Memories can often be fleeting but usually not the ones shared between a father who has devoted his life to baseball and a young son who has very real aspirations of doing the same thing.
Take this one for example. Jose Tolentino, the very definition of a baseball lifer, recalled a historic occasion that played out on July 9, 2011 when his son Milan Tolentino was nine years old. It was on that date that the Yankees’ Derek Jeter hit a home run off of the Devil Rays' David Price, a blast that was the 3,000th hit of Jeter’s Hall of Fame career.
Having witnessed it, the young Milan immediately began thinking about exactly where he wanted to be roughly 10 years hence and went to his father with a declaration.
“He told me, hey Dad, I’ve got to sign (professionally) out of high school,” Jose recalled during a recent telephone conversation with Perfect Game. “I said, ‘What the heck are your talking about?’ He goes, ‘Dad, for me to get 3,000 hits I have to sign out of high school. … He was the best (player) in his little league, but that was just little league.”
Nearly a decade later, it turns out Milan Tolentino’s proclamation wasn’t such a far-fetched leap of faith after all. Tolentino, a 2019 Perfect Game All-American shortstop from Mission Viejo, Calif., has developed into one of the top prep prospects in the class of 2020 and is widely viewed as an early round pick in the MLB Amateur Draft even if the draft is shortened to five rounds.
This is, of course, when the story gets interrupted. With the country in the throes of its worst health crises in 100 years, the fate of the 2020 MLB Draft – and the 2020 MLB season for that matter – is not known.
And right now, about three weeks after Tolentino’s senior season at Santa Margarita Catholic High School was cancelled, he is busying himself the only way he knows how – trying to stay baseball-ready.
“Just been staying at home, doing what we can; just hanging in there,” Tolentino told PG during a separate phone conversation this week. “You know how it is, just being with the family and stuff.”
Yeah, hanging out with the family has become the new national pastime. There is a batting cage at the Tolentino home that Milan has access to and there is one field in the area that is yet to be shutdown where he and one or two of his friends can get some work in.
He doesn’t have access to a complete weight room set-up at the moment, which has been problematic, but one of his friends does have a weight set he’s been able to use.
It’s just a matter of trying to figure out exactly how much can be done without having the benefit of a lesson plan to follow; all of the unknowns, in and of themselves, can be overwhelming. The most difficult thing, Tolentino said, is not knowing exactly what he needs to be ready to do and when he needs to do it.
“It’s kind of hard to calculate when we’re trying to peak, when to be in perfect shape for one (specific) thing; we don’t want to get burnt-out either,” he said. “That’s probably the challenging part here, is trying to figure out what we’re preparing for and the time frame of what we’re preparing for.”
Santa Margarita Catholic did get its 2020 season started and the Eagles got 10 games in before being shut down. Unfortunately for Tolentino, the flu had sidelined him for several of those games so he was really still trying to shape into form.
What turned out to be the last game the Eagles would play this season wasn’t even played at all – it was postponed by rain. At that point, individual school districts across Southern California had started suspending their seasons, but Tolentino and his teammates tried to stay upbeat.
“We were always kind of having hope that, hey, we’ll be back, we’ll be back,” he said. “Finally, when our coach texted us and told us to come clean out the locker room, that’s when it kind of hit everybody. … Honestly, I couldn’t have wanted it to have to happen with a different group of guys – I love those guys, so that was good.
“We’re still in touch every day and it’s such a good group of people but it was sad and it was unfortunate,” he added. “Now we just have to stay positive and keep moving forward.”
One thing that is certain moving forward is that Tolentino will continue to have the unrivaled support of his parents, Jose and Nathalie, the latter who was once a professional horseback jumper.
Jose Tolentino has been all over the baseball map, both literally and figuratively. A native of Mexico City, he was a member of the Texas Longhorns team that won the 1983 College World Series championship (Roger Clemens, Calvin Schiraldi and Bruce Ruffin were among his teammates) and was a seventh round pick of the Athletics in the 1983 MLB Amateur Draft.
A first baseman, Jose played parts of 11 seasons in the minor leagues (1983-92, 97), one season in Japan (’93) and three seasons in the Mexican League (’94-’96). He also appeared in 44 games with the Astros in 1991 when Houston was a member of the National League.
The elder Tolentino managed Team Mexico in the 2007 Pan-American Games and at the 2008 Summer Olympics and was the bench coach for Mexico’s World Baseball Classic teams in both ’06 and ’09; Jose also founded the Jose Tolentino Professional School of Baseball in 1999.
And for the past 16 years he’s been the Spanish radio broadcaster for the Los Angeles Angels while also doing television work for Fox Deportes, Fox Sports International, DirecTV and ESPN.
“We are actually in a fortunate situation; I think Milan is fortunate,” Jose said of his family’s situation during the shutdown. “Even though as difficult as this (time) is, I think we can relate it to something somehow, right?”
Based on his vast array of experiences and accomplishments within the game, Jose Tolentino feels like he has developed viewpoints from just about every possible angle. His attention to detail has allowed him to become an even better teacher than he was a ballplayer, which is really saying something. And he’s also been able to pass onto his son a lot of what he’s learned.
He has a plan when working with Milan during this time of so many unknowns, and he’s using an analogy to spring training. If it is set to begin in four weeks, the player needs to start getting ready in two weeks. In his words, “Every two weeks you get not quite ready by being almost ready.”
And that’s the thinking behind the father and son effort to make sure Milan Tolentino is as ready as he can be in the event that he is asked to perform without much of a heads-up. The body has a limit, Jose Tolentino said, adding that is the reason for an offseason in the first place, but how do you do an offseason without knowing when it will be in-season?
There was a time in the not-so-distant past when baseball was always in-season for Milan Tolentino, a 6-foot-1, 180-pound left-handed hitting shortstop and UCLA signee who is ranked No. 44 overall (No. 6 SS) nationally and Nos. 9/2 in California; PG ranks him as the No. 6 high school shortstop prospect in the 2020 draft class.
Tolentino’s PG career wasn’t necessarily extensive but it was most certainly high-profile. He played in the 2017 PG Underclass California World Series and the 2018 17u PG World Series, both with the Saddleback Cowboys program, and while that was the extent of Tolentino’s PG tournament play, the experiences resonated with him.
“Those were fun because at that time you were still with the kids that you’d been playing with since you were nine (years old),” he said. “I had been with that team since I was little and that was the last couple of years of the childhood group staying together. …
“I still talk with a lot of those guys and I’m even hitting with two of them during this quarantine. Those were great years and if I could do it all over again I wouldn’t change anything; I really had a lot of fun.”
Tolentino attended the PG Underclass All-American Games in San Diego in August 2018, a showcase event that runs in the either the days before or days after the PG All-American Classic each year. Tolentino’s Top Prospect List performance at the Underclass AA Games earned him an invitation to the 2019 PG National Showcase in Phoenix and a stellar showing in the desert led to the PG All-American Classic invite.
Every player can look back on his PG National Showcase experience and identify an aspect of it that was special, and Tolentino’s was a bit out of the norm. It was most memorable for him, he said, because it marked one of the last times he traveled to an event with Jose.
“When you’re (younger), you’re driving over to Arizona in the summer or, for us, we’re driving to north California or south California; we were just traveling as a family,” Tolentino said. “(The National) was kind of the last road-trip with my dad. We got in the car, drove to Arizona and that was the start of maybe the best summer of my life.”
Once back in San Diego for the PGAAC last August, Tolentino found himself in an entirely new setting, one which put an emphasis on activities separate from the game itself. The players are asked to embrace the entire experience as a whole, with the focal point being their visit to Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego, which followed a months-long fundraising effort to aid in the battle against pediatric cancer.
“Like we were all saying, it’s a reality check,” Tolentino said. “Sometimes when you’re an athlete you tend to feel like everything is going perfect and you forget about what’s really happening in the world at times. When we get to go to hospitals, it’s really good to be able to see everything and be with the kids and play with them and try to give them that sense of fun. …
“The kids are awesome; they’re always smiling and so it’s good to see,” he continued. “And they do a lot for us even though we’re going there for them. They give us smiles, too, and it’s fun; I’m glad we were able to do that.”
The summer of 2019 was a special one for Tolentino outside of the PG showcase circuit as well. He took part in the MLB/USA Baseball Prospect Development Program (PDP) League where he singled three times in four trips while facing elite pitching during the All-Star Game, and also stood out defensively.
Most impressively, perhaps, Tolentino was a member of the USA Baseball 18u National Team which secured a sliver metal finish at the WBSC U-18 Baseball World Cup staged in Korea. He played in all nine of Team USA’s games and hit .286 with a .412 on-base percentage.
“Hearing your national anthem with (USA) across your chest, you can’t put it into words; it was an honor,” Tolentino said. “That and making the (PG) All-American game were my two goals for the summer so getting those two done was awesome; the Area Codes (Games) was also a huge goal of mine.
“Getting all of that done and looking back at it … it was a blast. For my last summer as a non-collegiate or a professional, it was special; it really was.”
It’s obvious that the relationship Milan enjoys with his dad is a special one as well, even if there is an occasional glitch involving communications. He laughed while explaining something that every father and son encounters, and that’s when it takes some time for the fatherly message being delivered to be fully understood by the teenaged son.
“Sometimes you hear it but it just doesn’t click,” Milan Tolentino said with a laugh. “And then, two weeks later you’ll think about what he said and it clicks. It’s like, ‘Oh that’s what you said’ and (Jose’s) like, ‘Yeah, meatball, what are you talking about?’ But it’s good because it goes from dad to coach and your relationship just builds very cleanly. …
“Now we’re talking baseball all day and if we’re not talking baseball we’re talking about ‘Shark Tank’ because we’re always watching that now,” he added with a laugh. “But from baseball to life, he’s taught me everything. And my mom, obviously, too; don’t let me get started there.”
These days, the message Jose is trying to convey to Milan is to be proactive and to quit thinking about the big-picture life scenarios over which you have no control, while acknowledging that it’s going to be a battle each and every day.
Milan, for his part, knows he in a very good place despite a disruption to everyday life that even adults are having trouble adjusting to. Sometimes it just takes the perspective of a thoughtful and reflective 18 year old to provide the proper balance.
“It’s hard to look at things and say that everything’s going perfect because obviously we wanted to play our senior (season) and we wanted to be able to go to the beach without having to worry about anything, but we can’t,” Tolentino said. “Where we’re at is doing the most we can while we’re here and counting our blessings because that’s what we can do right now.
“You’ve got to trust the process,” he concluded. “We’ll be back but (before) we’re back we’ve got to worry about everyone else first because we’re OK.”