The following article is from our March 2007 issue.

Remember This Name Rodney Gessmann wants to become the Dirk Nowitzki of baseball - By Frank Bachner

No German has ever made it in Major League Baseball. Rodney Gessmann is trying to be the first.

He didn't do the negotiating himself. Rodney Gessmann is only 20 and he doesn't exactly have a poker face. It was his coach, Martin Brunner, and his father who faced off with the major league scouts who wanted to sign Gessmann for their farm clubs. Finally, the young German pitcher signed a seven-year contract with the Minnesota Twins, with a signing bonus of about $80,000 - cash.

The Twins aren't getting just any young hopeful for that money. Coach Brunner calls Gessmann "the greatest baseball talent Germany has ever seen." He knows what he's talking about. Brunner is manager of the "Regensburg Legionnaires," Gessman's professional team. He has worked as an assistant coach in the U.S. and runs Germany's Regensburg baseball training camp. In other words, Brunner knows baseball.

Gessmann signed in November and flew to America on Feb. 19. For a few weeks, he will train with a college team in Atlanta. Then, dress rehearsal begins on April 5, when the Twins' spring training begins in Florida. Gessmann is the first German player in five years to have scored a professional baseball contract, and only the fifth German to do so at all. His four forerunners all failed early, but Brunner says, "he has huge chances of climbing into the major league within four years." That's the top level - every baseball player's dream. Gessmann thinks he can do it.

First, however, he'll have to prove himself in the Twins' rookie ball team, the lowest level. He is one of 40 or 50 new arrivals at the organization, one of 1,500 prospects that professional baseball teams are putting to the test this year. Yet subtle hierarchies exist here too. The yardstick is called the signing bonus. The monthly wage is the same for every player, $900 plus free hotel room and board, contractual. The signing bonus, however, is a product of negotiation. The higher the bonus, the better the player. "Rodney's bonus puts him among the top 400 of newly signed talent," Brunner says.

The Twins have been keeping an eye on him since 2003. At large tournaments, they noticed that the German pitchs really well. In one European Cup match, Gessmann forced his opponent to strike out 20 times in nine innings. Twenty other times, batters didn't even touch the ball. "Rodney won the game all by himself," Brunner recalls.

The 32-year-old coach discovered Gessmann's talent in 2002. He brought him from Tübingen to the Regensburg training camp, enrolled him in the sports high school there and began shaping his style.

"Rodney can throw really hard, but he also has plenty of other pitches," Brunner says. "And he can deal with pressure very well." He fanned 20 batters in his first international game. He's the captain of the Regensburg Legionnaires and a key player on the German national team.

Brunner calls him a "perfectionist, who is constantly trying to set new personal records." In the last of three games in the final series for the German title, Gessmann chalked up 18 strikeouts. Yet it was all for a losing cause - Solingen won the title.

In the U.S., Gessmann is intent on making his dream come true. His strong nerves are certainly an asset along the way because it often comes down to withstanding psychological pressure.

"Physically, all these youngsters are good, otherwise they wouldn't get a contract," Brunner says. "But you have to improve every day, the trend has to go upward." Gessmann is 6 foot 3, in peak physical condition, but in Florida he'll still have to train six days a week in the mornings and play six days a week in the afternoon.

"I have a lot of respect for that," Gessmann says. "I'm not used to it." He tried a similar training camp program in Italy, for three weeks. "After a few days, I was exhausted," he admits. It took him three weeks to adjust.

But then there's the pressure from another side that he can hardly control. He's hopeful. He's supposed to fulfill expectations. That's because Gessmann, son of a Japanese mother and German father, born in Hilo, Hawaii, is supposed to spread baseball's popularity in Germany. That requires a face, a star with charisma and success.

Gessmann says he doesn't want to be compared to Dirk Nowitzki, the NBA basketball star of the Dallas Mavericks from Würzburg. He's already a star among stars. But that's the direction it's already heading in.

He currently accounts for 35,000 hits monthly at the Regensburg Legionnaires' website and about 800 fans turn out for the team's games. The interest is there. But it's limited to the league's 16 towns. There is no league sponsor and Gessmann doesn't have any sponsorship deals. He lives off the money he earns as a professional athlete.

But he does have charisma, Brunner says: "He's not the type who makes a big deal of himself. He's more prone to understatement."

That's something he has in common with Nowitzki.

Gessmann celebrated his contract with the Twins with a small circle of friends. His uniforms hang in his house and he doesn't talk much about his big games. He also hasn't internalized the role of being everyone's big hope. "I know the expectations, but I don't encourage them," he says.

The reason he didn't celebrate his signing in a more extravagant manner may have been another one. He didn't feel like partying. Only hours earlier, he and the Regensburg Legionnaires had lost their second match of the series.

- Frank Bachner is a sports editor at the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel.