‘Ageless Arm’ starts to show some wear, but Santa Fe hurler follows his passion
Santa Fe hurler has been living youthful dream since 1970s, just as his left arm is showing some wear
Perhaps the “Ageless Arm” is finally showing some wear.
That is an unheard-of concept for Rodney Tafoya. His left arm has been his trusted and most valued companion for most of Tafoya’s baseball career, one that is just a year away from entering its sixth decade of play and almost all of it from the pitching rubber. It didn’t falter when he was at St. Michael’s, nor when he pitched at New Mexico Highlands University and Kansas Newman College in Wichita in the mid-1980s. It helped him chase a professional career as he pitched in the Mexican and Prairie leagues, then kept his passion burning in the semiprofessional circuit that led him to compete all over the nation and even
internationally — as far away as New Zealand. It’s an arm that allowed Tafoya to see more of the world than many get to in a lifetime, and play with countless former Major League Baseball and minor league players, and as he gets older, in Major Senior Baseball League tournaments. When he tells those players of his tales from the road and how he is still pitching at 55, Tafoya said the response from them is genuine. “They’re like, ‘What? Whaaat?!?!
No way!! That’s crazy,’ ” Tafoya said with a giggle. “So, I’m in the club.”
In the Men’s Adult Baseball and Men’s Senior Baseball leagues, he has a 350-69 record, and spots in two semipro baseball halls of fame.
All thanks goes to the left arm. But after 660 games from high school on — a 444-92 record (plus 111 no-decisions and 13 saves) — Tafoya’s arm is finally showing its age.
Tafoya has pitched most of 2019 with pain on the inner part of his left elbow, where the ulnar collateral ligament is located. It has Tafoya thinking of two words associated with that part of the body: Tommy John, as in the surgery that the Major League pitcher made famous when Tafoya was playing Little League in Santa Fe in the 1970s.
It’s not that his arm is impervious to injuries, but to have a torn UCL at his age concerns him. In 1990, a torn ligament in his elbow kept him from pitching for almost two years and
derailed his professional pitching career for a few years. A slight tear in his rotator cuff sidelined him for five months in 2009. He started twice in one day in a tournament in Puerto Rico just to prove that he could at the age of 45.
Other than that, Tafoya has been mostly injury-free. Credit that to his near constant regimen of running — Tafoya estimates that he runs 40 miles a week — and weight training.
“My calves have never looked like this,” Tafoya said as he stands up to show his right leg in his home’s baseball room, which has a variety of personal and professional baseball mementos he has accumulated over the decades, near Alto Park.
While Tafoya has yet to see a physician about the pain, which he said usually subsides after four or five days and allows him to pitch in 10-day to two-week intervals, he has done his own research on the subject.
“As much as I can read and find out about a ligament, when it’s torn, velocity decreases,” Tafoya said as he stretches out his prized possession while talking about his injury. “My velocity, though, is increasing. … It’s basically a big, thick rubber band that has endured 80,000 pitches.”
“Endured” might be one way of putting it. Thrived is another. On June 30, Tafoya hit another milestone as he won his 350th semiprofessional game when he went 5⅔ innings with the Albuquerque Dodgers in a MABL game against the Pirates. He allowed eight hits, four runs (three earned) while striking out three in 91 pitches in the Dodgers’ 12-11 win. The achievement was a bright spot in what Tafoya has called a frustrating year.
While he is 3-0 in 2019, Tafoya has endured seven no-decisions. Considering he has suffered 111 empty starts in 37 years, it has been a higher number than he is accustomed to. Much of that is the concession Tafoya made with the sore elbow, as he limits himself to 100 pitches per outing. It’s rare now that he gets past the sixth or seventh innings, and he has to leave his fate in the hands of the bullpen.
And how does Tafoya know when he’s reaching his ceiling? Leave it to older brother, Jack Tafoya, to chart his pitches, which he has done for as long as Tafoya has pitched in the men’s leagues.
“I’ve done probably 90 percent of his games,” Jack Tafoya said. “The other ones are out of town, and I usually don’t go to his games in Arizona, California, Florida, Puerto Rico. … All of those places. I just let him hang out with his friends when he’s out there. I don’t bother him. Let him have fun.”
Rodney Tafoya, who is 14 years Jack Tafoya’s junior, considers him the unsung hero in his pitching journey, adding that this might be the first time anyone has talked to Jack Tafoya about his behind-the-scenes effort. When Rodney Tafoya hit four home runs in a MSBL game at Capital in 1999, it was Jack Tafoya who rummaged through the tall weeds beyond the outfield fence to retrieve the souvenirs for his brother.
“I said, ‘I hope there are no snakes out here, but I’ll find those balls,’ ” Jack Tafoya said.
Another factor for Rodney Tafoya’s recent spate of bad luck has been the level of competition he is facing. Tafoya took a different approach this year, opting to pitch more often in MABL games, which means he sometimes faces batters who aren’t even half his age. Tafoya said that he did it so that friends and foes couldn’t say he tried to “game the system” and pad his win total as he embarked on reaching the 350-win plateau in MABL/MSBL competition.
As the level of competition ratcheted up, so have opportunities to add to his legend. In June, Tafoya went to Cooperstown, N.Y., the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame museum, for the first time to compete in the Cooperstown Classic, an MABL tournament held at the complex’s Doubleday Field. He hoped that it would be the place where he won No. 350. But the team he pitched for, the Boston Palmer Phillies, could not hold onto a 5-3 lead after Tafoya left in the sixth inning. The Phillies lost 6-5 to Stinger Baseball.
Tafoya said he had to change his approach to batters in that game, often eschewing his lowto-mid 80s fastball in lieu of changeups and curveballs.
“I think I threw my change about 33 percent of the time,” Tafoya said. “I definitely had to pitch backwards to those guys because they can get a hold of a fastball and crush it.”
While he was at the museum, Tafoya got a rush when he found a book on sale, America at the Seams: 50 Stories in 50 States of How Baseball Unites Our Country, that selected him to tell New Mexico’s story.
While it wasn’t a plaque enshrining him into the hallowed halls, it was the first time he could find his name in the museum. Like a kid with a new toy, Tafoya purchased the book and had someone take a photo of him reading that chapter for him to post on Facebook.
“I mean, it’s in the Hall of Fame!” Rodney exclaimed. “My friends were like, ‘No way!’ And I was like, ‘Way!’ So we had to take a picture of that.”
As great as that feeling was, Tafoya isn’t about rest. He continues to pitch every couple of weeks in the MABL in Albuquerque, and at end of August he plans to head to Massachusetts to compete in a tournament in Cape Cod. However, once he decides to dial down pitching after October, Tafoya plans to alter his normal “off-season” schedule. He said he won’t touch a baseball until January and probably avoid heading to Florida to compete in a NSBL tournament in mid-February, but anticipates heading to Puerto Rico to compete in tournaments there.
Tafoya hopes that the break will give his arm a chance to recuperate so that he can continue adding to his already sterling story.
First, he wants to reach 500 wins. Then, he wants to reach a number he never could have imagined when he started at St. Michael’s — 511 wins, which would match Cy Young’s Major League mark.
And if he has to get Tommy John surgery to repair his elbow before then?
“I’ll do it and come back,” Tafoya said. “I mean, can you imagine that? I want to be a baseball player. I want to be a baseball player who can compete in the biggest game available. I still smile and enjoy the game, even if I’m in pain.”