GOODYEAR, Ariz. – The school year has started in the Denver, Colo., and its suburbs and many of the top athletes at high schools like Cherry Creek, Regis Jesuit, Highlands Ranch and venerable Mullen spent Friday playing football in the Rocky Mountains’ Front Range. About a dozen others, meanwhile, busied themselves playing baseball in Phoenix’s west suburbs.
Several of the top high school senior baseball prospects from the state of Colorado were at the Goodyear Ballpark Complex Friday afternoon wearing the uniform of Slammers Black Holzemer while enjoying the opening day of play at the Perfect Game/EvoShield National Championship (Upperclass) tournament. There were no other Friday Night Lights these guys would have rather been under.
“Anytime we can come down to Arizona – it’s just a quick little plane ride – it’s always great baseball here and it’s always great weather,” top 2016 catching prospect Maverick Handley said before Slammers Black opened the tournament with a 17-0, three-inning win over the SBG Wahoos from Encino, Calif.
“For us, this is a good chance to hone our skills and get ready for college and it’s always good baseball out here; we’re always looking to play out here as much as we can.”
This weekend’s PG/EvoShield Upper National Championship features 98 teams from across the country, most from California and Arizona. It is a perfect place for one of Colorado’s top organization’s to bring its team of 2016s as the fall tournament season moves ahead full-force.
“We’ve been to a lot of Perfect Game events and the reason we go is because they put on good events. There are a lot of (college) coaches here and there’s good talent,” Slammers Baseball president/owner/head coach Mark Holzemer said Friday.
“We’re kind of gearing up for … Jupiter (PG WWBA World Championship in Jupiter, Fla., in late October), and being from Colorado you don’t get to face the caliber of teams that you get to face in these events.”
This team is led by prospects like Handley, a Stanford University recruit and PG National Showcase alumnus from Lakewood, Colo., who is ranked No. 103 nationally. Travis Marr, a 6-foot-4, 205-pound right-hander/first baseman from Castle Rock, Colo., is a Clemson recruit ranked No. 387 nationally and was also among the top Colorado prospects on hand Friday. 2016s Ty Smith, an Ohio University recruit, and Nick Spillotis, a Dayton University commit, also played in Friday’s opener.
Other highly ranked and regarded guys from the Rockies like Bo Weiss, Nathan Sweeney and Paul Tillotson aren’t here this weekend but are expected to be with the team in Jupiter.
Weiss is a 2016 right-hander from Castle Rock, Colo., ranked No. 166 nationally who has committed to North Carolina and also happens to be the son of Colorado Rockies manager Walt Weiss; Sweeney, a 2016 right-hander/middle-infielder from Centennial, Colo., is ranked No. 234 and has committed to Arizona; Tillotson is another 2016 right-hander/outfielder from Monument, Colo., who has committed to Nebraska and is ranked No. 274 nationally.
Holzemer had this same group at a big scout team tournament in Southern California last weekend and then as now, the roster was somewhat depleted with some of the top prospects absent. Some of the players have reached the point where it’s just not realistic in terms of school commitments and financial considerations to hit all the tournaments that fill dates in September and October and have to pick and choose where they’ll be. It’s a fact of life in high-profile travel all.
“A lot of our top arms aren’t here … but we don’t rotate anybody in and kids get their A-Bs; it seems to work out well but we’ll see how it goes,” Holzemer said. To a man, the players certainly seem to enjoy being given the opportunity.
“There’s a lot better talent down here and that makes it better than playing the same teams over and over again; it’s always fun playing new teams,” Marr said. “In Colorado, it seems like everybody is in the same routine and they’re the same type of players. Coming out here, it’s a lot more fun and we can kind of just go out and play and not have to worry about anything.”
Ever since Holzemer became the majority owner in Slammers Baseball more than a decade ago, he has always welcomed multi-sport athletes and continues to encourage kids to diversify and pursue more than one sport. But the reality is that top prospects in any sport are more and more inclined to specialize, especially with so much college scholarship money being divvied up.
As an example, Holzemer noted that in previous Septembers Marr and Sweeney could be found playing quarterback and Handley linebacker for their respective high school’s football teams. Athletes just like them then started seeing other kids get opportunities they might be missing out on and decided to pursue the sport they felt offered the most promise.
“Some of these guys are going to weigh (their options) and think, ‘Hey, do I have a chance to play Division I football or do I have a better chance to play baseball? If I do, I better go all in,’” Holzemer said.
He explained that his group’s “recipe” is to come to PG events and bring as many top-end pitching arms as possible. Quality arms draw college recruiters and pro scouts to a ball field like nothing else, and once they’re on site the hope is they might take a liking to a position player or two that otherwise might have gone unnoticed.
It’s all about exposure and Holzemer has made a commitment to get his youth teams involved in PG events to get them used to a higher level of competition at an earlier age and also – more importantly – to get their parents accustomed to the drill. Playing for their high school team is – and should be – the top priority but getting out to the right events during the summer and fall should be a priority, as well.
With his coveted commitment to Stanford in hand, Handley now wants to make sure his uncommitted teammates can take advantage of these opportunities. It simply makes him feel good.
“A lot of these guys on this team aren’t yet committed and it would be awesome if I could help them be seen; have scouts come out to see not only me, but those guys, too,” he said. “I’ve known most of these kids for a couple of years and we’re like a brotherhood, and if one of us commits (to a college) we feel like it’s a big accomplishment as a team.”
Holzemer, a left-handed pitcher who was drafted by the California Angels in the fourth round of the 1987 MLB Draft out of Handley’s Mullen High School, played parts of seven seasons in the big leagues (1993-98, 2000) with the Angels, Seattle Mariners, Oakland A’s and Philadelphia Phillies; he spent the 1999 season playing in Japan.
Among his partners at Slammers Baseball is Clint Zavaras, a former right-hander who was drafted by the Mariners in the third round of the 1985 MLB Draft out of Mullen, and spent part of the 1989 season pitching for the M’s.
Over the years, Slammers Baseball has grown into the premier training program in the state of Colorado with top-notch facilities and a 22,000 square foot indoor facility in Englewood. Denver-area prospects have bought into what Holzemer, Zavaras and others in the organization work to get across and the Colorado kids are now just as highly recruited as their counterparts from the nation’s warm weather states. And, most importantly, they want to continue to learn from the players in the warm weather states.
“You see kids from California and they’re doing these goofy arm exercises, or you see some kid from Texas who’s throwing submarine (style),” Handley said. “It’s fun to see kids who are able to play the game more often than we can and to think that if I was playing the game as much they do I might be doing some of that stuff, too. That’s why we come out here – to see them and face them and know what we need to work towards.”
Not a whole lot could be learned about the Slammers Black in their one-sided tournament-opener, a game in which they used eight hits, 10 walks and one hit batter to score 17 runs in 13 innings. Cooper Shearon had two hits – including a walk-off, three-run home run in the third – and drove in four runs, and Aaron Dammel singled, tripled and contributed four RBI.
The Slammers were scheduled to play a second pool-play game later Friday afternoon and seemed certain to receive a stiffer test.
“With a lot of these kids, we’ve been playing together for a long time and we’ve kind of all grown together,” Marr said. “We all hang out together quite a bit and that’s kind of cool because not very many of us go to the same school. We play well together; it doesn’t matter who we’re playing or who’s out there pitching. We’ve been hitting well so I think we stand a pretty good chance.”
On selected September Friday nights in the not so distant past, several of these Colorado kids would have been lining up on Denver-area high school football fields, hoping to lead their school to a state championship and, more likely than not, loving every minute of it.
Instead, they choose to line up on MLB spring training baseball fields hoping to lead Slammers Black Holzemer to a PG national tournament championship while also preparing for a run at another more prominent PG national championship at the PG WWBA World Championship in Jupiter, Fla., at the end of next month.
“It’s good for us and our guys to get geared up for the end of the fall with the big events we have coming up,” Holzemer said. “Jupiter is huge, and for us to go to Jupiter and just to get out there is big for these guys.”