You could not play major league baseball. Not a chance. Not on your best day, in your nicest pair of shoes, after eating a completely balanced breakfast.

In fact, no one you know, or have ever known, is good enough to play baseball in the majors. Jeff Weaver could pitch left-handed and make you look like Billy Crystal. Juan Pierre would deposit your most intently-hurled fastball on the moon. Barriers to entry are high in this market for the majestically gifted. What’s all the more fascinating is the fact that pretty much every AAA player who’s never so much as sniffed a major league bench could dominate you as well. Such is the nature of professional baseball- the entire spectrum of talent, from the lowliest pinch runner to the most accomplished of superstars, is contained within but a few small percentage points on some unseen scale. Those percentage points just happen to be a great many standard deviations away from wherever you sit reading this. A quarter of an inch closer here, a tenth of a second faster there: it’s what separates Alfonso Soriano from Izzy Alcantara, and Izzy from you and everyone you’ve ever played wiffle ball with.

There are, of course, a great many men who have charged brazenly across the talent divide with total disregard for the fact that they do not actually belong on the big show’s greener pastures. They are gunned down by turrets the guard towers eventually, but as for how far they make it, there is considerable variation in the experiences of these not-quite-good-enoughs. The clock runs out on most in about the time it takes for a scouting report to be published. Can’t hit the slider. Susceptible to fastballs on the hands. Change-ups are an absolute adventure.

Some men, though, are able to eke out a bit more from their brief journey through the majors than others. Kenneth Eugene Harvey – all 6′2″, 250lbs of him – was one of those men. Harvey began his trek towards the majors like most others do: by hitting the ball prodigiously throughout high school and college. He was by all accounts an extremely gifted college player, and in his senior year at Nebraska led the nation in hitting at .478, which included 23 homers and a 23/38 K/BB ratio. That got him a fifth-round selection by the Royals in that summer’s draft. He’d go on to hit .328 in the minors from 1999-2002 before breaking camp with the Royals in 2003; they had lost 100 games in 2002, and really had no business keeping a young .300 hitter off the squad, regardless of who or what they thought he might eventually become. Harvey hit .266 in 485 at-bats as a 1B/DH for a Royals club that bunted, blooped, and stole their way to a miraculous 83-79 record.

The following year, the team got back to being miserable (58-104), and in late June traded their best player, Carlos Beltran, to the Houston Astros. Beltran was set to be an All-Star but, having been traded in the middle of balloting, was told that he could not play for the AL, nor could he be placed on the NL ballot (he was named as an injury replacement on the NL team anyways). This left the Royals without an All-Star; Harvey, batting .330 at the break, was tabbed as the team’s obligatory representative. He even got into the game: in the 3rd inning, with the bases loaded and one out, Harvey struck out on an 87mph Randy Johnson slider, an outcome which Channel 6 News in Lawrence, Kansas called “fitting.”

Harvey’s decline had already begun, though. From the first of July forward, he hit just .235 with 13 extra-base hits while missing time with a strained ribcage and sprained knee. Opposing pitchers had caught up to him, and finding himself unable to catch back up, he scuffled badly. He’d also accomplish what those who witnessed it reckoned to be a major-league first: while playing first base against the Padres at Petco, in a 4-4 game in the bottom of the 8th, Khalil Greene hit a sacrifice fly to Royals right-fielder Matt Stairs. Stairs caught the ball and fired a throw home down the first base line – Harvey, caught up in the moment, had turned his back to Stairs and was, on bent knee, watching Kerry Robinson attempt to tag. Stairs’ throw wound up drilling Harvey directly in the back; stunned, the portly Harvey slowly keeled over and dropped to the infield grass in pain, leaving Graffanino to jog over and retrieve the baseball. The Royals lost the game 5-4.

There was little left to mystery following that 2004 season. Harvey managed a .287/.338/.421 line on the year, but everyone understood just how inflated with early-season singles those totals actually were. For a big man, he had no power. He was an average defensive first baseman at best and had little to no plate discipline. Being the miserable organization that they were, the Royals had entire minor league rosters filled with mediocre first-basemen with bad backs, and in 2005, he lost his job to Calvin Pickering, a behemoth of a man (6′5″, 275lbs) who could do neither the things that Harvey did right (hit singles) or the things that he did wrong (everything else). The Royals went through three managers that year, lost 106 games, and only had 2 players reach 500 at-bats, one of which was Angel Berroa, who walked 18 times in 159 games. Harvey would see a little action – 45 at-bats – but could turn just 10 of those into hits. He started on May 18th against Bruce Chen and the Baltimore Orioles. In the bottom of the 8th, facing Steve Kline, he grounded back to the pitcher; he was placed on the DL on May 22nd, and would never again appear in a major league game.

He latched on with the Twins organization in 2007, but did absolutely nothing in just 10 games and that fall opted for free agency. With no major league organizations interested in his services, he signed on at age 30 with the Kansas City T-Bones of the Independent Northern League where, at last check, he was hitting .275 with a nifty .310 on-base percentage. As an added note of great personal humor to me, I discovered that Harvey’s newest teammate with the T-Bones is none other than Westfield, MA native and Northeastern University alumnus Bobby Carrington, a big right-hander who went 1-8 with a 6.85 ERA over three years with the Huskies. Carrington just recently graduated, and not only did I frequently observe him stalking around campus by himself early in the evenings, he also took a writing course with a girl I know who wanted desperately to sleep with him. She managed to be as successful toward those ends as Carrington was on the mound – which is to say, not at all. She remains in a slump, and he’s currently throwing pickoff throws to Ken Harvey at CommunityAmerica ballpark.

Last Sunday, Harvey hit a game-winning solo blast for the T-Bones in the top of the 9th against the Schaumberg Flyers at the tail end of a 6-game road trip. They start a homestand today against the Fargo-Moorehead RedHawks, and according to those around him, Harvey still aspires to get back to the Majors. For what it’s worth, he is almost certainly a helpful presence in the T-Bones clubhouse, and serves as an unmistakable reminder to his teammates of everything that’s possible, for better or for worse, in this silly world. Harvey lives with his family in Kansas City and, now clearly heavier than he was during his younger days, has little chance at making it back to the bigs.

Such is life, Ken. Many things are given and many are taken away. He’s had two knee scopes, and were he able to avoid an injury here or there, he might still be getting 300 at-bats a year for some major league squad. Fate, though, is unconditional; he was destined to play the role he did, in front of the eyes of those who cared to watch, now and forever. A poor major leaguer and a wholly undeserving All-Star, Harvey did more in the game than thousands before him, and accomplished more than what many after him will aspire to. We all have good days and bad days, and were the lot of us reducible to averages and percentages, we’d be able to look back on our times and pick out the unequivocally best of them. For baseball players, the task is a bit easier. It’s possible that Ken Harvey’s best days had nothing to do with baseball, but as a 30-year old playing in front of a few thousand people every night, that seems somewhat unlikely.

For good measure, here’s an incomplete list of the things that the big guy accomplished in his 271-game major league career:

  • Faced Randy Johnson with the bases loaded in an All-Star Game
  • Singled off Tim Wakefield
  • Doubled off Johan Santana, Rich Harden, Roy Halladay, and C.C. Sabathia
  • Homered off Jake Peavy, Kenny Rogers, and B. J. Ryan
  • Hit a home run in Yankee Stadium
  • Hit a walk-off home run on an 0-2 count against a major league closer (Brian Anderson)
  • Hit a grand slam
  • Hit a triple
  • Had 10 game-winning RBI in your first season, tied for sixth all-time among rookie first-basemen
  • From 2003-2004, led the majors with home runs on an 0-2 count (8)
  • On June 15, 2004, was leading the majors in batting average (.361)
  • Had a 15-game hitting streak
  • Stole three bases

What have YOU done lately?