Blazers pitcher recovers after reconstructive surgery on jaw

By Kevin Hayward | For The Olympian • Published May 20, 2008

Before the ping of the bat had registered in Scott Hetrick's ears, the sight of his son crumpling to the dirt appeared like something out of a bad dream.

Trailing Kelso 7-1 in the bottom of the sixth inning of a district playoff game on May 7 in Kent, Timberline was in a jam. With runners on second and third and one out, sophomore Taylor Hetrick was called in to relieve a tired Devlin Payton.

After striking out the first batter he faced, Hetrick quickly got ahead of the second. Having fooled the hitter with offspeed pitches early in the count, catcher Matt Hubbard called for a fastball on the outside corner.

The pitch was hard and on target.

"I don't even know how he got to it," said Hetrick, forcing out the words through jaws wired shut. "I put everything I had into it, and the next thing I knew, it hit me in the face and knocked me onto the ground."

The Kelso hitter timed his swing perfectly and the ball rocketed off the bat, hurtling toward Hetrick's chin like a heat-seeking missile. Hetrick had his glove up, but his reaction time and self-preservation instincts were no match for the speed of the baseball.

"Everyone said they saw him fall, and then heard the crack of the bat," said Scott Hetrick, who watched from the stands. "That's how fast it was."

On the ground but still conscious, the younger Hetrick assessed his wounds.

"I felt my face and I knew it was broken," he recalled, "because I could feel the big indentation and the big bump."

The ball ricocheted toward first base, where Payton nearly made the play on the batter running up the line. But balls, strikes and outs were quickly forgotten as teammates, coaches and a trainer rushed to attend to Hetrick, who had started bleeding heavily from his chin.

"I got out there and right away I realized it was very bad," said Timberline coach Mark Rubadue, who quickly summoned Scott Hetrick onto the field. "His jaw was just kind of hanging there a little bit."

Kelso's trainer used a T-shirt to stop the bleeding, and someone called for an ambulance. Remarkably, Hetrick never lost consciousness and walked off the field on his own power.