Baseball senior fights injury, unknown future

It seems strange that Augie's 6-foot-6 inch, 230-pound prize pitcher would drive around in such a small car.

Senior Per Nestingen looks oddly out of place ducking his head within the tiny confines of his '98 Volvo S70, but it's all he's got.

Tonight, we drive aimlessly around the greater Sioux Empire for our interview because, as many other seniors would agree, sometimes you just need to get away from campus for a while.

As he turns the wheel, he grimaces at the pain of his right shoulder that he hurt from overuse and stress. He's been trying to slowly nurse it back to health with pain pills and careful stretching in order to finish his final season at Augustana.

Now, at the end of his college career, he's realizing that this shoulder of his won't last forever, and that the major leagues are looking further and further out of reach, not to mention the job he has to find by May in order to start paying off school loans.

He has the look of a trophy racehorse staring down at its broken leg and not fully understanding what life will be like outside of the racetrack.

He says things like, "When I get out of school, I'm afraid I'm going to wake up and realize I'm not busy," because for the past 16 years of his life, it's been baseball.

He's woken up early and stayed late to turn his pitch into a goddamn rocket. Watching him rub his shoulder and wince through the pain during games is a wary reminder that the only thing we're really good at is getting old, and that even college kids are subject to wear and tear.

Even with his injury, even if his baseball days are done after he leaves Augustana, he's become a product of his craft, because baseball—like all sports—has something to teach besides how to shoot a basket or run a buttonhook.

Some people learn discipline and some people learn humility, but from what I can gather, baseball is a game of sacrifice. Sometimes you will sacrifice a big hit and take a bunt to load the bases, and it seems to me that the best players are the ones who are willing to sacrifice the most for their teams.

As for Per, well, he's been sacrificing in the name of baseball for a long time, and right now that lesson is written in his injury.

But Nestingen is one of those big types of people. He's bigger than a worn-out shoulder. He's got a big personality and a big voice and a monster fastball.

He's from the big city of Minneapolis (not Lakeville, not Edina, but—make no mistake—from the south side of Minneapolis proper) and not from SmallTown, South Dakota.

You hear him coming before you see him, like a locomotive burning down the hall, joking and talking and freestyle rapping his way to class.

He's one of those people that seems like everybody knows and everybody has a story about.

Me, I can remember freshman year when he screwballed my phone into the fire escape of Solberg one-South at 95 miles an hour and watched it vaporize into a million pieces of useless metal and plastic bits (I say good riddance to that rotten piece of technology, that damn thing never worked anyways—he did both me and the phone a favor).

But here, pent up in his little car, I can't help but think that this giant Scandinavian with a cannon for an arm is waiting to explode.

He's waiting for something big enough to contain him—something bigger than a Volvo S70, something bigger than Sioux Falls, and something far bigger than merely becoming a racehorse with a bum leg and a dead finish.