Turn back the clock to August 6, 2007. Barry Bonds was up, veins juiced with some foreign substance. The fans at AT&T Park were going nuts for their sour slugger, who two days earlier had tied Hank Aaron as Major League Baseball’s all-time home run leader. 

Then there’s Long Island native John Lannan on the mound for the Washington Nationals, 12 days into his big league career, facing possibly the most dominating hitter ever. Mind you, Lannan made history himself July 26 when he was just the fifth player to be ejected from his Major League debut in Philadelphia. 

That was a lovely introduction to “the show.” Lannan blew an 0-2 count against the pesty Chase Utley and plunked him. During the next offering he beamed Ryan Howard and was given the boot. Both blasts were from shear wildness and scrutinized heavily. 

Vastly different from that scene, the first at-bat against Bonds was smooth. He fouled out to third baseman Ryan Zimmerman. Lannan, a Chaminade High School graduate from Long Beach with a soft southpaw release, was relieved. He walked Bonds during the second at-bat and the third time around got him to ground into a double play. 

Lannan, 24, saved his bravado for the final showdown. Hundreds of media members, thousands of flashbulbs popping and his parents in attendance, he forced Bonds’ 3-1 count full with a fastball. The next pitch was a curve ball, low and away. Bonds swung, missed and the kid from Long Island was free from making history that no one wanted to make and on the radar screens of every team in baseball for being calm and collected, a common aura for the newbie.

“It was the best baseball moment I’ve had so far,” he says. “I hope there are more like it.”

It’s moments like that, where some athletes shutter and botch the cage-rattling nuances of being in the spot light. Lannan is different. He shrugs off the tough situations.

It’s his semi-absentminded persona and extremely focused work ethic, which got Lannan selected in the 11th round of the 2005 MLB Draft by the Nationals, then pushed him through four minor league levels in 2007 alone, earning him the organization’s Minor League Pitcher of the Year honors.

Barely reaching the mid-70s on his fastball at Chaminade, the 6-foot-4 Lannan managed to be the ace of his high school team. By his junior year, the Flyers won a Catholic High School Athletic Association Long Island crown in 2001.

“His junior year was our chance to make him a pitcher, rather than a thrower,” longtime Chaminade head coach Mike Pienkos says. “He was a really good high school pitcher, he just didn’t have the size and strength.”

Lannan admits his experiences at Chaminade are what really helped him mature as a ballplayer and fans across the country rarely let him forget.

“That’s the biggest thing I hear,” he says. “People screaming Chaminade from the stands. Everything I learned there still sticks with me.”

He had enough ability for Siena College coach Tony Rossi to recruit him to the Loudonville, NY school that’s mostly known as a bracket-busting March Madness institution, not one that produces Major League pitchers. 

Rossi spotted Lannan at a fall tournament in Toms River, New Jersey, where Glen Cove’s Craig Hansen—who plays for the Pittsburgh Pirates—was also being scouted. 

“The ball