CLEVELAND – The atmosphere. Everyone remembers the atmosphere. How unique it was for a high school baseball game, how there had to be just the right combination of factors to create an environment jammed with students, scouts, energy and possibility.
“It was a special night,” said Tom McNamara, then the Mariners scouting director. “We go to hundreds and hundreds of games. That one I remember.”
On Feb. 17, 2011, Javier Baez played against Francisco Lindor. A couple of teenagers from Puerto Rico who had ended up in Florida high schools. They were acknowledged as the top two shortstops eligible for that June’s draft.
That would have drawn scouts aplenty. But this was just before the college season began and with spring training just getting started, and the game was on the sprawling, college-like campus of Lindor’s Montverde Academy, about 30 miles west of Orlando.
So 110 baseball officials – everything from area scouts to cross checkers to scouting directors up to GMs – signed in that night, and those in attendance say at minimum 50 more were there, as well. And the lure of Baez vs. Lindor had brought out hundreds of students from the boarding school, people so jammed from line to line that scouts had to weave in and out to get proper angles to the field.
“It wasn’t so much a game,” remembers Tim Layden, Lindor’s high school coach. “It was a coronation for the two of them that spring.”
“That was the biggest stage both of them were going to play in that year,” said Ray Montgomery, then the Diamondbacks scouting director. “And they both performed, and both did all they can do to impress.”
So consider that Thursday night five years ago a coming attraction. For here are Baez and Lindor, now as the breakout stars of this postseason. Two-way dynamos not cowed by the moment. Quick hands. Live bats. Precociously high baseball IQs. Here they are having honored the Indians’ investment of the eighth pick of the 2011 draft on Lindor and the Cubs the ninth pick on Baez.
The 10th pick belonged to San Diego. The Padres GM then, Jed Hoyer, personally had flown to Florida to work out Lindor. If Lindor slipped to 10, the Padres were taking him. He didn’t. Now, as the GM of the Cubs, Hoyer will face Lindor’s Indians in the World Series, but he will do so having inherited Baez.
“It is funny how it works,” Baez said. “We both came to the United States at about the same time. We have led very similar lives, but in different ways.”
Their paths crossed that February in 2011, Baez’s Arlington County Day School in Jacksonville would soon lose its Florida high school accreditation due mainly to rule breaking by the basketball team. It would become a vagabond moving from state to state to play. On this night, in Florida, it was Arlington vs. Montverde, but everyone remembers it as a personal duel. A game of baseball H-O-R-S-E with each young star trying to outdo the other from the pregame through the seven innings, trying to be the alpha dog, the first shortstop taken in the draft.
“Of course we were competing against each other,” Lindor remembers.
What those in attendance remember was how good-natured it was. They showed off their wares, rather than showed up the other. As Indians scouting director Brad Grant recollects: “They both fed off the energy of it and the excitement of it and elevated their game. Each one stood out in energy, fun, instincts, flash, flair and talent.”
They played to their type. Even at 17, Lindor was Jason Kidd. There was style to his game, but not at the sacrifice of substance. He was a textbook shortstop, a controlled hitter, a complete package of fundamental excellence tied to switch-hitting athletic brilliance, playing on a diamond now called Francisco M. Lindor Field.
Even at 18, Baez was Russell Westbrook. A live wire of quick-twitch possibility – good and bad. He could rub an onlooker the wrong way with his exuberance. A scout could see his swing and imagine 40 homers or 200 strikeouts.
“It was reflective of who they are,” said Montgomery, now Milwaukee’s VP of amateur scouting.
It is rare that the visiting team takes batting practice. But Baez was there and so for the 7 p.m. game, the scouts showed up en masse by 4.
Lindor sprayed it around, pulled a couple over the fence. Then even he stayed to watch. What followed – even more than the game in onlookers’ recall – was the most memorable part of the evening. Baez began to launch balls not just over the left-field wall one after the other, but onto a football field beyond the left-field fence.
“Who had the better night? Baez had the better night,” said Josh Byrnes, then the Padres’ VP of baseball operations and now in the same role with the Dodgers, who were eliminated by the Cubs in the NLCS as Baez won co-MVP. “He had such electric bat speed. Some names you never bring up in amateur scouting. But this was Gary Sheffield.”
Even in the game, they played to type. Lindor went 3-for-3 with three singles and a walk, fielded his position – as always – elegantly. Baez had just one hit in four at-bats, and on that one he took two wild hacks to go to two strikes. Then, almost to demonstrate to the scouts that he could make an adjustment, he went the other way, hammering a triple to right-center.
“They went back and forth all night, like two great point guards,” said McNamara, now a Mariners special assistant to the GM. “Lindor was under control. Baez was out of control, but electric. They showed us every tool and they performed in front of a large group of scouts. That one really lived up to the hype.”
