Learning a new delivery — Former Bear takes on offseason challenge

There have been times during Ian Harrington’s pitching career when he’s been victimized by a bad-hop single.

The Yakima Bears' Ian Harrington in an Aug. 5, 2008 game against Boise at Yakima County Stadium. (ANDY SAWYER/Yakima Herald-Republic)

Or he’s thrown a 3-2 pitch on a corner and didn’t get the call, or when he’s thrown exactly the pitch he wanted to throw exactly where he wanted to throw it, and the ball still has been hit out of the park.

Many have been the lessons through which Harrington, a 23-year-old left-hander who performed last season for the Bears, has learned that neither baseball nor life is necessarily fair.

And now he’s trying to pass those on to youngsters who have long struggled with some of life’s harsh realities.

“We work with kids who have various forms of autism, dyslexia, ADD (attention deficit disorder) and different emotional and behavioral disorders,” said Harrington, who’s spending his offseason at Meeker Middle School in the Kent School District. “We spend four to five periods a day in the classroom with them and we deal with different topics each period — from math to current events to other subjects.

“There are certain situations where a student might have to be removed for acting out or because his temper will take over. Sometimes we have to restrain a student, and sometimes we have to use different forms of discipline to get them back on track and into the mainstream — which is our goal. The goal is to get them back into mainstream classes, and it’s a lot of fun to see that happen.”

Not that it always does. Just as Harrington doesn’t always return to the dugout having posted a goose-egg when he pitches an inning.

But they’re kids, so the battle is well worth waging.

Youth counseling was nothing Harrington studied at either Bellevue Community College or the University of Hawaii. But he had coached youth basketball, baseball and flag football teams, and saw working with kids a preferable option to construction.

“I was just beating up my body,” Harrington said, “and I wasn’t enjoying the elements I was working in.”

So last year, after pitching his first professional season for Yakima, he worked for the Kent district in various capacities. Some days he’d serve as a teacher’s aid, some days he’d tutor kids.

This year Harrington is working at the same school he attended before going on to Kentridge High School.

And though he professes a love for working with kids, he acknowledges the physical and emotional demands of his efforts.

There are days, Harrington admits, when he’d rather not go to work, just as there have been days in which he’d prefer to stay away from the ballpark.

He has had to follow a student across campus when the student refused to return to his classroom, for example. He has had to restrain students.

The school has a de-escalation room for angry students to cool off in, and for more severe cases a room that’s padded for, as Harrington put it, “their own safety.”

“There are days,” he said, “where I feel like just walking away, where I say to myself, ‘You know, I don’t know if I’m going to feel like going in tomorrow.’ But also there have been days when I’ve been standing in the outfield shagging flies during batting practice, and I think, ‘Man, I can’t wait to get out of here.’

“But then you put it all in perspective. You say to yourself, ‘Wait a minute, I’m playing baseball and I’m getting paid for it.’ And you consider yourself lucky and you move on.”

Harrington was more than lucky last season for the Bears, especially during the latter stages. After working with pitching coach Dan Carlson to add a cut fastball to his arsenal, he won five of his last seven decisions to finish 6-6 with a team-best 4.12 earned-run average.

Accordingly, Harrington will continue his counseling until he reports to Arizona Diamondbacks spring training in March.

Beyond baseball he plans a career in law enforcement, first as a major-city patrolman and later, possibly, as an FBI or Drug Enforcement Administration agent.

But first things first.

“There are a lot of connections between sports and life, and the connection for me and this particular job would be the arguments or fights in the clubhouse,” Harrington said. “I’m not going to lie and say everybody on a team gets along.

“But one of the things we’re trying to show our kids is that if you have a disagreement or get angry with someone, there are ways to go about fixing it rather than punching them in the face. Or if you have a problem with someone, you can swallow that and still be friends.”

And work your way through difficult circumstances and/or periods in your life, just as Ian Harrington can pitch his way through a bases-loaded jam.
• Roger Underwood can be reached at 577-7694 or runderwood@yakimaherald.com