Craig Kimbrel is No Longer Craig Kimbrell

Despite being one of the game’s best, Craig Kimbrel still has a tough time getting recognized. (via Keith Allison)

His old scrapbooks are riddled with misspellings of his name, he didn’t make the All-City team, and he spent the first semester of his freshman year of college throwing from his knees.

A far cry from the June afternoon when his name was properly spelled at the bottom of a contract that made Craig Kimbrel the winner of the 2019 Free Agent Sweepstakes – and cemented the Chicago Cubs’ position as a World Series contender. Quoth first baseman Anthony Rizzo: “It’s definitely a boost.”

This whole crazy saga may never have happened without the freakiest of freak accidents. We know baseball is full of those oddities, whether it’s Carlos Correa having a rib break during a massage or Trevor Bauer dicing open his pinkie with the propeller of a drone. For Kimbrel, it happened at a construction job site in his hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, working for his father in the summer of 2006. Mike Kimbrel is an electrician, a free spirit with a fondness for motorcycles who has often taken cross-country trips on his bike to see his son pitch. Craig was helping Mike in a basement of a house under construction when suddenly 800 pounds of sheetrock shifted and tumbled onto Craig’s left foot. Numerous bones were broken. He was only two weeks away from reporting to Wallace State, a community college an hour’s drive away, one of the few schools that displayed any interest in Kimbrel. A baseball career that had shown glimmers of promise might well have been dead-ended in that basement.

Kimbrel was a product of the rec leagues of Huntsville, a city at the northern edge of Alabama that prides itself on high-tech companies and its historic role in space exploration. The Saturn V rocket that propelled the Apollo missions to the moon a half-century ago was built in Huntsville. Thousands of young astronaut wannabes flow to the city each year to participate in Space Camp.

Huntsville’s contributions to outer space are significantly greater than its contributions to baseball. Though the area could boast of four players who have made major league appearances in 2019, not many careers were launched there. Don Mincher, a 12-year-major leaguer and two-time All-Star who homered off Don Drysdale in 1965 in his first World Series at-bat, remains a revered figure in the community even now, seven years after his passing. Jimmy Key, who won 186 games in his 15-year career during the 1980s and ’90s, grew up in Huntsville.

A generation earlier was Jim Tabor, who arrived on the scene with the Red Sox the same year as Ted Williams but had a meteoric career cut short by injury and hard living. And there was Gabby Street, anemic at the plate but a solid catcher. He managed the St. Louis Cardinals to the 1931 World Series championship and worked as an analyst alongside a neophyte play-by-play man named Harry Caray, but his claim to fame happened Aug. 21, 1908, when he caught a ball dropped from the top of the Washington Monument.

While managing the Cardinals, Street brought his club to Huntsville for an exhibition, playing at the very same Optimist Park where Craig Kimbrel’s career would blossom. Though on the smallish side, Kimbrel could throw hard, but his relationship with the strike zone occasionally was fleeting. He gained the respect (fear?) of opposing hitters and popped up every now and again in the newspaper. Typically as not, the report added a second L to his last name. “After a while, we just laughed about it,” Kimbrel would say later.

Kimbrel attended Lee High School, sharing pitching duties with Buddy Boshers, a fourth-round pick of the Angels and veteran of 100 games out of various major league bullpens. Kimbrel was good, but not stellar enough to earn first-team All-City honors, leading years later to no shortage of teasing of the sportswriter who oversaw the team selection.

He was chosen to pitch in an All-Star Showcase game, where he threw well enough to be “discovered” by Randy Putman, the head coach at Wallace State-Hanceville, who offered a scholarship after seeing Kimbrel pitch only one time. It was just his first stroke of genius. Months later, when Kimbrel arrived on campus in a cast, his left foot mangled, Putman put him to work. While the rest of the team went through traditional practices, he had Kimbrel throw from his knees.

That routine built up more strength in his lower back and his arm. His velocity, once he was back on his feet, rose from the 80s into the 90s. It didn’t take long for him to start registering on the pro scouts’ radars. Kimbrel went 8-0 as a freshman, and the Braves picked him in the 33rd round. He opted to return for a second season at Wallace, when he struck out 123 batters in 81 innings. This time, the Braves grabbed him in the third round.

Kimbrel emerged as a devastating closer during a 2010 late-season call-up with the Braves, ultimately reaching the 300-save plateau more quickly than any other reliever in baseball history. He was the National League Rookie of the Year in 2011, led the National League in saves his first four seasons, and was an All-Star in seven of his first eight seasons.

When the Braves began dismantling things after their 2013 playoff run – during which manager Fredi Gonzalez lost the decisive game when he didn’t utilize Kimbrel because it wasn’t a “traditional” save situation – Kimbrel wound up in San Diego for a season then was traded to the Red Sox. He had minor knee surgery in 2016 but rebounded for a 35-save season in 2017 with a 1.43 ERA, striking out half the batters he faced.

Though he had 42 saves in 2018, it was a trying year. In the offseason, wife Ashley gave birth to their daughter, Lydia Joy, who was born with a heart condition and faced several surgeries – though she’s now in good health. And though he had a nine-pitch save in Game Two, there were moments of struggle in the postseason that would cloud his free agency.

The Cubs weren’t daunted. They knew what Kimbrel had already proven, that he could be knocked to his knees and still get back up.