stuff.

Lindsey Callaway should have listened to her old man.

She lost the perfect game and the no-hitter when she tried to sneak a riser over the outside corner and the Mojave kid lined it through the middle of the diamond for a clean single -- which is not that easy to do in prep softball, where the defense's grade point average is often higher than its fielding percentage.

The game ended on the next pitch when the runner, perhaps thinking that second base would be a better vantage point to witness the last strikeout of the game, was thrown out trying to steal.

Callaway's pitching line: 14 batters faced, 12 strikeouts, no walks, 1 hit allowed. She went to a full count only once. It was like Kerry Wood's coming out party against the Astros at Wrigley a couple of years ago.

But if Terry Callaway, Lindsey's father, was just a wee bit disappointed, it was because he has seen his only kid pitch even better. Like a week earlier against Cheyenne, when she fanned all 15 batters she faced for a perfect game.

Upon further review, forget Kerry Wood. When it comes to a pitching performance that dominant, I've got to go back to Bugs Bunny against those Redwood-swinging lumberjacks in the Looney Tunes League.

That was the reason I would get lost in Summerlin trying to find the ballpark. To be honest, I didn't know what I would find when I finally got there. If Cheyenne was the equivalent of the Bad News Bears before Buttermaker signed free agent Kelly Leak, then maybe 15 consecutive strikeouts weren't such a big deal. But perfection, regardless of the shape or form in which it comes, is usually worth checking out.

Observers of the local softball scene say there are probably four or five pitchers in town who are a little better than Callaway. But all are old enough to have been driving for a couple of years.

I made it to the bleachers as Callaway was completing her warm-up tosses, the last of which ripped through the webbing of the catcher's glove with a big puff of white smoke, which most likely was chalk dust.

I say most likely, because in that Callaway has been clocked at 63 mph on a radar gun, it's possible it could have been the real thing.

For a point of reference, Lisa Fernandez, perhaps the best softball pitcher in the world outside of the King (Eddie Feigner) and His Court, registers 70 mph on the gun. (Feigner, who is still touring nearing his 80th birthday, has been clocked at 104 mph).

In that Fernandez is 33, one way to look at it is Callaway has 17 years to add 7 mph to her high, hard one.

After the Mojave game, Callaway, who has been working on her windmill delivery for nearly as long as Don Quixote -- she began chucking the softball when she was 9 -- said Fernandez is her role model. Her goal is to follow Fernandez's cleat marks to UCLA and then, in a perfect world, to the USA Olympic team.

There's at least one guy in town -- besides her father -- who thinks that goal is realistic. Dan Alcoser, who has been working with Callaway since she was 9 and is her coach with the Las Vegas Outlaws touring summer league team, said his star pupil has the potential to one day go for the gold.

In that he also coached Fernandez, his opinion is not to be dismissed. The Olympic star was only 12 then -- too early to judge her rise ball, perhaps, but old enough to tell she was going to be something special.

He sees some of those same intangibles in Callaway.

"Lindsey is a worker," Alcoser said, noting Callaway's five-days-a-week, 12-months-a-year dedication to softball. "When it's cold outside, she's into it; when it's hot outside, she's into it. She works, this girl."

After the game, I asked Callaway is she was going to stay with it, what with having just turned 16 and received her driver's license, and if she thought it would be difficult balancing softball with being a teenager.

"No," she smiled bashfully as I teased her about boyfriends. "This comes over everything."

Although Callaway is the star of her young high school team, she seems to be handling the fame well. Palo Verde coach Jaime Ditto said that while it's obvious Callaway has the talent to be something special, she is just one of the girls with her teammates. She doesn't ask for special treatment, nor does she receive it.

Well, that's not entirely true.

When I asked Ditto if the team did anything special to honor Callaway's strikeout frenzy against Cheyenne, she admitted it had.

"She didn't have to pick up equipment that day," Ditto said.

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