CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – It was cold and windy on Perfect Game Field at Veterans Memorial Stadium all day Monday, but the bright sunshine seemed to invigorate the top prep prospect out of Oak Creek, Wis., a prominent suburb just south of Milwaukee.
When the workout session at the Perfect Game Pre-Draft Showcase got under way sharply at 10 a.m., Doran Turchin was ready to take the torch. An athletic, 6-foot-2, 190-pound senior outfielder at Oak Creek High School, he promptly delivered an event-best 94 mph throw from the outfield (Jay Feliciano from Arecibo, P.R. also threw 94) in the first drill of the morning.
Turchin was far from finished. The 60-yard dash was next on his workout schedule and he ran a personal-best 6.63-seconds, the seventh-best effort at the event. He followed that up with an impressive display during batting practice and then drilled a long home run down the left field line in one of his many at-bats in the six-hour, 18-inning showcase game. It was a noteworthy day’s work.
“That is exactly what I was hoping for,” Turchin said after the marathon nine-hour day reached its conclusion. “That was more than I ever expected to (achieve) and it kind of took me by surprise, but I was feeling good. I ran well and I threw well, and hitting-wise I knew I needed to put the ball in play and barrel it as much as I could.”
It was a standout performance on a day filled with many of them, albeit most came from the pitcher’s mound; Turchin’s showing ranked among the best of the 50 or so position players in attendance. A PG blog posted while the showcase was in progress noted that Turchin can “flat-out play” and called him a “very good all-around player.”
He played both football and basketball through middle school and continued his football career through high school, but always knew that baseball was the athletic love of his life. “I just like how competitive everything is in baseball,” he said. “You’ve got your teammates and you go to work with them every day and there’s nothing else like it. It’s just the thrill of the game.”
Oak Creek High School is a member of the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) which doesn’t have a spring baseball season. The Knights begin their summer season on May 23 with the regular season running through July 11; postseason play runs July 14-24.
Turchin, who has signed with the University of Illinois, was named the NOW Newspapers (eight newspapers that serve suburban Milwaukee and Waukesha counties) Player of the Year as a junior. He hit .418 (46-for-110) with four home runs, three triples, 11 doubles and 46 RBI in 34 games, helping the Knights to a third-place finish at the WIAA state tournament.
Before the Pre-Draft Showcase, PG ranked Turchin the No. 415 national prospect in the class of 2015 and No. 2 in the state of Wisconsin behind right-hander Bryant Jordan from Hubertus. Jordan, a Missouri signee, was also in attendance at Monday’s PG Pre-Draft.
Turchin credited the support he’s received from his parents, mother Missy and father Dan, for a lot of the success he’s enjoyed, adding he doesn’t think his mom has ever missed a single one of his games. He also gave a lot of credit to his coaches at Oak Creek HS, including head coach Scott Holler.
“He’s just the best athlete I have coached,” Holler told NOW Newspapers in August after Turchin was named Player of the Year. “He saved so many runs with his range and his arm.”
He reserved most of his praise, however, for RJ Fergus, the owner and operator of Hitters Baseball, an organization that fields prominent travel ball teams and recently opened a new indoor facility in Caledonia, Wis. Turchin has been working out at Hitters since he was in eighth-grade and has participated in a winter program at the new facility for the past couple of years.
He played in two PG WWBA tournaments with Hitters Baseball in 2013 and three PG Super25 tournaments with Rawlings Hitters National Baseball Club in 2014.
“RJ Fergus has had a huge impact on me,” Turchin said. “When I’m down or when I’m up, he’s always pushing me – ‘You can always do better, you can always do better; you can work on this, you can work on that’ – he’s always pushing me and it’s really helped me a lot.
“I can’t thank RJ enough for everything he’s done – and the rest of the coaches there, too – and I truly feel blessed to be able to go there whenever and work on my game.”
The PG Pre-Draft Showcase always ranks as one of the most opportune times for a prospect to raise his level of play. There was somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 scouts in attendance at PG Field-Vets Stadium Monday and Turchin provided enough material for each one of them to fill a couple of pages in their notebooks.
So far this spring, he hasn’t been showing up on too many top draft prospects lists for the upcoming MLB June Amateur Draft, but that could easily change. And he’s aware change may very well be in the air.
“I’ve given the draft a lot of thought and I’ve talked with my family about it a lot,” Turchin said. “It’s something that I’m definitely going to think about even more (after the Pre-Draft) and it’s a really big thought now.”
If this June’s draft doesn’t play itself out in a manner Turchin is comfortable with, he’s got another tremendous opportunity in front of him.
This has been an exciting spring in Champaign, Ill., where the Illinois Fighting Illini have won 26 straight games heading into this week’s Big Ten Conference Tournament. They won the league’s regular season title with a 21-1 record, are 45-6-1 overall and have vaulted to the No. 2 position in PG’s latest College Baseball Top-25 Rankings.
This is noteworthy because Turchin has signed a letter-of-intent with the Illini as one of the top prizes in head coach Dan Hartleb’s incoming 2015 class. He was actually recruited to Champaign by former assistant coach/recruiting coordinator Eric Snider, who has since moved on to Louisville, but has formed a great relationship with new Illini AC/RC Spencer Allen, who arrived in Illinois from Creighton.
“Doran is one of the top athletes in the state of Wisconsin,” Allen said in an athletics department news release on the day Turchin signed with the Fighting Illini. “Being a dual-sport athlete, Doran brings a toughness and is a competitor on the diamond, (and he) has a frame that will allow him to add strength. We feel that he will have a middle-of-the-order bat at some point in his career.”
It took only one visit to the campus to convince Turchin something special might be brewing in Champaign. A second visit only solidified that feeling.
“You could kind of tell there was a little something about the team having a little bit of swagger to them; they seemed to really jell well together,” he said. “And then I went on my official (visit) and I saw an actual practice live, and I was kind of in awe by how everything was ran and how (meticulous) they are about everything they do. That’s what it takes; that’s how you win (26) games in a row.”
There is, of course, no guarantee that Turchin will ever end up as a Fighting Illini, just like there is no guarantee he will even complete his senior season at Oak Creek HS. If he gets drafted and is offered an acceptable signing bonus, he could be playing somewhere in an MLB Rookie League by late June.
In the meantime, he’ll just keep trying to get better and prove to the scouting community Monday’s performance at the PG Pre-Draft Showcase was no fluke. He’s ready to take the torch and run like crazy.
“You can always develop more as a player in my eyes,” he said. “My arm could still develop more, my speed could still develop more; my hitting could always keep developing. But I’d really like to say I’ve enjoyed the way I’ve played lately and developed as a player.
“I definitely feel like I could go (to an upper level) and compete and that’s all you can really ask for. When you compete, good things happen.”