For young Canadian ballplayers, the road to the majors starts with a simple, difficult step: getting noticed
JP Stevenson has one of the best left arms Prince Edward Island has ever laid claim to.
It’s 2011, and the lanky 14-year-old ace on the provincial team is at work at Baseball Canada’s Bantam Boys Championships in Vaughan, Ont., where he strikes out eight in five and a third against the defending champs from powerhouse Ontario. JP is on the hook for the loss, but the Islander still impresses. He’s the only reason the 11–1 final score isn’t uglier.
Baseball is Stevenson’s passion, why his parents truck him to Summerside so he can play for the Chevys, since his own community of New Glasgow, P.E.I., isn’t home to a traffic light, let alone a ball team. The kid with the dark hair and the broad grin hopes baseball can pay for college one day. But after this drubbing, he gets a reality check, courtesy of an MLB scout. “I had to leave the Island,” JP says.
This is the price of making it in Canada for a kid who grew up in the wrong market—P.E.I. has produced three Major Leaguers, ever. Of course, not all baseball stars have to move across the country to get their opportunities. But no matter where you’re from, one thing is true for every Canadian with an eye on turning pro or using America’s pastime to foot the college bill: It’s going to cost you. Minor hockey, long the champion in the Elite Sports Limited to the Rich category, has competition—baseball in Canada is big business. The upside: It has never been easier for a young Canadian ballplayer to develop, get noticed and earn a shot at the big time.
The ease of self-promotion through social media and the influence of homegrown MVPs like Joey Votto have contributed, but it’s the growth of baseball at the grassroots and elite level that has made the road to U.S. colleges—and even the Major Leagues—smoother than ever.
Canada’s lone MLB club is helping pave the way, and not just by throwing money around. The Toronto Blue Jays’ most high-profile initiative debuts next month with the first-ever Tournament 12, featuring Canada’s 230 best college-eligible players, with Hall of Famer Roberto Alomar acting as commissioner. The four-day showcase Sept. 20–24 in Toronto draws the cream of Canada’s crop under one domed roof to play in front of pro scouts “with no barriers,” says TJ Burton, the Jays’ amateur baseball coordinator.
Tournament 12 will not only include stars like Toronto-born Gareth Morgan, a projected first rounder in the 2014 MLB draft, but players from smaller markets and guys who can’t afford to play on travel teams and have never appeared at lucrative U.S. tournaments that draw thousands of scouts.
It’s the type of exposure Winnipeg-born pitcher Ben Onyshko—he’s among Alomar’s invitees—moved 1,300 km away from home for. At 15, Onyshko relocated to small-town Alberta to attend the Vauxhall Academy of Baseball.
“The idea seemed crazy,” the 16-year-old admits.
But on a recruiting trip, Onyshko learned he’d get an 80-game schedule compared to his 35-game season with the Winnipeg South Chiefs. Afternoons were focused on baseball, his backyard was a $1.3-million facility and he’d get high-level competition and coaching he couldn’t find at home. He’d also be able to play year-round. In a city like Winnipeg, Charlottetown or Moncton, N.B., the baseball season runs from the end of May to early September.
And winter ball options are limited. In P.E.I., the only game in town is the Eastern Baseball Academy, an indoor program that operates two days a week in a soccer complex. The scouting situation down east is even worse: P.E.I. provincial junior coach Jason Monaghan says there “might be three scouts” for all of the Maritimes.
“If you s–t the bed at the Canada Cup,” he says, “you probably just screwed your chance at getting an opportunity to move on to a high-school or a college program.”
Stevenson goes so far as to say a P.E.I. pitcher at the Canada Cup is overlooked regardless.
“Nobody wants to see P.E.I. play New Brunswick.”
It’s no wonder Vauxhall—one of Canada’s first premiere baseball academies when it opened in 2006, and now one of 20 or so across the country—regularly convinces kids to leave home.
Says coach Les McTavish: “You throw 90 mph when nobody’s there watching and it won’t matter.” Not a bad sales pitch.
Taking McTavish up on his offer, of course, is pricey—Vauxhall costs $13,000 a year. But in seven years, every player but four has earned a college scholarship. After one season at Vauxhall, Onyshko’s already seeing the rewards: He’s the only Manitoba-born player on Canada’s junior team roster (Baseball Canada covers the team’s costs). The six-footer says he wouldn’t be representing his country had he stayed at home.
“Being at Vauxhall has allowed me to be seen multiple times,” Onyshko says. But he knows not everyone has to seek out the spotlight. “You don’t see guys from Ontario going to Vauxhall, right? Why would they when they can be seen next weekend?”
Josh Naylor—a six-foot, 225-lb., baby-faced tank—is one of the lucky ones, born and raised in the backyard of one of Canada’s top programs, the Mississauga-based Ontario Blue Jays. The club’s head honcho is a scout for the Cincinnati Reds; the Jays play year-round, attend tournaments in the U.S. and even draw scouts to regular-season games. Their indoor complex is home to pitching mounds, a gym and batting cages.
As Naylor takes his rips in there, you see what coach Sean Travers means when he says the teen has “man power.” He’s the best 16-year-old hitter in the country. Perfect Game—the world’s biggest baseball scouting agency—ranks him No. 9 in the North American class of 2015. Naylor is a talent, but he also knows he’s lucky he grew up in Mississauga. He says he plays for the Jays because no program in Canada produced more MLB draft picks in 2012 (five) or 2013 (four), and, thanks in part to his grandma, who usually drives him, he has the “luxury” of working out at the clubhouse seven days a week. Of course, luxury has a price—this year, his parents will dish out some $10,000 so he can play baseball.
Travers, who’s also the Ontario Blue Jays’ director of player development, says the club has never turned away a talented player who didn’t have the money, but admits, “If your parents don’t have the means to make it happen for you, it’s difficult.”
Out west in Langley, B.C., fees for the Blaze—the other power-hitter in Canada when it comes to producing top-level talent, with Brett Lawrie, 2010 first-rounder Kellin Deglan and Canada’s highest 2013 MLB draft pick in third-rounder Tyler O’Neill among recent alumni—come in at around $6,000. It’s hard to keep costs down when a showcase in the U.S. attended by hundreds of pro scouts runs $599 per player.
“You need money to get exposure,” Travers says, sitting in his office in the Jays’ clubhouse as players take BP nearby.
At Perfect Game’s 85-team, invite-only world championship in Jupiter, Fla., this October, you’ll find more than 2,000 scouts at a single game, and only two Canadian clubs—the Blaze and the Jays. “[Baseball] might be more expensive than hockey,” Travers says, “because of all the travel.”
Expensive, sure, but it can pay off. At a scout-infested home run derby in Miami last year, a 15-year-old Naylor hit a 453-foot bomb, good for second-longest in a field of 18-year-olds.
“I think I turned heads,” he says, grinning. Naylor is a pitcher (with an 88-mph fastball), an outfielder and a first baseman. An exceedingly polite kid—he says “thank you” all the time—Naylor was three when he started carrying a glove around and running pretend bases at home. “I’d slide into the hallway and yell ‘Safe!’” By 11, he’d smashed 30-plus homers for his house-league team in Mississauga, playing against kids two years older. This is the type of talent that deserves notice. “As far as a hitter goes,” says Travers, “I’ve never seen anything like him.”
Luckily for Naylor (and his grandma), Tournament 12 is a short drive away. The trip to his next showcase won’t cost anything more than gas money. Naylor was a shoo-in invite for Alomar, and while the showcase is a more novel opportunity for a kid from Moncton, even big-market stars like Naylor benefit from the Toronto Blue Jays’ renewed efforts to put a stamp on the baseball landscape in this country, a priority since Paul Beeston returned to the club as president and CEO in 2009.
While many of the Jays’ initiatives are marketing-driven—at the 17 Super Camps they run across the country this year with ex-players including Devon White and Jesse Barfield, the kids each get a Jays hat and T-shirt, with the hope they’ll become fans—it’s also an effort to become Canada’s team again.
“Paul realized that we lost a bit of that identity for a couple of years,” Burton says. The Jays invested more than $100,000 in Baseball Canada programs last year.
And while nurturing talents at home is a gift to all 30 MLB teams, the hope in the Jays’ front office is that they, too, will reap the benefit by drafting a Canuck or two to join Lawrie on the roster.
Naylor is two years from the draft, and knows he has to wait his turn. Until then, the Ontario Blue Jays will showcase his talent according to their plan. The team orchestrated the moment Baseball Canada head coach Greg Hamilton got his first look: Naylor had just turned 15 and faced 90-mph pitching for the first time. His second at-bat, he drilled a double off the centre-field wall. A day later, he was on a plane to Italy with Team Canada’s under-18 squad, where he DHed for the team that won World Championship silver.
In the history of Canada’s junior team, only two younger players have cracked the squad.
“My dad always told me, ‘It’ll happen, you’ll be seen,’” says Naylor. “I was just being patient.”
JP Stevenson couldn’t afford to be patient. That’s why he moved 4,481 km from home, taking the advice of that scout in P.E.I. and enrolling at Vauxhall, where he’s on the same pitching staff as Onyshko (the lefties have what coach McTavish calls “a healthy competitive relationship”).
The town of 1,500 is “a heck of a lot bigger than New Glasgow,” JP says, “but I figured the transition wouldn’t be too difficult.”
His mom, Mary Beth, still can’t talk about the distance without her voice shaking.
“It was the hardest decision his father and I had to make,” she says. “It’s still raw. He left as a young boy. But we couldn’t be the reason he asked, ‘What if?’”
Mary Beth, a teacher, jokes that she and husband Chris might need a money tree in the backyard. But the hope is they won’t have to dish out for college. Stevenson will visit Canisius College in Buffalo this summer, because the Div. I school has promised to extend an offer.
He’s bright, an honour-roll student, and he’s realistic. There hasn’t been a P.E.I.-born player in the majors since Vern Handrahan with the Kansas City Athletics in 1966. So JP’s focus remains getting an education paid for by his 85-mph fastball and playing ball for as long as he can.
“I wake up at Vauxhall and walk outside and I’m on the baseball diamond,” he says. “It’s pretty ideal.” Stevenson pauses, then adds, “It’d be better if it wasn’t so far from home.”
It’s all part of the price tag, kid.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine. Subscribe here.
