When Corey Pacek used to attend his second-oldest son’s baseball and basketball games, there was one item he made sure to have on him at all times.
“It was funny because we always had to carry his birth certificate everywhere,” Pacek said. “Because people would say, ‘Why is that coach wearing a uniform?’ Can you imagine being an 11-, 12- or 13-year-old, and the kid pitching is like 6 inches bigger than your dad?”
Now 16 and a sophomore at Knoch High School, Zane Pacek still towers over not only his peers but just about everybody around him.
“If I ever want to holler at him, I need to stand on a chair,” quipped his baseball coach, Bill Stoops.
Standing 7 feet tall and weighing 250 pounds, it’s safe to call this teen nicknamed “Big Country” one of the biggest athletes in WPIAL history and maybe even one of the biggest players the sport of baseball has ever seen. But Pacek isn’t just big, he’s talented, as well (in both baseball and basketball), and this mountain of a teenager with major-league bloodlines hopes to someday become the tallest pitcher (and player) in MLB history.
Just as he was a season ago, Pacek is one of Knoch’s primary starting pitchers this spring. The big right-hander made his second start of the season Tuesday, giving up 4 runs (3 earned) and 9 hits over 6 innings in a 4-1 loss to North Catholic. Pacek struck out four and did not walk a batter. In an 8-4 win against Highlands on April 2, Pacek surrendered 2 runs (1 earned) and 5 hits while striking out 7 and walking 2 over 6 innings.
“Pitching is just my favorite thing to do,” said Pacek, whose parents are both Knoch graduates. “I could be playing basketball. I could be playing baseball. But if I’m just having a day where I just want it to be over and I can go pitch, that’s just my favorite thing to do. That makes my day amazing.”
Pacek, who wears a size 16 shoe, has thrown 14⅓ innings overall this season, allowing 7 runs (4 earned) and 16 hits to go along with 2 walks, 15 strikeouts and a 1.95 ERA. Although he has shown some massive power in the past (a video of him hitting titanic shots as a 6-5 12-year-old went viral years back), he never picks up a bat for Knoch — “Coach doesn’t let him bat because he bats lefty and he doesn’t want him getting hit in his pitching arm,” his dad said — but he does sometimes play first base when he’s not pitching.
“At 7 foot, you can’t throw the ball over his head,” Stoops said. “If you do, you better have a good excuse.”
Pacek doesn’t literally come from a family of trees, but you can’t fault someone for thinking that. Most of the height comes from his mom’s side of the family. Athena Pacek is 6 feet tall, and her younger brothers are 6-6 and 6-4. Their father was also 6-4. Corey Pacek is 6-2, and each of Zane’s siblings are also anything but vertically challenged. His brother, Jackson, 19, is 6-4, while his sisters, Deianira, 14, is 5-11, and Leda, 12, is 5-8.
Even with all of that height on the branches of his family tree, Zane became the tallest member of his family when he was just in eighth grade, which was also the same year that he dunked a basketball in a game for the first time. He did it at Knoch Middle School, and his dad was told that Zane was the first middle school player to throw one down in that gym since the legendary LaVar Arrington more than a quarter-century earlier.
“When I was younger, [a doctor] told me I’d be like 6-6 or 6-7, but we see how that turned out,” said Zane, who reached 7 feet last fall, not long before basketball season.
Stoops has been coaching for 43 years, among his other stops being North Allegheny, Franklin Regional, Gateway and Deer Lakes, but just when Stoops might have thought he’d seen it all, Zane Pacek came along. Until Pacek, Stoops said the tallest player he ever coached might have only been 6-6.
“The other day at Indiana, I had to go to the umpire,” Stoops recalled. “The umpire looked at him and said, ‘How tall is he?’ And I said, ‘7 foot.’ He said [Zane] reminded him of Randy Johnson.”
When it comes to super-sized pitchers, Johnson, a 6-10 lefty and five-time Cy Young winner, is the standard, while the tallest pitcher to ever throw a pitch in the big leagues was Jon Rauch, who was 6-11 (also the tallest MLB player ever). One of the best comps for Pacek, though, might be Chris Young, a 6-foot-10, 255-pound right-hander who pitched 13 seasons in the major leagues.
But when asked if there was an MLB pitcher he looks up to, Pacek didn’t say Johnson, Rauch or Young. His choice was someone he knows personally, someone he calls “Uncle J.”
“My uncle,” Pacek quickly replied. “He played in the MLB for the Cubs and won a World Series with them.”
Pacek’s uncle is Jason Hammel, a 6-6 right-hander who won 96 games over 13 seasons in the majors, one of his career highlights being winning a World Series with the Cubs in 2016. Athena Pacek and Hammel are siblings. The two, along with brother Bill, lived in Saxonburg when they were young before the brothers moved to Washington state to live their father in 1994 prior to Jason’s sixth grade year.
Hammel, 41, played his final big league season in 2018, and he and his family now reside in Massachusetts. Hammel has been around the game nearly his entire life, and even he can’t recall seeing another player quite like his nephew.
“When my brother and I left Pittsburgh, Randy Johnson was out [in Seattle]. That was probably the closest thing I’ve seen to Zane’s frame, and I think Johnson was 6-10,” Hammel remembered.
For Pacek, there was never a giant growth spurt, his parents said. Instead, it was a steady growth since he was a child. Among the many amusing photos the Paceks have illustrating Zane’s height over the years include ones of him towering over classmates in kindergarten and at a third grade spelling bee just after turning 10.
“It was funny,” Athena said. “Jason came into town for the holidays this year, and he hadn’t seen Zane since he passed Jason up. Jason said, ‘It’s kind of unreal to see someone taller than me, let alone my little nephew.’”
There has never been anything little about Zane, who did play football while in elementary school, an experiment that was short-lived.
“I played football a little bit. Third grade, fourth grade,” he said. “But I was too big for the weight limit, so I had to play with the sixth graders and seventh graders. And I was like, ‘That’s not happening.’ So I didn’t play after that.”
Baseball has always been Pacek’s No. 1 love — “He loves to pitch. It’s his favorite,” Athena said — but it’s the other sport that he started playing when he was 4 that in recent years has become a major part of his life.
“He’s never wanted to do anything but play professional baseball. But once he got to play basketball more and especially with Alan Bauman, he saw something in Zane and he’s taken a special interest in him, so now Zane loves basketball, too,” Corey Pacek said.
Bauman has coached the Knoch basketball team the past four seasons, with Pacek being his starting center each of the past two.
“His touch around the rim. His footwork. I call him ‘Big Country.’ When coaches ask what he is, I go, ‘Do you remember Big Country?’ That’s what he is,” said Bauman, referring to Bryant Reeves, a big-bodied 7-footer who played in the NBA in the late 1990s. “I’ve never been a big ball screen guy. That dude setting a ball screen, it works.”
Bauman also said he has never seen a player improve from one season to the next like Pacek did this past season. One of four sophomore starters for Knoch, “Big Country” averaged 7 points, 7 rebounds and 2 assists per game for a team that went 15-11 and reached the WPIAL Class 4A quarterfinals. With Pacek and classmate Jackson Bauman (son of the coach) among those returning next season, Knoch is expected to have one of the strongest teams in Class 4A.
“Bigs develop later, and when they do, it’s a rocket. And you can see that starting to come,” said Alan Bauman, adding that he and Pacek spent a lot of time watching film of Purdue star Zach Edey this past season. Edey (7-4, 300) might be one of the few humans bigger than Pacek who have excelled in baseball. He was a standout pitcher while growing up in Toronto.
Pacek appears to have a ton of potential in both sports. As a pitcher, Stoops said, Pacek has learned how to use his body more since last season. Pacek’s arsenal of pitches include four-seam and two-seam fastballs, a split change and a curveball. He’s hit as high as 86 mph on the radar gun this spring.
“He’s looked pretty good,” Stoops said. “Against Highlands, they couldn’t get around on him. Everything was late. His breaking ball was breaking.”
Knoch is breaking in a new catcher this season. Dylan Roth is a freshman who at 5-8 is 16 inches shorter than Pacek. Those two formed the starting battery in Tuesday’s game. Roth said it’s much different catching for Pacek than it is for the team’s other pitchers.
“He’s always throwing hard and has always been more downhill than any other pitcher because he’s tall, so he has to get more of an angle on his pitches,” Roth said.
Baseball players as big as Pacek just don’t come around often, and that size combined with talent makes Stoops believe that Pacek could play at a high level in college.
“I think he’s got Division I [talent] the whole way,” Stoops said. “He threw 85 last year. I know Maryland, Penn State and Virginia Tech had inquired about him. And I said, ‘He’s only a freshman.’ Then [coach] Danny Hall from Georgia Tech got in touch with me. He said, ‘You have a pitcher that’s 6-11? I said, no, he’s 7 foot!”
Baseball might not be Pacek’s only option, though, as 7-footers are always in high demand by college basketball programs, as well.
“[College coaches] are very much aware of him. They want to watch him develop and see where he’s at,” said Bauman.
Taking into account Pacek’s size, talent and desire to keep improving, it wouldn’t be a shock if this “Big Country” is known around the country someday.
As for his dream of becoming the tallest player to pitch in the big leagues, a certain former MLB hurler believes Pacek is on the right track.
“The sky’s the limit for him,” Hammel said. “Frames like that don’t exist in baseball. He loves chatting ball when I’m in town, and he’s thirsty for knowledge and passionate about the game. He’s got a good arm and it works well. It’s more or less just developing as a pitcher.”
Brad is a sports writer at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Email him at beverett@unionprogress.com.