CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – Round-of-16 bracket-play at this weekend’s Perfect Game WWBA Kernels Foundation Championship went on late Sunday morning without the prominent St. Louis Pirates organization as part of the mix.
The program, a regular at the Kernels Foundation WWBA World Championship Qualifier since 2004 and the tournament champion in 2008, always brings a well-equipped contender to the event, and it certainly did so again this weekend.
The St. Louis Pirates 2019’s opened the day Sunday having to complete their round-of-32 game against Peak Performance Prospects Black, which was suspended Saturday night. They led, 4-3, with the game going into the bottom of the seventh when play resumed, but the Prospects Black – much to their credit – tied things up and sent it into extra innings.
They prevailed 8-7 in eight innings when PG’s tie-breaker rules went into effect; the Pirates scored three in the top of the eighth, the Prospects plated four in the bottom of the frame. The Prospects lived to play another championship-bracket game – which they lost to the Minnesota Miller’s Varsity in the round-of-16 – while the Pirates went home.
There was one unfortunate consequence of the St. Louis Pirates 2019’s going by the wayside so early on Sunday, however. That outcome deprived scouts and other interested parties the opportunity to watch one of the top catching prospects from the class of 2019 continue to perform on Eastern Iowa stages where he’s felt quite comfortable the last two Septembers.
“This was really a fun event last year (and) this year it’s a really good event, too. I love this event; it’s awesome,” Kurtis Byrne told PG under an overcast sky at Perfect Game Field-Veterans Memorial Stadium early Sunday morning.
Kurtis Byrne is a force, a thinking man’s ballplayer who hits for power and who can show off a power arm from behind the plate. Checking in at 6-foot-1, 210-pounds, the senior at Christian Brothers College High School in Chesterfield, Mo., a Texas Christian University commit who has risen to No. 63 in the class of 2019 national prospect rankings (No. 1 Missouri, No. 6 catcher).
In the two games the Pirates got in here on Friday and Saturday-Sunday, Byrne provided a snapshot of what he’s capable of doing at PG’s national WWBA tournaments. In just eight at-bats, he managed to hit two home runs and a single (.375) and also drove in seven runs.
At the 2017 PG WWBA Midwest Underclass Qualifier and the 2017 PG WWBA Kernels Foundation Championship played last September on various fields in or around Linn County, Iowa, Byrne stepped up and impressed enough to earn all-tournament recognition at both events.
He was 5-for-9 (.556) with a home run, two doubles and three RBI at the Midwest Under Q and two weeks later went 5-for-12 (.417) with a pair of doubles at the Kernels Championship. Byrne went on to play with the St. Louis Pirates/Elite Baseball Training team at the PG WWBA World Championship in Jupiter, Fla., where he homered and singled in eight at-bats (.250) and drove in four.
Byrne also earned all-tournament recognition at both the 2018 PG 17u WWBA National Championship and the 17u PG World Series this summer, the two most prominent 17u events on PG’s annual tournament calendar. He went 7-for-20 (.350) with a home run, five doubles and five RBI at the 17u PG WWBA and followed that with a 7-for-13 (.538) effort at the 17u PGWS, with four doubles and four knocked in.
The trophy room on his PG Player Profile Page is filled to the rafters with 32 “trophies” that he’s accumulated since he came on the PG scene in 2016. That number includes all-tournament recognition at eight PG tournaments while also being included the Top Prospect List/Teams at five PG showcase events.
Byrne cited his experiences in Jupiter last October and at the PG National Showcase at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla., in June as two of his favorite events, mostly because of the competition level. But he also said he enjoyed them because they taught him how to dig-in, stay relaxed and keep his focus while performing in front of hundreds of eyes that were evaluating his every move.
“I remember the scouts, honestly, just all those golf carts; that’s the biggest thing to take away from that event,” Byrne said of the PG WWBA World Championship experience. “But also, the competition is amazing – it’s the best tournament of the year; I love it.”
The St. Louis Pirates will have a team in Jupiter three weeks from now, they just won’t receive the paid berth that winning the Kernels Championship would have provided.
PG scouts certainly took note of Byrne’s performance at the National, when he recorded personal bests with an 83-mph throw from behind the plate to second base and a 1.81 Pop time. His scouting report read in part:
“Kurtis Byrne … (has a) big and strong physical build … right-handed hitter, big hand hitch load, hand driven swing, creates very good raw bat speed, big power when he gets extended out front, can drive the opposite gap well and turn the barrel as well; ball jumps hard when everything comes together. … Stays compact with his actions behind the plate, has big arm strength and makes accurate throws. Bat is his best present tool and it can be loud.”
That’s just what you get with Byrne, who’s a month short of celebrating his 18th birthday.
“He’s a special guy, he’s a special kid, he’s a special player that always brings a good attitude every day, and he’s someone for all of the other guys to kind of chase,” St. Louis Pirates 2019’s head coach Danny Chambliss said Sunday. “All of these guys that are here apparently want to be great so he’s someone for them to look at and see what that looks like and more or less chase what he’s doing. … At the end of the day, he’s an A-plus human being, and that always helps.”
The St. Louis Pirates 2019’s WWBA Kernels Foundation roster that was here offered an equitable mix of players from the classes of 2019 and 2020, with most of them calling cities and towns right around the St. Louis area home, both on the Missouri and Illinois sides of the Mississippi River.
The prospects, for the most part, have been with or will continue to be with the Pirates’ program throughout their high school careers. That continuity, and the sense of familiarity that it brings to the players, makes everyone sitting in the dugout feel a lot more comfortable in their surroundings.
“That’s a big part of what we do, and the way that we train our guys in the wintertime, it helps to have them for a long time,” Chambliss said. “It makes it pretty seamless when the new guys step in and they just kind of follow suit with guys we’ve had for a while and get a feel for the way we do things.”
Among the other Pirates 2019’s from the 2019 class that joined Byrne on the field this weekend were right-hander Evan Gray (No. 481, Arkansas), outfielder Chase Krogman (N. 482, Missouri State), third baseman Colin Bergmann (t-1,000, Saint Louis U.) and outfielder Kylon Cunningham (t-500); 2020 corner-infielder Drake Westcott (No. 129, Louisville) was also on hand.
“We’ve all been playing together for about three years now and we all have a really, really good chemistry,” Byrne said. “We just really bond with each other, we hang out with each other, we go to dinner together; it’s a really good chemistry and that helps us on the field, too.
“We take pointers from one another all the time; that’s our big thing,” he continued. “Some players are spark plugs who really get us going at the top of the lineup, and Colin Bergman is one of those guys, too, who’s really a sparkplug. We just have a lot of guys like that.”
Byrne said that he played a little bit of infield when he was younger but has been a catcher for much of his career. It’s been argued that the catcher holds down one of the most important positions on the field and it came naturally to the athletic Byrne.
“I just really like that you’re in the game all the time,” he said. “You’re always just throwing it back (to the pitcher) or doing something. It’s not like, quote-unquote boring, I guess, because you’re always in it.”
The importance of Byrne’s presence behind the plate isn’t lost on Chambliss: “He’s a great kid and a leader on the field, which you have to be as a catcher,” the head coach said. “That’s priceless to us as far as all that goes and I’m blessed to have him and happy to be around him every day.”
Byrne is also appreciative of the opportunities he’s been presented with as part of the St. Louis Pirates program, saying that “it’s really transformed me into the player that I wanted to be coming into high school; it’s really changed my game.”
Byrne’s original college commitment was to Indiana from the Big Ten but he decommitted after the Hoosiers made a coaching change. He took his visit to the Big 12’s TCU and Fort Worth a couple weeks after re-opening his college recruitment and, in his own words, just fell in love with the place.
“The town was awesome and it’s Texas baseball, playing at TCU,” he said. “It’s really big-time baseball and you just can’t beat it.”
When the directors at the St. Louis Pirates organization are going through the process of selecting the young players they want to be a part of their program, they are looking for kids like Byrne. They’re the kids who will show up every day, ring the bell and go out and do their jobs.
They also emphasize to the young teenagers the importance of keeping their grades up at school, pointing out that D-I programs are only allowed 11.7 scholarships that are usually divided up between recruiting classes that might number 15 or more. Any academic assistance that can supplement the athletic dollars can go a long way toward moving a player’s college career forward.
“So, doing your job, working hard and doing everything that you can in the classroom is a way that you’ll fit in with everyone in our program,” Chambliss said.
The teams competing at this weekend’s PG WWBA Kernels Foundation Championship have faced some challenges with weather-related issues while also trying to acclimate themselves to the new, single-elimination bracket-play format. Top prospects like Kurtis Byrne seem to always find a way to roll with the punches.
“(This format), to be honest, it does kind of change you mentality coming in because if you lose one game, you’re out,” he said before the Pirates 2019’s were eliminated. “Every game means something, so you have to go out there every day and compete your hardest.
“(But) I really hope that I can leave here being a better player,” he concluded. “We’re playing really good teams out here and I’m learning a lot about baseball and I’m just having a good time out here.”