A ‘different kind of closer,’ Padres’ savvy veteran uses mind as well as arm on mound

Twice-traded already, Street pitched well enough in first halves for both the Oakland Athletics and Colorado Rockies to have warranted a spot in the Midsummer Classic. Street had to get to San Diego before he finally was selected for one, and just being named to the team had a visibly profound emotional effect on him. He’s only 28 years old, but he’s been a closer since the day he graduated high school in Austin, staying home to become a second-generation Street legend at the University of Texas.

Before then, closers were pretty much converted something-elses, either strong-armed shortstops who couldn’t hit or starting pitchers who couldn’t control or maintain their velocity over more than a few innings. Street, a closer who got considerable credit for the Longhorns’ three straight College World Series and 2002 national championship, was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player. And he was a major reason why colleges began making a priority of quickly identifying the pitcher best suited to finishing games.

Yet, as long as he’s been ID’d by the very specific role he plays, and as much as he embraces it, Street doesn’t really buy into a lot of the closer persona and hoopla. When he joined the Padres, nearly as much attention was paid to what his entry “song” would be as his craftsmanship on the mound, and he insists that he’d have the same mentality pitching in the sixth inning than the ninth.

“You just make pitches,” he said. “(Being a closer) just means that when you get that last out, there’s no more to get.”

See? Different.

Street will acknowledge a difference in him, the difference between him now and the first several years of his major league career. In Oakland, he said, he lacked the maturity to properly handle disappointments and some decisions.

“Stuff-wise, though, he’s the same now as then,” said Padres veteran Mark Kotsay, who also was a Street teammate with the A’s. “He was always an attack pitcher, a strike-thrower, not afraid to get beat with people hitting the ball. I never saw him get beat by walking three guys in a row. It’s not dominant, 1-2-3, where you just sit back and relax. But it’s also not, oh bleep, what are we gonna get? With Huston, you know what you’re gonna get, and that’s awesome.”

As both a left-handed bat who knows he might just get one cut a game and spends most of many games just studying pitchers for that eventuality, Kotsay said the thing he really likes about Street is, Street studies right back at you. Not just on film, either.

“He reads hitters well, reads you while you’re hitting,” said Kotsay. “A lot of guys in the game don’t do that. They don’t care about what they see from the hitter. They don’t even know what they’re seeing. They just care about the scouting report that was told to them — This is how you get a guy out — instead of watching the guy in the course of his at-bat.

“Believe me, the batter’s up there making adjustments to you. On the mound, on the fly, Huston makes his adjustments back. That’s as opposed to going strictly by the scouting report that says ‘Soft down-and-away, hard-in,’ or ‘Hard-away, soft-whatever.’ He’s able to see what the other guy’s trying to do.”

Big difference.


