Thobe Makes Most of Second Chance : Baseball: Former Edison High and Golden West pitcher is back in the minor leagues with a different attitude.

Four years ago, Tom Thobe made a decision that would forever change his life. He faced a grave question, a case of giving up something very dear for the chance to pursue a long-time dream:

Should he continue to play professional baseball, even if it meant he could no longer ride his skateboard?

Now Thobe (pronounced TOBY) grew up in Huntington Beach and went to Edison High and Golden West College--unless, of course, the waves were good--and a skate-or-die tenet was deeply ingrained.

On one hand, he had taken a $30,000 signing bonus from the Chicago Cubs and endured a summer sans surf with the club’s rookie league team in Wytheville, Va. That alone was akin to your parents moving you to Riverside.

Now, team officials were saying that riding his skateboard was prohibited by a no-high-risk-sports clause in his contract.

Man, these dudes were just plain unreasonable.

“I was skateboarding around town, but only as a means of transportation,” he said. “I wasn’t getting radical or anything. It wasn’t like I was out doing berms or something. I was just going straight, to the local Wendy’s or whatever.”

After much deliberation, Thobe decided to stick by his principles.

He quit baseball, came home, rode his skateboard, rode his surfboard, dabbled in drugs, made sandwiches at Subway and got arrested for stealing cassette tapes from K mart. Ah, the wisdom of youth.

Fans of the Macon (Ga.) Braves shouldn’t be surprised if Thobe drops down on his knees and kisses the mound at Luther Williams Field one of these nights.

At 23, four years after walking away from the game, Thobe’s baseball career has been resuscitated and he knows he’s a very lucky man. Pitchers who quit the rookie leagues and don’t touch a baseball for three years aren’t exactly what the scouts are looking for.

“I’m just so stoked to be here,” he said. “I see baseball in a whole different light now and I really want to make the most of this. I just can’t believe how fortunate I am and I thank God every night.”

So he’s relishing every moment and making the most of his longshot shot. He’s 2-1 with a 2.38 earned-run average as the rookie league Braves’ primary left-handed reliever. In 22 2/3 innings, he has struck out 21, walked five and opponents are hitting .171 against him.

“You’d think that after all that time away from the game he would be very rusty, but he’s been incredibly sharp,” Brave Manager Randy Ingle said. “Every time I’ve called on him, he’s done an outstanding job.

“I think he has realized that the game can pass you by and you better concentrate and take care of yourself and give yourself your best chance when you get the chance.

“And he has a real chance to move up in this organization the way he’s throwing.”

Four years ago, Blanche Thobe was sure her son was throwing it all away.

“I remember my husband (Jack) telling him, ‘We’ll support you in this, but we want you to know you’re making the biggest mistake of your life,”’ she said. “All that wonderful talent God gave him going to waste.”

But she knew in her heart--and she could see in her son’s eyes--that he had probably made the right decision.

“He came to me and said, ‘Mom, if I go back there, I’m going to lose my mind.’ And, to tell you the truth, when he walked off that plane, I felt like the whole world had been lifted off of my shoulders. He was very, very unhappy there.

“He was just too young. He was only 19. He was intimidated by the older players and pro ball and he just wasn’t ready to handle it.”

Thobe began the season at Wytheville as a starting pitcher and his ERA halfway through the season was hovering around 16.00. He couldn’t throw a strike with his curve. He was walking a lot of batters. And fastballs and walks are a lethal combination.

He wasn’t having any better success dealing with life in the minors.

“I was real nervous and I let the idea of pro ball just get me, just eat me up,” he said. “Then they moved me to the bullpen and that turned the whole season around. I finally got control of all my pitches.

“But I really missed the beach and the whole beach lifestyle. I was young and rebellious and when they told me to stop skateboarding, I just sort of told them where to stick it and kept doing it. Everything was catching up with me and I was ready to get a full-time job and chuck it.”

Thobe stuck it out for the rest of the season, however, and returned for minor league training camp the next spring.

“They only let me pitch five innings in the spring and they were going to send me back to Wytheville,” he said. “I didn’t think I was getting a fair shake. I thought I was going to be buried in the system, so I quit.

“Looking back, I didn’t really want to be there and everyone knew it, so there was a lot of friction all around. And the main thing was, I just wanted to surf.”

Fred Hoover, the former Golden West College baseball coach, would prefer that his pitchers smell of resin bag than surf wax, but he tried to wring the saltwater out of Thobe for one season.

“Tom was always a pain in the ass that way,” Hoover said. “The lure of the waves was just too much for him to handle. We went way out of our way to get him to focus on school and the team.

“With most kids, you tell them to either get on the team or get off the team. I’ve been doing this for 37 years and I don’t know, with some guys you just go the extra yard. And for some reason, we became really good friends.”

Thobe had promised his parents he would go to college at least one year before signing, but attending class was never too high on his list. Blanche Thobe says school and Tom were an oil-and-water kind of mix. “He’s just sort of a free spirit,” she says.

Still, Hoover believes Thobe should have waited.

“I think signing was a mistake, but then isn’t it for almost all of them?” Hoover said. “This kid going from Huntington Beach to live in Virginia at 18 years old? C’mon.”

Hoover heard that Thobe had quit the Cubs, but for three years, he didn’t have any contact with him. Then, at a tryout at Orange Coast College, their paths crossed again.

“He was pretty rough around the edges, but his stuff wasn’t that bad,” Hoover said. “He said he wanted to get back in the game and that he was starting to throw a little bit.”

Hoover invited Thobe to pitch in a Golden West alumni game and later set up a tryout with Atlanta scout Steve Youngward. A wayward baseball career had been revived.

Thobe has abandoned his desire to become one with the ocean. He tried it once and realizes an occasional radical tube ride can’t make up for a life of tedium.

“When I first came home, I surfed all day and worked at night, making sandwiches,” he said. “I got into trouble, got arrested for shoplifting and trespassing and was messing around with drugs. Just making the wrong decisions.

“A couple years ago, I got a job at a reprographics company in Irvine, working in their Xerox room making copies all day. I was going nowhere.”

Then he met Jennifer Herrmann and all of sudden, he found himself thinking about something other than the size and direction of the current swell.

“I started thinking about the future, getting married and having a family and how I would support them,” he said. “I decided I should try to give baseball another try. So I sold my truck, lived off the profits from that for a couple of months and started working out real hard with my brother (J.J., a pitcher in the Cleveland organization).

“When I left the game, I always knew I’d go back one day. The time just wasn’t right for me then. I had to grow up.”

“Everyone else in the family said he would never go back, but I always held out hope,” Blanche Thobe said. “Then Jennifer became the catalyst and when he sold the truck, I knew he was serious, because he loved that truck. Still, there was the matter of how he was going to do it.

“You don’t know how many guys out there are trying for another chance.”

Thobe beat the odds and his luck held through the Braves’ minor league training camp, where his roommate was former major league pitcher Jim Acker.

Acker retired to his ranch in Texas before the season, but he didn’t disappear into the sunset before passing on some advice to Thobe.

“I know how to pitch now,” Thobe said. “Before, I just threw it. Jim taught me more than I could’ve learned in five years of pitching. We talked nonstop about pitching.

“He opened up a whole new world for me about the mental part of the game. And it’s something I wouldn’t have probably even listened to the first time I was in pro ball.”

Acker also taught Thobe how to throw a slider and the pitch has become the ace of his repertoire, which also includes a fastball, curve and changeup.

“He really knows how to pitch,” Ingle said. “He mixes his pitches real well and he’s just as tough on right-handed hitters as left-handed hitters.”

Blanche Thobe had a chance to see two of her sons in action during a recent South Atlantic League series between the Braves and the Columbus (Ga.) RedStixx. J.J., a starting pitcher for the RedStixx, was sitting with her behind home plate charting pitches and working the radar gun when Ingle signaled for his left-handed closer.

“It was so exciting,” she said. “Tom struck out a hitter with a really good slider and J.J. said, ‘Where did he come up with that ?’ And all his fastballs were up between 85 and 88 miles per hour. J.J. just couldn’t believe it.”

After the game, Tom was beaming, she said.

“I have never seen him as happy as he is right now.”

It may have taken some time, but it seems Tom Thobe has decided it’s more fun to play for the Braves than play in the waves.