PITTSBURGH (AP) — Cam Booser thought he was done with baseball seven years ago.
Turns out, baseball wasn't done with him.
The left-handed pitcher walked away from the game in 2017, discouraged by a string of injuries from Tommy John surgery to a broken back sustained when he was hit by a car while riding his bike, and self-inflicted wounds like a 50-game drug suspension.
He returned home to Seattle and poured himself into carpentry, working on acoustical ceilings. He was good at it, just not as good as the guys he worked alongside, and he knew it.
All the while, the game he'd dedicated his life to never really left his mind. He'd find himself thinking about it daily during a retirement that turned out to merely be a sabbatical.
By 2021, Booser was back on the mound and pain free. That first throwing session turned into another. Then another. His velocity returned. The discomfort Booser long associated with pitching did not.
And on Friday, Booser's comeback took another unexpected turn, one he never saw coming during his extended break: a spot in the major leagues.
The Boston Red Sox called up the 31-year-old Booser from Triple-A Worcester, a destination Booser admits he never considered until the moment it happened.
“Yeah, the first part of my career was, by my own doing, pretty bad,” Booser said before pitching the ninth inning in an 8-1 win over Pittsburgh. "I made a few mistakes. But I think when I was able to come back and get a better head on my shoulders, things were a lot more clear.”
That clarity led to the most adrenaline-fueled walk of his life when he was summoned from the bullpen with Boston comfortably ahead Friday.
He took a moment to settle himself and then gave up a triple to pinch-hitter Alika Williams. A strikeout of five-time All-Star Andrew McCutchen on a 95 mph fastball followed, then two routine groundouts to end a day that will be forever etched in his memory.
Booser's teammates greeted him in the clubhouse afterward with a celebratory shower of whatever was available, ketchup included. He was given two baseballs as keepsakes, though they were hardly necessary.
“It's by far the best moment of my career,” he said after the game. “Something I'll always remember.”
Talent has rarely been the issue for Booser, whose fastball regularly clocks in the upper 90s. Control, however, was another matter. He spent four summers toiling around in the low minors for Minnesota, never rising higher than Class A. The Twins tried briefly to convert him into a position player. That didn't take, either.
Finally, in 2017, Booser walked away. Yet it wasn't just his mind that couldn't let go. A friend couldn't either, pushing Booser to hire a trainer. The trainer began posting video of Booser on social media. The Chicago Dogs, an independent minor-league team, saw enough to offer him a shot in 2021.
The Arizona Diamondbacks took a flier on Booser and put him at Double-A in 2022.
It didn't take.
Booser was released in July and signed with another independent team before landing in the Red Sox organization in 2023. About midway through last season, something flipped.
The ball went where Booser threw it more often than not, and hitters couldn't seem to hit it more often than not. Booser was lights out in spring training and even better for Worcester, striking out 15 against just one walk in 6 2/3 innings before he walked into Worcester manager Chad Tracy's office on Thursday.
Tracy asked Booser if he was ready to throw. Booser said of course and only semi-jokingly volunteered to start. Tracy had another idea. How about pitching in Pittsburgh?
At first, it didn't compute.
“It didn’t resonate with him, right?” said Red Sox manager Alex Cora, who was listening in. “Like, ‘What?' ‘Yeah, for Alex in Pittsburgh’ and that’s when he let the emotions go.”
Cora thinks Booser has evolved into more than a lefty-on-lefty specialist. While Cora isn't sure Booser will be able to maintain his “crazy” strikeout rate in the majors, he's not worried about Booser's stuff playing.
“We expect him to do big things for us,” Cora said.
And if Booser's arrival provides a reminder to the rest of the roster about the importance of perseverance and faith, all the better.
“To make it to the big leagues, there’s different ways, right, different journeys,” Cora said. “And his is a lot different than a lot of people.”
AP MLB: https://apnews.com/MLB
FILE - Boston Red Sox pitcher Cam Booser throws in the fourth inning of a spring training baseball game against the Minnesota Twins in Fort Myers, Fla., March 6, 2024. The Red Sox called up the 31-year-old Booser to the major leagues for the first time Friday, April 19, 2024. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — He's visiting Manhattan construction sites, decrying local crime and holding court in his gilded Fifth Avenue penthouse.
After a years-long breakup with his hometown, Donald Trump is back in New York, this time as a criminal defendant. Stuck here most weekdays for the duration of his criminal hush money trial, the Queens-born presumptive GOP nominee has been conjuring images of his old days as a celebrity developer, reality TV star and tabloid fixture with weekly local campaign stops as he settles back into the place that made him, voted against him twice — and may end up convicting him.
After leaving court Thursday, Trump made another stop, heading to a midtown Manhattan firehouse with boxes of pizza in hand. Trump spent about 10 minutes shaking hands, posing for photos and chatting with several dozen firefighters and other personnel there before returning to Trump Tower for the night.
The felony trial has curtailed Trump’s ability to campaign across the country. But it also means Trump is often spending four days a week in the nation’s media capital, with access to ready-made locations for campaign events that he can use to court voters as he tries to reclaim the White House.
“While President Trump is forced to spend the next few weeks here in Manhattan, he should use that opportunity to get to communities around the city,” said former U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, a Republican who challenged Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022 and lost a closer than expected race.
Zeldin declined to detail private conversations with Trump campaign aides, but noted his gubernatorial campaign had included stops in heavily Asian American neighborhoods like Chinatown and Flushing in Queens, Dominican communities in the south Bronx, and Orthodox Jewish communities, among others.
While many were longtime Democratic neighborhoods, he said, “they were excited that I showed up and I was talking to them about issues that they cared about more than blind partisan loyalty.”
He noted news coverage of Trump's stops carries them far beyond local businesses or community groups.
“That video that gets taken ends up getting shared widely all over the country,” he said.
Trump's stops in heavily Democratic New York City have felt sometimes more like a bid for mayor than a run to reclaim the White House.
Thursday's stop at the firehouse was captured by a large gaggle of reporters and cameras penned across the street. Inside the station, Trump thanked staff for their service, said FDNY spokesman Jim Long. Trump had visited the same firehouse, as well as a next-door police precinct, when he returned to the city in 2021 after leaving office to commemorate the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.
“We appreciate whoever supports our members at the FDNY, no matter their political affiliation,” the FDNY said in a statement, noting they have hosted leaders including former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Mike Pence and every one of the city's mayors over the years.
Trump's other visits have drawn large crowds. After the second day of jury selection, the former president was whisked by motorcade to a bodega in a majority-Latino section of Harlem, where hundreds of supporters and onlookers gathered behind police barricades to catch a glimpse.
The visit to the bodega, which had been the site of a violent crime, also allowed Trump to rail against the district attorney overseeing the hush money case. Alvin Bragg faced backlash after he brought murder charges against a store cashier who stabbed a customer to death in apparent self-defense. The charges were eventually dropped.
Last week, Trump visited the site of an unfinished skyscraper — not one of his own — to shake hands with cheering construction workers, sign hats and helmets and pose for pictures with hard hats and steel beams in the background.
The image harkened back to his roots as a developer and an era when he was a fixture of the city, frequently featured on the covers of New York’s cutthroat tabloids as he talked up projects on which he slapped his name in big gold letters.
“We’ve built a lot of great buildings in the city with these people,” Trump said at the stop.
Trump has also been using his signature Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue to host meetings with foreign leaders preparing for a potential second Trump term, including former Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso and Polish President Andrzej Duda.
Trump, who officially became a Florida resident in 2019, had spent little time in New York after he took office in 2017. He visited only a handful of times as president, and officially decamped to his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida after leaving the White House in 2021.
When he announced in 2019 that he was making Florida his official home, he said in a post on Twitter — now X — that he would always “cherish” New York, “but unfortunately, despite the fact that I pay millions of dollars in city, state and local taxes each year, I have been treated very badly by the political leaders of both the city and state.” He later told told the New York Post that he’d largely avoided the city as president to avoid snarling traffic with his presidential motorcade.
That meant largely abandoning Trump Tower, where he filmed “The Apprentice" and later staged the 2016 campaign launch that he famously entered via escalator. After his surprise victory, reporters camped out in the building’s lobby for weeks as Trump paraded a line of White House hopefuls through the lobby, along with celebrities like Kanye West.
Trump had long told aides that he wanted to campaign in his home city, insisting he had a chance of winning, even though New York remains overwhelmingly Democratic. In 2020, President Joe Biden beat him with 60% of the vote.
Beyond his unannounced stops to local businesses, Trump has also talked of holding rallies in the south Bronx and at one of the city’s most famous venues, Madison Square Garden.
“We’re going to have a big rally, honoring the police and honoring the firemen and everybody, honoring a lot of people, including teachers, by the way,” he said after court last week. “We’re honoring teachers, because teachers have been very badly maligned with some very poor leadership. But we’ll be honoring the people that make New York work. And we’ll be doing a number of large rallies, it’ll be very exciting.”
And he has increasingly weighed in on local news events, including calling into his friend Sean Hannity’s primetime Fox News show while a police raid was underway to remove and arrest pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University.
“We’re going to make a heavy play for New York,” Trump said during the visit to the Harlem bodega last month. “I love this city and it’s gotten so bad in the last three years, four years, and we’re going to straighten New York out.”
He also said there were upsides to being stuck in the city.
“It makes me campaign locally,” he said, his New York accent coming out even more thickly as he added, “I think there’s more press here than there is if I went out to some nice location."
Former President Donald Trump reacts while meeting with construction workers at the construction site of the new JPMorgan Chase headquarters in midtown Manhattan, Thursday, April 25, 2024, in New York. Trump met with construction workers and union representatives hours before he's set to appear in court. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
Former President Donald Trump meets with firefighters at a midtown Manhattan firehouse,Thursday, May 2, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
Former President Donald Trump meets with firefighters at a midtown Manhattan firehouse,Thursday, May 2, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
