The Werth family doesn’t mind if you call them
stupid, as long as it’s the right brand of stupid. “We’re
baseball stupid,” dad Dennis Werth says. “That was the only
thing I thought you could do in life.”
The mindset paid off last week when former Glenwood
High School baseball star Jayson Werth provided a crucial base hit to help
his teammates on the Philadelphia Phillies win the World Series on Oct. 29.
Jayson’s mom Kim Werth, contacted in Philadelphia on Thursday night,
called the ensuing celebration “the most amazing thing I’ve
ever seen.”
The Phillies beat the Tampa Bay Rays in the fifth
game of the series, at Citzens’ Bank Park in Philadelphia.
“I can’t even explain to you how cool it
was,” Kim says.
Yet, in another way, it’s almost business as
usual for the Werth family. Kim’s father and brother — Dick
“Ducky” Schofield and Dick Schofield — each have World
Series rings. The elder was on the 1960 championship Pittsburgh Pirates
team; Kim’s brother was on the 1993 championship Toronto Blue Jays
team. Jayson’s stepfather, Dennis, who raised Jayson from the age of
five, was a member of the 1981 American League champion New York Yankees.
“All the men in his life have World Series
experience,” Kim says. “I wouldn’t say it’s normal,
but it’s kinda what we do. I just grew up going to ballparks and I
just thought that’s what you do. You’re supposed to be good.
It’s what you see, it’s what you get used to, and it’s
your mental approach.”
The females in the family don’t exactly sit on
the sidelines. Kim was a track star at Southeast High School, winning state
titles in the long jump and two sprinting events, and competing in the 1976
Olympic Trials. Kim and Dennis’ older daughter, Hillary, received a
track scholarship from University of California at Los Angeles, where she
competes in the heptathlon. Little sister Hannah, known as the best
volleyball player in the Central State Eight Conference, graduates in
December from Chatham’s Glenwood High and will begin playing for the
University of Nebraska where she has a scholarship.
In fact, Dennis left Philadelphia after Game 4 to fly
home so that Hannah could play volleyball with her team as scheduled. They
watched the end of the World Series in their living room with a few
friends.
In some ways, being home instead of in the ballpark
provided Dennis — who coached Jayson’s traveling club teams for
10 years — with an outlet for his nerves. “When I go to a game,
I’m actually managing it in my head. It probably drives
Jayson’s wife and my wife crazy,” he says. “Sometimes I
have to walk. I’m not real good at sitting, and I had to sit at most
of the Series.”
The Phillies sold standing-room-only tickets for $700
apiece, turning every trip to or from a seat into a friendly combat
mission. “You had to kind of push and muscle your way just to get
back to your seat,” he says. “It was chaos.”
Kim encountered more chaos after the final game.
Leaving the stadium, she says, fans were clinging to the hood of the car.
“People were climbing on poles, falling off of lampposts . . . .
I’ve never seen a city so behind their team,” she says.
When she went out to breakfast the next morning with
Jayson and his wife and kids, patrons at the corner diner where he’s
a regular customer gave him a standing and chanting ovation. The family
then got to enjoy a quiet meal, while fans who wanted autographs waited
politely outside.
Kim says she had a hunch Jayson could be a great
athlete when he started walking at nine months of age. She soon began
pitching tennis balls to him by the bucketful, and he would swing at them
with a toy bat. She knew he was good, but it was too early to predict
success. “Here’s what I didn’t know: I didn’t know
if that’s what he was going to like,” she says.
Dennis says he saw Jayson’s potential the
summer after ninth grade, when he blossomed from a scrawny kid the family
called “Stick” into a six-foot-tall muscular man with a
graceful stride.
“I was coaching third base at a game in
Wichita, and I looked at him across the field and thought, man, he grew a
lot. Then that kind of klutzy, clumsy stride he had when he was young
developed into a stronger-looking pattern when he ran, and I thought wow!
Look at him! He glides. He’s like a gazelle.”
Still, Dennis knew it would take more than the
family’s gene pool for Jayson to realize his potential.
“There’s a lot more things that just the
natural abilities,” he says. “There’s mental abilities,
how much of it you can handle, what kind of work ethic, and whether
he’s going to be pulled away by other things that may or may not be
important.”
Jayson’s mental toughness and work ethic were
tested when he was severely injured during spring training in 2005. He was
hit in the wrist by a 96-mile-per-hour fastball, breaking a bone and two
tendons, requiring two surgeries and months of rehabilitation.
“I don’t think people realize how hard
he’s worked to get where he’s at,” Kim says.
The Werths say their family of phenomenal athletes is
a product of a little nature, a little nurture and a lot of hard labor.
“If you’ve got to hold [your
children’s] hands and make them do things, you’re wasting your
time,” Kim says. “I always told the kids: ‘If this is
what you want to do, I’ll drive you to practice. I’ll get you
there, but the rest is up to you.’ ”
Contact Dusty Rhodes at drhodes@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2008.
