Susdorf's '08 Wonderdog surprise

Published online on Thursday, Jul. 02, 2009

"What's the day today?" asks Steve Susdorf. "The 30th?"

You tell him that it is July 2 and he is unfazed by that revelation, almost satisfied with his life only being two days off.

He does know where he is, at least, which is in high-A ball, playing for the Clearwater Threshers, a baseball team with a shark for a mascot. And yes, sometimes during home games, the Threshers play the "Jaws" music.

Susdorf is more specifically in Jupiter, Fla., on a road trip against the Palm Beach Cardinals. He's in the clubhouse because it's pouring outside.

"We're supposed to start in 15 minutes," he says, "but they haven't even pulled the tarp yet."

And there is a microcosm of life, perfectly presented by a minor league baseball player: a series of chaotic times when you can't remember what day it is, and then lazy rain delays when the Earth barely rotates.

Here in Fresno, of course, Steve Susdorf is no regular ol' minor league baseball player. He's one of the few, the proud, the highly decorated national champion Fresno State Bulldogs, the ones who last June cut in, took the sports world by the arm and danced her way past midnight.

And that's Central Daylight Time, in case you were wondering. Omaha time.

We now have a much belated 2008 College World Series update: Steve Susdorf was hurt. It turns out while reporters and announcers drooled on Tommy Mendonca's dislocated fingers and Steve Detwiler's torn thumb tendon, Susdorf was schlepping around a bum left hip.

He says he had some "hip flexor issues" during his junior year, but by the middle of his senior season it was so painful during a road trip to Cal Poly that he "almost shut it down." Not that you could have blamed him. The Bulldogs were barely .500 at the time. He had a pro career to think about.

And if Susdorf doesn't finish that 2008 season, who knows, maybe the run to Omaha never happens. (He did have six hits, a home run and a sliding, series-ending catch in the Super Regional, alone.) That would be the second time Susdorf took a risk for the good of Fresno State. He was the only player on that title team who passed up money to come back for his senior year.

The possibility of injury is exactly why baseball players don't come back for their senior seasons, and if Susdorf would have cut his college career short, he might have gone undrafted altogether. (Even after making the all-tournament team in Omaha, he was still only a 19th-round pick of the Phillies.)

Instead, he kept his mouth shut and played through it.

"I didn't say anything," he says. "It didn't need to be said."

Two weeks after the College World Series, he flew to New York to join the Williamsport Crosscutters on a road trip. The next day, in the first inning, he hit a grand slam. His teammates joked that he should retire right there, walk out of the stadium with the ultimate hit as his one and only professional at-bat.

Talk about a hot streak. Not long after, Susdorf was on a plane to the ESPYs.

After the short season with Williamsport, he came back to Fresno in the fall, took a semester of classes and finished his civil engineering degree. He'll be designing buildings and bridges someday.

The Fresno State professors were even "cool about it" when he missed the first two weeks of class while still playing ball. Hey, you're Steve Susdorf. It's only shocking they didn't change the semester start date to fit your schedule.

The hip just kept throbbing though. That's the new injury that's all the rage. A partially torn labrum in the hip that needs surgery. Alex Rodriguez got it done during the steroid fiasco. Mike Lowell, the Red Sox third baseman. Chase Utley, too, which is why Buchanan High graduate Jason Donald got so much playing time in spring training.

After trying to fight through it in Fresno last fall, Susdorf finally had the surgery done in Florida in January. "Femoral acetabular impingement," he says the condition is called, being the academic All-American who reads constantly. He says something about friction in the hip joint and "shaving down the bone a little bit." Ugh. Perhaps that's enough detail.

Point is, that's why he missed the first 40 games of this season and didn't arrive at low-A ball until late May. And since, he's hit .333 in Lakewood, N.J., then was promoted to Clearwater where he stands in the clubhouse, laughing and doing a phone interview during a rain delay, not sure exactly what month it is.

Who cares? After 10 games in Florida, Susdorf has 19 hits, good for a .432 average. "Been doing pretty well," he beams.

Congrats. A town of Bulldogs fans are glad the hip is all fixed. And grateful you waited to do it.