Big Game Hunter

It was the miracle he needed. The next season, 2000, filling in on a one-shot assignment at Double A Round Rock, he made an impression on the owner, who happened to be Nolan Ryan, and was allowed to stay. Over the next 12 months, Oswalt made the Olympic team, advanced to Triple A and became a major leaguer. That, in a nutshell, is the Spark Plug Story.

Life in the major leagues, a land of big money (he's in the second year of a two-year, $17 million contract) and modern medicine, has been a mixed bag for Oswalt. The batters pose little problem (he was seventh in the NL with a 2.94 ERA last year), and he's happy to average nearly 200 innings a year. But big cities, traffic--they flummox him. He stays close to the team hotel in New York for fear of getting lost. The life that baseball has made possible for him, however, from the grand house (of his own design, atop a knoll) to his increasing land holdings, is much appreciated. When he clinched the National League pennant for the Astros with seven innings of one-run ball against the Cardinals, he hardly knew why he was happier, for the World Series or the bulldozer that had been promised him. Considering Houston was swept by the Chicago White Sox, probably the latter. "Anyway, season's over, I'm the first one home," he says.

In fact, the off-season is his real season. Whether it's making trails so he and his buddies can get to the deer stands in their rugged golf carts or burning off underbrush to create more grass for his prey to eat, it's all about the hunt. This season was peculiar in that he'd settled on a particular buck--he had 10 night-vision pictures of him--and for some reason would brook no substitute. Day after day, starting at dawn and then returning at dusk, Oswalt stood sentry in his pine woods. After several weeks it began to feel personal, the way the buck, which by then he had named Eight Ball, was eluding him. He let two much bigger ones go by, size no longer the point. As the obsession took hold, Nicole advised him over dinner one night that he had "done lost his mind."

Then one Sunday, violating religious practice in his household but obeying his instinct, he grabbed his rifle and went out in the soft rain. Time was running out, just two days left in the hunting season. Desperate, Oswalt left his stand, crunched along a hardwood bottom and finally came upon Eight Ball, in all his antlered glory, who had been cleverly skirting Oswalt's stand all this time. The buck looked up and barely had time to register a sigh of resignation before Oswalt, who, as they say, has good command, shot him through the throat.

"I don't like getting beat," explains Oswalt, who will soon have Eight Ball mounted on the wall in his office with the rest of his winners. That, in a nutshell, is what a hitter is up against.