Jonathan Papelbon

I grew up down in Louisiana, you know, in the swamps. Down there we got gators. My daddy used to take me, and my two younger brothers Joshua and Jeremy, the twins, down to see them gators. He'd give us each a baseball and then he'd slink back into the swamp like some kinda old boogeyman. Them gators, they'd get a smell of fresh meat and charge right at us, so our only hope was to hit them with the baseball hard enough to kill 'em. That's how I learned to throw so hard. One time my brother Joshua, he was so young and his arm weren't much then, he got set upon by this mean old one-eyed gator we used to call Ol' Scratch. That gator had a hold of Josh's ankle and his twin, Jeremy, was frozen in fear. So I took that ball and rocketed into Ol' Scratch's good eye. It hit that mean ol' bastard so hard that half his skull caved in and he stopped to gnawin' on my littler brother. My Daddy was later fond of telling people that I had an arm like that of Zeus himself.