EVERETT — He hates it when the coaches count his pitches.
“I wish,” Ricky Holm said with some irritation, “they’d throw the pitch-count chart out.”
Once when he was pitching in the Connie Mack League, he had thrown well over 140 pitches, the game was headed into extra innings, and his coach, Levi Lacey, had indicated that Holm was done for the day.
Holm thought otherwise. An intensely competitive kid, the 6-foot-2 left-hander had it in his head that the moment his team finished batting, he would run out to the pitcher’s mound and begin warming up. He had even instructed a teammate to bring his cap and glove out to him.
Then the coach intervened. “Levi came out and told me to get off the mound,” Holm said.
He obeyed. Grudgingly.
“He’s almost like an old-school player,” Lacey said. “He’d go out there and play every day if we’d let him. He says, ‘Coach, if you want me to, you can just pitch me fourth in the rotation, then I’ll close on Saturday and start the last game on Sunday.’
“He doesn’t care. He says, ‘Coach, let’s not even keep my pitch-count today.’ “
A pitcher for Lacey’s Laces team in the Connie Mack League for three years, Holm currently is pitching for Lacey’s Everett Community College team after graduating from Marysville-Pilchuck High School last spring. Holm had offers from a number of other community colleges, and even after he had signed with EvCC he was getting calls from other coaches trying to lure him away, but he remained loyal to Lacey.
“When those other teams were calling, I felt guilty just talking to them,” he said one evening as he sat in the bleachers before a Trojans’ game at Everett Memorial Stadium.
He stayed true to Lacey, even though they had their differences of opinion over the years with the Laces.
When Lacey was asked if he had to sit down and have some air-clearing sessions with Holm, the coach guffawed. “I think ‘some’ would be a nice way to put it in the article because it was a lot more than that.”
Sometimes their tiffs were almost comical. “The best example of Ricky and Levi going at it,” said Holm’s father, Rick, “was when Levi tossed him out of a game three times in one inning, all in the dugout. They were disagreeing about a pitch that Ricky had swung at and missed. He eventually got to stay in the game.”
Holm doesn’t shy away from discussing the differences he had with his coach, choosing to face them head on. “Usually the fights were over me being mad about him calling me out on something, but by the end of the game I knew that he was right,” Holm said. “I did need to hustle more, I did need to run something down…”
He did need to grow up. And here, his coach could relate to him.
Lacey said he was a lot like Holm as a young player. That is, “I’m right, you’re wrong. That’s part of the (maturing) process,” Lacey said. “I didn’t take the information (from the coach) I should have taken when I was younger. It took a kick in the butt for me to figure it out.”
It took keen competition to inspire Holm to try to become the player Lacey knew he could be. Two years ago, a new group of very talented players joined the Laces team, guys who might not have been as good as Holm was, but were close. They were not only good, Lacey said, they were disciplined.
“If the coach told them to do something, they’d do it,” Lacey said, “and as soon as Ricky started seeing guys as good as him doing it, he knew that he needed to make some changes and the light switched on.”
Used to being the best player on the team, Holm knew that if he was to “keep up with these guys, I was going to have to try harder.”
He realized he couldn’t get by on pure talent alone anymore. It was, he said, a “big reality check.”
“Levi’s told me since I was 15, ‘Yeah, you’re good now but in order to get where we know you can go, you need to work harder and you need to expect you can do it,’” Holm said.
Lacey stressed to Holm that he needed to become a better teammate “and he’s become a very good teammate. He’s made a ton of changes.
“He understands the big picture, which is the success of the team. He’s willing to move runners over where before he’d rather hit a home run.”
He still doesn’t care for the pitch-count, though. “He’d throw 300 pitches if they’d let him,” his dad said.
Pitch-count didn’t matter in one of his first games as a junior college player this spring. He needed just 85 pitches to throw a no-hitter in a 2-0 victory over Thompson Rivers University, a four-year school in Canada. Only two errors — one committed by Holm — kept him from a perfect game.
Heading into a Sunday doubleheader, he had a 4-1 record and was hitting .317 as an outfielder and designated hitter. “He’s got a chance to get some good honors in this league,” Lacey said.
Holm is also having a positive impact on his teammates. “When he walks around, he has a mannerism that you’d better be ready to play because he is,” Lacey said. “He plays with confidence and it radiates off him.”
What Kurt Koshelnik likes about Holm is his “spunk.”
“That’s what makes him what he is,” said the former assistant baseball coach at Marysville-Pilchuck High School and now the head coach. “He’s a competitor. He does not like to lose. When handled and done correctly, it’s a benefit to him.”
Needless to say, Holm also dislikes not being in the game. Nobody understands that more than his former head coach at M-P, Josh Rosenbach, now a principal at the high school.
Rosenbach was in the dugout the day he witnessed “the most violent collision” he’s ever seen in a baseball game, an accident involving Holm and his shortstop as they ran into one another going after an infield pop-up.
“Ricky was knocked out cold and they carried him off the field on a backboard,” Rosenbach said. “It was pretty scary for a little bit.”
But by the end of the game, Holm was back at the ballpark.
And a few days later, he was back on the mound.
No doubt suggesting that the coaches not count his pitches.
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