In the spring of 2008, Pat Murphy worried about the state of his prominent baseball program at Arizona State. Too many of the players he and his coaching staff recruited, he found, were wonderful athletes — "Tarzans," he said — who could not actually hit.
"Can't we find some short, red-headed, short-armed guy?" he asked in a staff meeting. "I've never seen a short, red-headed, short-armed guy playing that can't hit."
"They all laughed, of course," Murphy recalled. "It was tongue-in-cheek. But my point was that sometimes the guys that look like major leaguers aren't, and the guys who are don't.