Small-town hero Travis Hafner is rocking in Cleveland

	Travis Hafner was so raw and unorthodox as a prospect that he was given the nickname "Pronk" -- part project, part donkey. John Biever/SI
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By Albert Chen, SI.com

The legend of Pronk begins here in this tiny speck in America's big, flat and lonely heartland. Zoom down North Dakota's two-lane I-52, where there is wind and wheat and nothing else for miles and miles, past towns with strange names like Anamoose and Fessenden, and suddenly he's right in front of you, standing tall and swinging a baseball bat. It's Pronk, drawn up big like a comic book superhero and painted on a wooden sign that reads, "Welcome to Sykeston: Home of Travis Hafner."

Sykeston has a population of 174 and falling. It's a drowsy North Dakota hamlet with four stop signs and four businesses: the Wild Mustang Bar, which in better times, a century ago, was a fancy dance hall; the Country Café, where the daily special has been $4.95 for as long as anyone can remember; the gas station, where a lone gas pump stands in someone's front yard; and the local grain elevator. There's a high school, but it shut down last year after enrollment had dipped too low. It was another sign of the times -- people are leaving town, slowly.

"The school closing was a sad moment for us," says the county auditor, Diane Hafner, a distant relative to Travis ("a 21st cousin," she says). "The town's getting older -- everyone's 70, 80, 90 years old, and it's going to keep going that way. Families are getting smaller. People are moving to the big city. The farm families have quit and gone elsewhere. You don't see as many people around town as before; it's a lot quieter now."

Sykeston comes to life every time its favorite son, Travis Hafner, steps to the plate for the Cleveland Indians. Whenever Hafner is at bat, chances are someone in Sykeston's watching -- probably at the Wild Mustang. "On Bingo Night on Wednesdays at the Wild Mustang, every time Travis is up, it's, 'OK, hold the game, gotta watch this,'" says Diane Hafner.

The people of Sykeston still shake their heads, because it is a tad surreal -- how one of their own has gone on to become one of the top hitters in baseball and an icon in Cleveland. What are the odds of that? Their own Travis Hafner, who last year finished fifth in the American League Most Valuable Player voting, may still be the most underrated player in baseball even as he's widely regarded among major league pitches as one of the game's most feared left-handed hitters.

Sykeston knows Hafner as the quiet, polite kid who grew up on his family's 3,000-acre farm but hated farming; the youngster who spent those sultry summer days in his family's golden wheat field hitting rocks off a beaten-down baseball bat. Says his grandmother Mary Jane Hafner, "He was always carrying around that bat. Sports was his life. Farming? Wanted to have nothing to do with it. We knew he wasn't going to be a farmer. But baseball? We weren't so sure about that, either."

Hafner went to Sykeston High, where four guys and four girls made up his graduating class. ("Getting a prom date wasn't a problem," he jokes.) Everyone knew Travis as the guy who played baseball; he traveled around the state to play with an American Legion team, and he was slicing up pitchers pretty well. But how good was the kid? No one really knew. How good can you be when you've never seen a pitch above 80 mph?

During Hafner's senior year, a guidance counselor asked the seniors to write out their goals, their realistic hopes for the next few years, nothing too far-fetched. Travis wrote "professional baseball player." The counselor laughed and asked him to write down a backup. "Professional baseball player," he wrote again. It turned out Hafner was quite serious.