Pitcher Miya Warner ’06 has amassed nearly 450 strikeouts and boasts a sparkling 1.40 ERA in her tenure at Amherst, while pitching over 379 innings, 48 complete games and 14 shutouts.Pitcher Miya Warner ’06 has amassed nearly 450 strikeouts and boasts a sparkling 1.40 ERA in her tenure at Amherst, while pitching over 379 innings, 48 complete games and 14 shutouts.
Pitcher Perfect: Miya Warner
Miya Warner ’06 was never the quickest or the strongest player on the team—in fact, she often had to settle for youngest. “I wasn’t very good when I was little,” she insists. Her pitches were never the fastest. But spunk and athletic cunning made up for what little she was given to start with.
Granted, Warner was only in third grade when she first took to the diamond. Softball was the third thing her parents had pitched at her—first came ballet and gymnastics. “They lasted a day,” she says, “then I quit.” Her parents didn’t seem to mind; they seemed rather pleased that their daughter was trading in her tutu for a uniform. “My mom is pretty much the biggest baseball fan in the family,” Warner notes. Her parents were more than happy to have a “sports kid” in the ranks, and they would come to be her greatest supporters.
All the support in the world wouldn’t help the fact that she was still the smallest player on her team. “You may never be the fastest,” Warner’s dad would tell her, “but you’re feisty.” “He would always say that I was a Feisty Little Guy,” Warner says, so “FLG” stuck and became her nickname. Full of all the spunk, vim and vigor she could muster, Warner stepped onto the softball diamond in third grade. She hasn’t missed a season since.
A Hollywood ending would scoop her up right about now, following a whirling montage of young Miya Warner picking up a softball and pitching it harder and faster than anyone had ever seen, a young girl exploding with raw talent, carried into the movie credits on the shoulders of a jubilant team heavy with the trophies she earned them. The problem is, though, that pitchers don’t just “happen.” Especially pitchers in third grade. And Warner would never pitch fast and hard; it just wasn’t her way.
Starting in seventh grade, Warner played in the ACCAL (the Alameda-Contra Costa Athletic League), a competitive summer softball league. She had to travel to a different town to find a competitive league, leaving her home of Berkeley, Calif., and shuffling over to Hayward, 20 miles away. It was there that Warner ran into Rick Chavez, a pitching coach on her team who would help Warner find her way to the mound. Once a week, Warner would meet with Chavez for pitching lessons, a routine that continued into high school. She still sees him for “tune-ups.”
In Warner’s stories, Chavez sounds like the classic tough-guy coach with a soft heart. “Good enough isn’t,” he’d tell his girls. “If you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late.” Chavez rattled off enough of these lines that they were christened “Rickisms.” Warner knows them all by heart.
One lesson a week still won’t make a pitcher, though. Practicing a whole season won’t do it, either. “You can’t just succeed,” Warner explains. It took constant work, spreading out over and in between every season, every week, every trip into the back yard. Warner had to practice on her own, outside of the team, so her father became her ad hoc catcher, her back yard a personal training camp. She built herself up throughout high school, earning the league vote of MVP her senior year. When it came time to pitch herself to colleges, she didn’t have to try hard to get noticed.
Warner could have landed anywhere she wanted when it came time to take flight from the West Coast. She had her heart set on a school “no smaller than my high school” (which had 3,500 students) located somewhere on the East Coast. She ended up with one of those two factors. Though Princeton was an early favorite, her visit to Amherst hooked her. It was a picture-perfect visit—Warner came at the height of leaf season and stayed with the girls on the softball team, a group she speaks about as if they were her family. “I loved them,” she says. Warner may have been the jewel of the diamond in high school, but she didn’t want it to be her life; “I wanted sports to be a part of my college experience, not my entire college experience,” she explains. Of course, Warner’s visit was just a little too perfect, but by the time Warner found out about Amherst’s one drawback, it was too late. “They never told me about winter.”
Being part of a team was what drove Warner away from gymnastics and ballet in the first place; she felt most at home when she was part of a bigger group. Warner stepped into Amherst’s softball team during her first year at the college, a young, fresh face ready to start at the bottom of the ranks and work her way to the top. Or be vaulted there on the first day. “Here’s the ball. Go pitch,” they told her. Warner has pitched every game she could since the first day she wore the Amherst uniform, appearing in 63 games and more than 379 innings.
Amherst had more to offer Warner than a pitching mound that might as well have had her name on it from the get-go. She took up history and French, declaring both as her majors. She spent a semester and summer in Paris, studying abroad for as long as she could before the team called her back to action. But Warner’s strongest drive wouldn’t fit in a department or a uniform, and it started before she ever landed on the East Coast.
Warner graduated from a high school that was everything Amherst wasn’t: large, impersonal and troubled. Three out of every five African American students dropped out before their senior year. “If you were rich and white and had support at home,” she says, “you did fine….The achievement gap was terrible.”
Warner admits she came from the privileged side of the equation. “I was just born who I was,” she says. That’s what’s called her to action. Her interests led her to enroll in two classes at Amherst, “Race and Races” and “Schooling Society.” She’s taking “White Identity” this semester and wants to start working at Amherst’s ABC House (A Better Chance), part of a nationwide program aimed at closing the startlingly wide racial gap in education.
Coming into a problem like the racial gap is hard for someone on the outside, Warner admits. If she ended up working at an urban school, “At the end of the day, if things get hard,” she tells me, “I can leave. [The students] can’t.” That’s not stopping her, though. When she graduates, Warner is thinking about working for Teach for America, where she can address the problem from the inside, or studying social action in grad school, attacking it from the outside.
Warner still has a year of competitive softball left, and she’s more than ready to throw herself back into the game. The way things have been going, Warner’s likely to go out with a bang. She already has a career stats sheet that reads like a dream. She nabbed first-team All-NESCAC honors in her rookie campaign, leading the conference in wins (12), innings pitched (164.2), strikeouts (181), shutouts (4), complete games (22) and opponent batting average (.207). In her sophomore year, she finished second in the NESCAC and 21st in the nation in strikeouts per seven innings (8.1). Her junior season yielded First-Team All-NESCAC and First-Team ESPN The Magazine Academic All-District, finishing with seven shutouts, good for second in the NESCAC, surrendering just 14 earned runs in 97 innings of work and fanning a league-best 9.4 batters per seven innings.
Warner never stopped being the Feisty Little Guy. Having pitched several full games and double headers on her own, Warner laughs at the mention of baseball games that see three pitchers in a single night. “They’re wimps,” she jokes. Warner’s pitching evolved out of the first problem she ever encountered in softball—never being the fastest or strongest. Her arsenal of pitches is more James Bond than Rambo. She counts heavily on her screw balls, curves and change-ups, pitches that rely on a deadly finesse and athletic cunning to hit the perfect spot. Of course, after pitching alone in a game where a single batter can come up against her three times or more, Warner’s advantage of surprise dwindles as the tables shift to the batter’s end of the transaction. Even after seeing Warner pull strike after strike from her bag of tricks, the batters still don’t have much when they come up against her.
In the end, though, Warner didn’t come to Amherst to play softball, and she scoffs at the idea that any student comes to Amherst just for sports. “When Sue Everden recruited me,” Warner explains, “she talked about academics and the social scene at Amherst almost as much as softball. It was this blend of opportunities that sold me on Amherst. Without athletics, I think Amherst would lose some of its best, most dynamic students.” Without Warner, Amherst certainly would have lost one of its best. As she warms up for a final season of competitive softball and the last pitch that will sail her out of the Pioneer Valley, it’s not clear where Warner’s going to land. Wherever it is, though, chances are that there’s going to be change, and that a Feisty Little Guy will be there to pitch it.
—Samuel Masinter '04
Photo: Samuel Masinter '04