By Alan Mathews
August 23, 2004

Devil Rays executives Bart Braun and Tim Wilken were on the road scouting minor leaguers before the July trade deadline, and they could hardly believe the player they had a shot at in the Eastern League.

Lefthander Scott Kazmir struck out seven that night in Binghamton, scattering five hits over seven dominant innings against New Britain and getting his second victory in his fourth Double-A start.

It would be the last time Kazmir appeared in a Mets uniform.

As the 20-year-old was warming up for his next start, Binghamton manager Ken Oberkfell pulled Kazmir aside.

"I was just starting to get stretched out and I get called up the office," Kazmir said. "Oberkfell said, 'You're not pitching today. You just got traded.'

"He's always kidding around, so I started laughing. Then I saw his face was serious and I didn't know what to think. It was a huge shock."

The Mets shipped Kazmir and righthander Joselo Diaz to the Devil Rays for big league starter Victor Zambrano and righthanded reliever Bartolome Fortunado.

Kazmir is just two years removed from being the 15th overall pick and Baseball America's High School Player of the Year. Now, he's set to make his major league debut against the Mariners tonight, as the Devil Rays called him up from Double-A Montgomery.

He has a career ERA of 2.41 and an electric arm and was the best prospect in the Mets organization. With New York in fourth place, seven games behind the Braves in the National League East on the day of the trade, it's reasonable that Kazmir had no inkling he might be changing organizations.

"There was nothing to lead up to it," Kazmir said. "Some of the other players, they pretty much knew it was going to happen. For me, it was out of the blue."

Daunting Debut

From the blue seats of Binghamton to the red-hot summer of the Southeast, Kazmir packed his bags for the Southern League. The Devil Rays assigned him to Montgomery, and he met the team on the road, arriving in Raleigh, N.C., the day after the deal and finding himself on the mound against the Carolina Mudcats a couple of hours later.

"I literally shook hands with him with one hand and handed him the ball with the other," Montgomery pitching coach Dick Bosman said.

Kazmir gutted his way through five scoreless innings that muggy afternoon, striking out eight. While everyone in baseball was trying to sort out the flurry of deals before the trade deadline, Kazmir was working his mid-90s fastball and plus slider in and out of the zone to pick up a win in his Devil Rays debut.

The resolve he showed that afternoon may have pleased the Rays more than his pitching line or his stuff. And no one has ever questioned his stuff.

Kazmir has been recognized as a rare arm since his sophomore year at Cypress Falls High in Houston. He was regarded as one of the best prospects in the 2002 draft, but he fell to the Mets because of his reported bonus demands. He signed for a relatively reasonable $2.15 million.

He had done little to tarnish his reputation since signing. He had a 2.33 career ERA coming into the season with 179 strikeouts in 127 innings. He had been bothered by minor, nagging injuries both this season and last, and Mets officials had to push him to work more diligently at times, but those seemed minor concerns. And the Devil Rays are confident the composure he's shown suggests his makeup is as sound as his stuff.

"I don't think there are a lot of roadblocks going into this other than what he needs to answer for how he (commits) personally," said Wilken, a special assistant to Rays general manager Chuck LaMar. "Everything has been fine that way, and I know that (the organization) is pretty darned pleased with what he's done there in four starts."

Kazmir had a 1.44 ERA in his first 25 innings with Montgomery, putting him at 4-5, 2.50 for the season between Montgomery, Binghamton and Class A St. Lucie. He had 104 strikeouts against 42 walks in 101 innings.

Trade Winds

The Mets tried to put a favorable spin on the deal after it was done, as Kazmir pitched well enough to put himself in line for a big league callup with the Rays and Zambrano went down with an elbow injury in his third start with the Mets.

Following the trade, Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson was quoted in several publications suggesting Kazmir's mechanics needed improvement. At barely 6 feet tall, Kazmir already fought questions about his durability. He had a tender elbow at the start of the 2003 season and an abdominal strain early this season, and the Mets handled him carefully, so he has never had a huge workload.

While Wilken points out that few 20-year-old pitchers have perfect deliveries, he says there's nothing in Kazmir's mechanics to suggest a future of arm problems.

"We didn't see anything alarming either mechanically or mentally," said Wilken, who previously worked with Peterson in the Blue Jays organization. "Scott Kazmir has gotten through a lot of things, so hopefully in his next steps he can handle (making adjustments) too.

"I just hope Rick Peterson's wrong this time."

Kazmir disputed that Peterson even made the criticisms attributed to him, and said he isn't worried about his mechanics regardless. Doctors analyzed his delivery at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham prior to this season, looking at the muscle strain and torque in his arm and upper body, and said he checked out fine.

"I don't think (Peterson) said that, to tell you the truth," Kazmir said. "Because when we were in Birmingham doing biomechanics with all that, he was saying he didn't want me to change anything and that my mechanics were pretty sound."

Sound enough to get him to the big leagues, anyway. LaMar and manager Lou Piniella all but said Kazmir would be in the big leagues by September, and Kazmir's debut in the major leagues will come tonight in Seattle.

"(LaMar) said, 'Keep doing what you're doing, we'll get you up there in September,' " Kazmir said. "But I'm not concentrating too much on that, just trying to pitch and whenever they decide it's time, it's time."

Kazmir likely will finish his tumultuous summer in a big league uniform. It will just be a different one than he (or almost anyone else) expected.