FORT MYERS, Fla. - Throw a no-hitter as a rookie, and it could mean the start of a Hall of Fame career, as it did for Christy Mathewson, one of the best there ever was.
It could mean you throw another one a year later, like Steve Busby, and blow out your arm by the age of 26.
It could mean you'll choose dating movie stars over putting your own name in lights, like Bo Belinsky, who never won 10 games in a season the rest of his career but cut a swath through Hollywood.
It could mean you vanish before anyone knows your name, like Bobo Holloman, who threw a no-hitter in his first big-league start - one of only three games he would win in the big leagues, the fewest of any pitcher who threw a no-no.
Clay Buchholz tried all winter to duplicate the no-hitter he threw in his second major league start last September - the first ever in more than a hundred years of Red Sox rookies - and couldn't do it. And he had every advantage he could think of, as he invented a pitcher on a video baseball game and gave him an otherworldly arsenal of pitches. Got close a couple of times - "two outs in the ninth," he said - but sometimes fantasy doesn't trump reality.
"One of the biggest things ever," he said, "is I can't wait to have my name on a video game."
It used to be a young ballplayer longed for his own baseball card. Now, validation comes when he takes out his PlayStation 3 and there's a lifelike digital facsimile of him, bearing his name, ready to come to life at the touch of a joystick.
That will be the easiest of goals for Buchholz, 23, to reach in 2008. His stunning debut last season assures that he'll live in the next wave of games to hit the stores, if he isn't there already.
But the scope of Buchholz's ambition cannot be contained in a game console. That's why he spent two months this winter holed up in a sports training facility in Pensacola, Fla., working out twice a day with another Sox pitching prospect, Michael Bowden, to satisfy the team's demands that his precious right shoulder be stronger come spring.
You do that only when you know you've missed something, which in Buchholz's case was the chance to be with the Sox when they won the World Series last October. While the Sox were splashing in champagne puddles in Colorado, Buchholz said, he already was at the Athletes Performance Institute just outside Pensacola, which is great if you're there to train as a Navy pilot (Ted Williams and Johnny Pesky passed through in World War II) but evidently comes up a bit short in ways to entertain restless young men.
"I must have watched some of the same movies eight times," Buchholz said.
Ever been more bored? "If I have," he said, "I can't think of it right now."
