It required but the slightest nudge the other day to get Jace Peterson and Cameron Maybin talking some gentle garbage about their basketball skills.
So, who wins 1-on-1?
The speedy 6-foot-3 outfielder, who quit the Roberson High (Asheville, N.C.) basketball team his senior year, just 15 points shy of a career 1,000 points?
Or the 6-0 second baseman, a three-sport all-state athlete in Louisiana (small school), who you just know had a little Matthew Dellavedova in him?
“Come up to my crib in Asheville and we’ll see. I’ve got a nice little court there. I’ve got a (championship) belt and everything there, too,” Maybin said.
“I’m taking that belt back to Louisiana,” Peterson clucked.
There was general agreement on one thing: “Nobody (in their baseball circle) could beat us 2-on-2,” Peterson said.
Having fellows on the payroll who are generally athletic — and know it — would seem to be a good thing when the workplace is a stadium. But sports can be so short-sighted. Kids get confined to a single game. They become specialists before they lose their last baby tooth. And miss out on the rhythmic flow of the games changing with the seasons, as well as the opportunity to develop other skills and varied muscles.
Baseball is especially guilty of monopolizing its young, locking the children into year-round high-dollar programs with the thinking that the only way to achieve a life of major league bliss is through countless after-school reps.
Here we pause to mention that Peterson made it to the baseball apex despite not playing in a single such select program. “We wanted Sundays free to go to church,” said his father, Scott Peterson.
The just-completed draft drills extraordinarily deeply, fracking its way through 40 rounds this year. Hence the headline in the satirical online “Onion” — “Report: 87 Per Cent of Americans Unaware They Have Been Chosen in Later Rounds of MLB Draft.”
But in the great grey mass of names, you can discern a bit of a pattern for the Braves.
Among their first-rounders, pitcher Mike Soroka played hockey (goal tender) before he started baseball and infielder Austin Riley was a high school soccer player/football kicker.
Third-round pitcher Anthony Guardado also was a defensive back at Nogales High in California.
By the time 30 rounds had passed, the Braves were daring to try to pick the pocket of various SEC football programs, almost heresy in these parts. They chose two wide receiver signees as outfielders — D.J. Neal (South Carolina) and Terry Godwin (Georgia).
This was no accident or coincidence. Diversity of athletic experience has become a legit component — one of many — to the Braves’ scouting philosophy.
Brian Bridges, installed late last year as the scouting director, said so.
The multi-sport players, particularly the football guys “have been knocked down and you get back up. It’s just not vanilla, playing baseball every day,” Bridges said
“They tend to adapt more; they can handle it better; they can deal with failure better because you’re going to fail in this game.”
The manager won’t argue.
“I believe in guys who play multiple sports,” Fredi Gonzalez said. “You don’t get burned out on baseball. And they’re good athletes.”
One other sport in particular has his respect.
“I think there is a mental toughness to a football player, there’s a little bit different mind-set, especially if they play college someplace. You can tell the toughness,” Gonzalez said.
Here’s where we get back to Peterson. The Braves didn’t acquire him from San Diego in December as part of the Justin Upton trade just because he had the distinction of being a ball-hawking defensive back at McNeese State. But that didn’t hurt.
The toughness showed itself when the Braves sat him out earlier this month with a bruised thumb. To get him to miss two games, the Braves “just about had to put him in a straight jacket,” Gonzalez said.
More important, Peterson, with only 27 games of major league experience before this season, has slid in fairly seamlessly into the role of leadoff hitter. At second base he has paired well with shortstop Andrelton Simmons.
Scott Peterson, who coached his boy in baseball, can see now the same approach he encouraged at the small private school in Lake Charles, La. “We wanted him to have a football mentality in baseball. There was not a ball he thought he couldn’t get to. And at the plate, he had a bulldog mentality,” he said.
To think, back in high school, if he were to rank his sports, Peterson would have gone, in order, basketball-football-baseball. He kind of had to grow into putting baseball on top (or not grow enough for the other sports, whatever the case).
He played all three, and ran some track, too. “He loved it whenever a new season came along, and he hated to see the old season go,” his father said.
Shopping for college, Peterson was looking for someplace he could compete in more than one sport, that was a requisite. He got small college offers for all three. He settled on the football-baseball perfecta at McNeese.
Might he have been farther along in his baseball career had he concentrated just on that? Who knows? If he went that hard at baseball, he just as easily could be on his second shoulder surgery by now.
This much Peterson does know — and pay attention, baseball fathers out there: When one day he settles down and has a family, his kids can play any number of sports they desire.
“Every sport is kind of a different competitiveness; it brings out something else in you. I’d recommend it to anybody’s kid.”
So, listen up junior, if you don’t put down that glove once in a while, how are you ever going to grow up to be another Jace Peterson?
