"Hunter Pence ambled past on his way to a baseball game Tuesday night, across the dugout and up the stairs and onto the field, where the Philadelphia Phillies would play the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Jimmy Rollins cracked a smile and pointed.

"There he goes now," he said and shook his head, like the whole notion of a Hunter Pence could not be more foreign to him.

Not here, not in an era when ballplayers seem bred from an assembly line and raised in a Tom Emanski video, their edges ground clean and predictable. For every Youkilis, there are 20-some Theriots.

In form and style, Pence is more erector set than conveyor belt.

"You'll never see another Hunter Pence," Rollins said, "and that's the truth. I mean, you could say unorthodox, but that doesn't begin to describe it."

A native Texan whose father incentivized baseball practice by threatening piano lessons, Pence has taken a seemingly unwilling body and turned it into a ballplayer. It moves in unusual directions. It catches somewhere short of full range. It lunges where it is supposed to glide, and jerks where it is supposed to feather, and then it hits 3-something and plays its way into another All-Star game and becomes the final part to what the Phillies believe is a World Series machine.

You know, all things considered, Pence said, "The piano would be an awesome addition."

Meanwhile, the world is short one very earnest pianist who'd put his head down, choke up an inch on the keys and swing as hard as he could.

"It's what I got," he said, "and I try to make the best of it.""