USA Baseball Blog

When he was drafted by the Boston Red Sox in the 14^th round of the 2006 MLB First-Year Player Draft, most people who knew Matt LaPorta figured the Florida Gators junior slugging first baseman would sign and forego his senior season in Gainesville.

But most people were wrong.

LaPorta, the 2005 SEC Player of the Year as a sophomore, believed he could improve his draft standing if he returned for his senior year at Florida. Conventional wisdom suggests that players returning to school after being drafted as juniors lose much of their bargaining power. After all, seniors have little leverage remaining when they enter their last season of eligibility.

It can be a difficult decision for a young player. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion. And most aren’t shy about sharing them.

“On one hand it’s a difficult decision because the world says it’s a dumb decision and you keep hearing that you’ll never get as much money as after your junior year in college,” LaPorta says. “It was just a lot of negative things.”

But LaPorta never wavered.  He was used to waiting to fulfill his dream of playing major league baseball. Coming out of Charlotte High School in Punta Gorda, Fla., in 2003, the Chicago Cubs called his name in – like the Red Sox later – the 14^th round. The opportunity to play Division I baseball at Florida lured him away from signing out of high school. LaPorta understood that a down year as a junior in college in which his batting average fell from .328 as a sophomore (while helping the Gators reach the College World Series final), to .259 played a role in his draft placement in 2006. “But I believed in how good I was and believed in the talent I was blessed with,” he says. “I believed in the kind of player I was.”

Indeed, it proved to be a huge positive. LaPorta regained his stroke and earned his second SEC Player of the Year honor, batting .402 with 20 home runs. It was the kind of performance that had helped land him on the 2005 USA Baseball Collegiate National Team two years before where he played alongside some big names – then and now – such as David Price, Max Scherzer and Matt Wieters to name just a few. That tenure helped convince LaPorta he belonged.

The Milwaukee Brewers certainly thought so, taking LaPorta in the first round of the 2007 Draft with the seventh overall pick. His “gamble” of returning to school – he’ll tell you it was no gamble at all – had paid off. He received a $2 million signing bonus.

But even as a professional, Matt’s time with USA Baseball wasn’t through. He was selected to the 2008 United States Olympic Baseball Team where he primarily played left field. In a four-game pre-Olympics exhibition series with Canada, LaPorta slugged three home runs and delivered five RBI. In the Olympics in Beijing, LaPorta was involved in a hard slide at home plate in the fifth inning of a game against the host Chinese. Two innings later, he was struck in the head with a fastball by relief pitcher Chen Kun. LaPorta sustained a minor concussion and was taken to a local hospital. The U.S. won the game 9-1.

He bounced back in the Bronze Medal Game, slugging a home run to help secure a medal for the Americans.

“It was amazing being on the podium and having a medal placed around your neck,” he says. It’s hard to duplicate that feeling. It was a great experience and I’m very grateful for it.”

The Olympic experience remains a highlight of LaPorta’s baseball career, which ended last spring when he retired to begin his new career as a loan officer with SunTrust Mortgage in the Tampa area.  His good friend, former NFL punter Tony Umholtz, introduced him to mortgage banking, and LaPorta – despite not studying it in college and with no real experience in the field – flourished. “I’ve really enjoyed it and I do see it as a long-term career. I do have to say this is harder than baseball. With baseball, I had played it all my life. With this, you learn something every day.”

LaPorta has landed on his feet post-retirement and he’s set up a charitable foundation to help other former players ease into their new lives and careers. LaPorta’s “Next Up” foundation helps ex-players make the most of their opportunities, and assists in resume building, interviewing skills and offers an assessment test to determine what fields make the most sense. “As a baseball player, you haven’t had that many jobs,” he says. “So job skills aren’t necessarily going to stand out on a resume. What we like to do is extract the intangibles of a baseball player that made him successful. And by successful I mean anyone who ever played at any level from A-ball to the big leagues.

“We let them know we’re here for them and to use the foundation as a resource for whatever they need to get done,” he adds.

LaPorta is taking on the business world with the same drive that led him to Florida, the USA Baseball Collegiate National Team and the U.S. Olympic Baseball Team. He says he may coach someday when his kids are older, and he still follows the game.

“I do see myself in some capacity having something to do with baseball,” LaPorta says. “It’s such a great game.”

When David Eckstein was a college infielder at the University of Florida, he asked his coaches to send a note to USA Baseball to let the organization know that the ambitious young man in Gainesville, Florida was interested in tryouts.

He never got a call.

Several years later when the organization was searching for professional players to build a roster for international play, Eckstein – then a major league infielder – again sent word that he would love to come to whatever tryouts were necessary to have a chance to wear the red, white and blue.

He never got a call to tryout that year, either.

But a funny thing happened a few years after Eckstein was named the 2006 World Series MVP for the world champion St. Louis Cardinals; he finally connected with USA Baseball, working as an honorary manager during the 2014 Tournament of Stars, following in the footsteps of his brother, Rick, a former coach in the USA Baseball organization and current batting instructor at the University of Kentucky.

At the Tournament of Stars, Eckstein worked as a position player coordinator, watching hundreds of 18U players. His job: Find talent, which in that setting wasn’t difficult. “It was all around me,” he says.

He worked with USA Baseball all the way through the selection of the 2014 18U National Team 20-man roster. Suddenly, he had to look at the game differently. He had to mine for talent. “I legitimately didn’t know any of the kids, and you’ve only got five days,” Eckstein says. “You’re not looking for a kid to have a good week, you’re looking for a kid with the right reaction and attitude, and how they represent USA. You’re watching them in all aspects of the game including how they are on the bench. I’ll walk over and sit on the bench and just watch.”

It was during one of these impromptu bench sessions in ’14 that Eckstein first saw Nick Madrigal, now at Oregon State. He recalls being impressed. “I’m sitting on the bench, and the players are telling the other players, ‘Man, you got to get up and see this kid hit,’” Eckstein says.

“To me, Nick Madrigal was the best high school shortstop in the nation last year. I’d put him up against anybody, and I have no problem saying that.”

Madrigal was a 17th round pick of the Cleveland Indians last season, but opted to sign a scholarship offer with Oregon State.

“That’s a kid I see a lot of me in,” Eckstein says. “Because if he was even close to 6-foot [he stands 5-7] he’d have been a first rounder.”

Eckstein’s dream of wearing the red, white and blue uniform – remember his earlier efforts? – became reality this summer when he was named a field coach for the 2015 USA Baseball 18U National Team. Working as first base coach, hitting instructor and infield instructor, Eckstein received a gold medal as the team won a third straight world championship by beating host Japan in the title game of the 2015 WBSC U-18 Baseball World Cup.

“It was such a great experience over there with that group,” says Eckstein, who had previously travelled to Japan as part of the 2002 MLB All-Star contingent that played a series against the Japanese. “I was so proud to wear the uniform. It was the first time I had ever gotten to wear USA across my chest.”

His work with USA Baseball (which Eckstein says he’s enjoyed as much as anything in his career) is a likely stepping stone for a return to the on-field work in a more permanent role, as instructor, coach or talent advisor at whatever level of baseball comes calling. “I definitely do see myself back on the field at some point,” he says. “Baseball is still my passion.”

His next dream: Coach with his brother, Rick.

But there’s more than baseball in Eckstein’s life these days. He’s taken on a role as a business partner at Her Universe, a company that was the brainchild of his wife, Ashley. The company (heruniverse.com) produces and markets superhero and sci-fi fashionable apparel for girls and women, a group previously unserved in the business world. Among the licenses Her Universe holds: Marvel, Doctor Who, Star Trek, Transformers and Star Wars – the latter a license Ashley was turned down for twice by LucasFilm – that despite that she’s the voice of Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars: Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels. Ashley would not be denied. The third time she met with LucasFilm, she secured the license.

“It’s aimed at Fangirls,” Eckstein says of the business model. And business is booming. Eckstein knows a little something about persevering when the odds seem great. A 19th-round pick by the Red Sox in 1997 out of Florida, the 5-foot-6, 179-pound middle infielder played bigger than his physical stature.

David did not study business in college, but he’s been a quick study in learning how the business world works. He credits his baseball career for that.

“Business and baseball are a lot alike,” he says. “You’ve got to stay focused and stay with what you’re good at and not try to do too much. You’ve got to be patient.” For Eckstein, that patience was rewarded when USA Baseball finally called.

“I’ve really enjoyed it,” he says of the experiences with the organization. “And I was really honored to be a part of it.”

Remembering... Ty Griffin

Even now, some 27 years later, Ty Griffin still draws inspiration from the gold medal he and his Team USA teammates won in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.

And sometimes others do, too. Case in point, two years ago Griffin – head coach of the Tampa Catholic baseball team – was looking for something to give his Crusaders players an edge against crosstown rival and traditional powerhouse Jesuit and its ace (and former USA Baseball alumni with the 2010 18U National Team) Lance McCullers Jr.

He found it in his gold medal.

Griffin brought the gold medal with him to the game and after he went over the game plan with his players, he reached in and pulled the medal out. “I told them we’re all going to be connected to this gold and that’s how we’re going to play.” When the medal made its way around the group of players, Griffin – “Coach Ty” to his team – slipped the medal back into his pocket. What the players didn’t know is that their coach had also brought with him a fake medal – a lookalike – that was gold and good enough to fool a group of fired up ballplayers. When Griffin dug back into his pocket, he had the fake medal in hand and looked them in the eye. “I told them a win tonight would mean more to me than the gold medal,” Griffin recalls.

And then he wound up with medal in hand – the one the players thought was the real Olympic medal – and threw it over a nearby fence. A brief second of stunned silence. Then the players jumped to their feet, yelling and screaming and some high-fiving. Griffin’s theatrics had fooled everyone, and his inspired players couldn’t wait to take the field.

“They really bought into it,” the coach says with a chuckle. And it worked. Griffin’s Tampa Catholic team defeated McCullers and Jesuit.

Griffin is a veteran of big games, and as a player with USA Baseball, produced one of the organization’s biggest moments when he slugged a two-out, two-run home run in the bottom of the ninth inning to beat Cuba in the preliminary round of the 1987 Pan Am Games. The victory was historic as it marked the first loss for Cuba in 20 years of Pan Am play, a streak that had reached an astounding 37 straight wins.

As he strolled to the plate with Central Michigan’s Larry Lamphere on base, Griffin – an All-ACC Conference player at Georgia Tech and the first-round pick of the Chicago Cubs (ninth overall) in the 1989 MLB Draft – caught a glimpse of his parents in the Busch Stadium stands. Cuba’s pitcher figured Griffin would be looking fastball and offered up a curve that just hung, and Griffin slugged his way into USA Baseball history. It was the second home run for the switch-hitting second baseman who had hit one left-handed earlier in the game.

“Just an unbelievable feeling,” he says of rounding the bases after the game-winner. “I just remember a lot of people cheering and waving flags.”

That victory served notice to the rest of the field that the Americans were serious about their baseball. The U.S. did reach the gold medal game before losing, but by reaching the championship game they had qualified for the 1988 Olympics.

“I remember Coach [Ron] Fraser coming in and telling us, ‘Look, our No. 1 goal is to get to the medal game,’” Griffin says. “‘And if we don’t, the United States won’t be represented at the Olympic Games.’ That’s what made the Pan Am Games so important is that we achieved our goal for us, but we also achieved it for the United States.”

The Pan Am experience carried over the next year when the 1988 Olympic Team was compiled. Several of the players from the ’87 Pan Am Team also were on the ’88 Olympic Team. And they knew they were good.

“We got a sense that we had a great team when we came back the next year to train for the Olympics,” Griffin says. “It was a great bunch of guys and we just connected and went out of our way to do things for the other players. We understood it was a team of great players.

“We matured as young people [after Pan Am] but also as ballplayers,” he adds. “We came to Seoul with the thought that this was ours to lose. If we played our game we knew it was ours. It was almost borderline cockiness, but we weren’t cocky in the sense of how we played. But the guys on that team fed off each other so well that there never was a time I didn’t feel we weren’t in the game.”

In addition to coaching high school players, Griffin was an assistant coach with the 2014 USA Baseball 14U National Team Development Program (NTDP). His goal is to coach for the organization in international play. Then maybe he can bring his medal out again.

Remembering… Mike Neill

Every September 27th, Mike Neill dips into a book bag and pulls out a tangible piece of the greatest thrill of his baseball career – an Olympic gold medal.

He’ll place it around his neck for a few moments, and recall all that went into winning gold with the 2000 USA Baseball Olympic Team in Sydney, Australia. Then he takes to texts and phone calls to his former champion teammates.

“I do it every year,” says Neill, now Vice President-Wealth Management and a Financial Advisor/Financial Planning Specialist for Morgan Stanley in Philadelphia, just a long home run from the campus of Villanova, where he starred in college, and – after retiring from pro ball in 2002 – returned to earn his Finance degree. “Being part of that [USA] team... was incredible.” What was incredible was Neill’s sense of timing for that team. His home run in the bottom of the 13th inning beat Japan in the opening round of the Olympics, capping the longest game in Olympic history.

Then there was the home run against arch-rival Cuba in the championship game... but more on that later. For even the United States to get to the Olympics, it was a pinch-single by Neill in the 10th inning that drove in the winning run a year before to lift the U.S. to a 2-1 win over Mexico in the semifinals of the 1999 Pan Am Games. That win qualified the U.S. for the 2000 Olympics.

The inning before that hit, Neill – chilling on the bench – told coach Buddy Bell that “I’m going to be one the bench waiting if you need a good, solid at-bat,” Neill recalls. Bell listened, and told Neill that “I need that now.” “I don’t think Buddy really understood I was just talking [crap],” Neill says with a laugh.

So when the Olympics rolled around – and Neill was chosen as one of a handful of players from that ’99 Pan Am Team to make the Olympic roster – he wasn’t fazed by much. He was a 30-year-old minor league veteran whose brief major league career in 1998 consisted of six games with the Oakland A’s in which he batted .267 over 15 at-bats.

The Olympics offered new life.

Sometimes people find themselves in the right place at the right time. And they take advantage of those situations, which is what Neill did with the 2000 U.S. Olympic Team. Never mind that he felt his swing was getting “a little long” when the Games began, Neill’s 13th-inning home run made the world take notice. Maybe this U.S. team wouldn’t be a pushover. Did he know it was gone when it left the bat? “I did,” Neill says. “Very rarely does that ever happen, but that was one of the few times that I knew it was gone.”

A contentious matchup with Cuba, in which the U.S felt the Cubans had plunked Ernie Young on purpose and believed the Cubans were trying to intimidate the Americas, saw the U.S. lose 6-1. But it would be the only loss they would suffer in the Olympics. But coach Tommy Lasorda kept the team focused, and reminded them of not embarrassing the uniform they were wearing. They reached the semifinals against South Korea, and waited out a slow-moving storm that delayed the game several hours. Once play resumed after midnight – and with hardly anyone left in the stands – Doug Mientkiewicz homered to send the U.S. into the gold medal game against Cuba.

“The semifinal was really overwhelming,” Neill says. “For Doug to hit the home run and get us to the gold medal game was big. It really sort of relaxed us.”

In the championship game, it was Neill who set the tone for the Americans. After the first two batters struck out, Neill drilled a fastball to the opposite field that cleared the fence. As he rounded the bases, he dotted the trot with a couple of fist pumps and plenty to say to the Cubans as he passed them. What did he say? “I was just letting them know we were there to play,” Neill says.

Neill also caught the final out of the game, sliding near the left-field line to come up with the highlight-reel out. That brought a huge celebration as the U.S. players mobbed pitcher Ben Sheets, who shutout the Cubans on just three hits to clinch the only gold medal in U.S. Olympic baseball history.

On the podium, Neill couldn’t help but think of the significance of the team standing alongside him. And when the first notes of the National Anthem were heard, it was all he could do to keep it together. “An indescribable feeling,” he says. “To be part of something like that . . . I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t think about it.”

Remember… Warren Morris.

Somewhere along the line, Warren Morris became something more than just “dad” to his 11-year-old twin girls.He became a celebrity of epic proportions to anyone associated with LSU athletics.

It’s been 19 years since Morris, then a senior second baseman coming off an injury-plagued season, launched a home run for the ages, drilling a bottom-of-the-ninth, two-run home run that won the 1996 College World Series for LSU. It remains the only CWS-winning HR in the 69-year history of the event, and it lives on in this, the YouTube age where generations of ballplayers both new and grizzled can watch that fateful moment unfold over and over and over again.

Among those are Morris’ oldest daughters, twins Hettie and Amelia. “They’re kind of surprised that people want to stop me and just say hi or get a picture” says Morris, now a banking professional in Alexandria, La. “They’ve seen my picture in the Hall of Fame room there [at LSU’s Alex Box Stadium], so they kind of understand it now. But I’m still just dad.”

Watch that home run online and you see a 22-year-old Morris standing at the plate, wagging a bat that wasn’t even his. He was using a new Easton as a favor to the daughter of LSU head coach Skip Bertman. She had asked him to use the new bat in an effort to promote her local batting cage business. Morris, ever the nice guy, agreed to try the bat because no one else would. “Everyone was kind of superstitious and just wanted to stay with their own bat,” he explains.

Morris was batting ninth for the Tigers that afternoon, and – without a home run to his name that season – the last thing he was thinking about was clearing the fence. With a runner on second, he just wanted to try and punch one past the infield and tie the game. “When it came off the bat, I thought I had a double,” Morris says. “Then I saw [first base coach] Daniel Tomlin jumping what seemed like four feet off the ground. That was the first indication it was gone.”

The bat Morris was testing that day now hangs in the LSU Hall of Fame.

The summer would only get better for Morris, who returned for a second year to play with the USA Baseball Collegiate National Team. From there, he landed a spot on the 1996 United States Olympic Team where he and his teammates earned a bronze medal. “That was a good summer,” Morris says with a laugh.

Morris uses that bronze medal and CWS-winning memory when asked to speak to groups about his story. “It’s a way to kind of share it with people, especially kids,” he says. “It kind of shows that if I can make it, anyone can make it.”

And those kids, who weren’t even born when Morris rounded the bases of history for LSU. They see it on YouTube, and they begin to understand what this man is about.

Morris was honored when USA Baseball asked him to work as the honorary manager of the 2010 Collegiate National Team, which played a series against Japan in Omaha’s Rosenblatt Stadium, site of Morris’ life-changing CWS home run. It would be the last games played at Rosenblatt before it was torn down.

“Now that was cool,” he says of the chance to represent USA Baseball again, even in an honorary role. “I’ll always be thankful for that opportunity. I’m so appreciative to the organization for that.”

While there, Morris did something he had never done even while playing a few games at the old stadium as a minor leaguer. He took a stroll to the right-field bleachers, found the area where the ball landed, and sat down. “Just knowing the stadium wouldn’t be there very long . . . I wanted to see it from the perspective of the fan that caught the ball.”

That fan returned the ball to Morris that day, finding the dazed hero amongst the madness of LSU revelers. Morris still has the ball today.

After playing nine seasons of professional ball, including five seasons in the big leagues with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Minnesota Twins and Detroit Tigers, Morris retired as an active player.

As an assistant vice president at Red River Bank in Alexandria, Morris spends his days helping customers secure loans, obtain mortgages and works to help make a positive change in people’s lives. And while he doesn’t think about his glory days every day, he’s reminded of the home run at least a couple times a week.

“It’s kind of incredible now,” he says. “We’re almost 20 years removed from it, but it still lives on. I’ve been so blessed.”