They say an athlete’s character plays a key role when it comes down to selecting teams - from Little League through high school, college and even at the professional level.
If that was the only criteria in the decision-making of the 30 Major League Baseball clubs during this week’s first-year player draft, Luke Willis would be a lock as a high draft pick staring at hundreds of thousands of dollars in signing bonus money.
That trait, however, isn’t the only factor when over 1,200 players are selected this week. In fact, it’s probably the sixth-highest, at best, behind the five tools generally used to measure a position player in baseball - one’s base running speed and skill, arm strength, defensive prowess, ability to hit for average, and ability to hit for power.
Willis measures well on most of those, without question.
The 5-foot-11, 190-pound outfielder recently ran a personal-best 6.4 60-yard dash at workout for one MLB club, and he stole 29 bases in 34 attempts this past season, his senior campaign at George Mason University in Fairfax. The stocky former all-league high school running back and track standout was used as a closer during his prep career at Oakton High School, with a fastball clocked as high as 87 MPH. He was regarded as one of the top defensive outfielders in the Atlantic 10 Conference. And he hit a team-high .355 this past season, ranking second with four home runs and third with 29 RBI as Mason’s leadoff hitter.
What can’t be measured with numbers is the maturity the 22-year-old now carries himself with, both on and off the field. How his growth on the field from a young, at times maybe immature player, to one veteran Mason coach Bill Brown leaned on to lead his club the past two seasons, can be attributed in part due to the loss three years ago of his father, Jeff.
Scouts know Willis can play. He’s spoken with a number of clubs and was invited to workouts by the Washington Nationals, Pittsburgh Pirates, Tampa Bay Rays and Los Angeles Dodgers. One scout who asked not to be identified indicated Willis would be selected on Wednesday, the third day of the 40-round draft, and likely in the middle rounds.
“If I had known in high school that I’d be at this point after my senior year in college, I’d feel really good about myself,” Willis said yesterday, just hours before the draft began. “I felt like I performed the best I possibly could at all those [workouts]. I’ve ran some good 60 times, made some good throws and made some good swings, and I’ve heard nothing but good things from the scouts. So I’m hopeful that it will work out for me.”
What the scouts in attendance at those workouts and in the stands at his games likely aren’t as familiar with is the stress his father’s battle with cancer had on him during a two-year period before and after Jeff Willis’ passing. It affected him during his freshman season at Coastal Carolina, where he began his collegiate career and had what he described as his worst season in baseball, and the early part of that following summer while playing in the Northwoods League, a collegiate summer league in the Upper Midwest. It led to an ugly scene where he threw his bat against the backstop after striking out during a slump that summer and was subsequently handed a three-game suspension by the Northwoods League, a blowup stemming from being away from his family while his father, a former Junior College player who had remained very fit well into his 50s, was slowly losing his battle to the disease.
“That’s not the kind of player I am, but it shows how serious it was,” said Willis, a first-team all-state and All-Met selection by The Washington Post his senior year in 2011.
“At the end of my senior year of high school is when it hit him during the baseball season, and you know, I think my dad is Superman, I’m not entirely worried about it right out of the gate. I think he’ll be fine. But you go away to school, and you only come home so often. And every time I come home, for Thanksgiving, for Christmas break, he’s starting to lose weight. And I kind of feel like they’re hiding some information because they still want me to do my thing at school.
“And it’s really tough, not knowing what’s going to happen.”
Those scouts are likely unaware of how he hit maybe the longest home run of his career, an estimated 420-foot blast to straight away center field at Madison High School while playing with the Vienna River Dogs of the Cal RIpken Collegiate Baseball League later that summer in 2012, within an hour, maybe minutes, of his father’s passing while in hospice care at the family’s home. Or how less than a week later, an estimated 500 people came out to what normally would have been a lightly-attended River Dogs game to support him in his first game back after losing his father.
“I’ve never hit a home run like that,” Willis said of the long ball, which came against the perennial league power Bethesda Big Train. “And that’s the moment right there I think where he passed away. And then April [Carroll] showed up to the game, and I just kind of knew it there. She said, ‘Luke, you need to go home’. And then that last inning is when I robbed a home run after I had already hit the home run. It was just a weird series of events.”
April Carroll is part of a support group that has rallied around Willis, his mother, Evy, and his sister, Lindsey, since Jeff WIllis’ death on July 14, 2012. The group includes Carson Carroll and Bill Grossman, who coached with Jeff with the Vienna Mustangs travel team and then with Stars Showcase Baseball, his former Oakton baseball coaches Scott Rowland and Justin Janis, football coach Joe Thompson and track coach Alisa Byers, and Brown, Patriots hitting coach Tag Montague and Greg Williams, the father of Mason teammates John and Joe Williams.
“They’ve helped me through the really tough times,” Willis said. “I really think I have the best friends in the whole world, and I have the best supporting cast in the world.”
Willis tells the recent story of the Carroll’s coming home from watching their youngest son, Mitch, play a road series with his University of Maryland-Baltimore County team, arriving just before 5 a.m. An hour later, they’re back on the road, Willis in the back seat, taking him to one of his workouts in front of pro scouts.
“They drove me up five hours for a two-hour workout, then back home while on one-hour of sleep,” he said. “It’s unreal the people that have looked out for me, and how far out of their way they have gone just to help me out.”
He credits the transfer to Mason for his playing career turning around, and appreciates how Brown and his staff gave him the freedom to play his game.
“Going to Mason was definitely the best decision I’ve made in my life,” Willis said. “It turned my baseball career around. The last two years at Mason, I’ve had the most fun I’ve ever had playing. And that’s because I understand the game better, and the coaching staff there allows you to play. I was comfortable. I was able to make mistakes, and learn from that.”
His experience with the Patriots included a tournament MVP performance as Mason won the conference championship in the school’s first year in the Atlantic 10 last spring, then an appearance in the NCAA Tournament regional in Texas. This year, he emerged as one of the top players in the conference, threatening the school record for steals in a season and stringing together a 26-game hitting streak, just one shy of the school record.
“I remembered seeing somewhere where someone said, ‘Life is like a slingshot. You have to get pulled back before you go forward’. I regressed [at Coastal Carolina]. I was probably a worse player for a whole solid year right when my dad passed away. I contemplated quitting, and I feel like the move to Mason is what propelled me forward. I’m never going back to what I was before as a player.”
After hitting .160 and .281 in his two seasons at Coastal Carolina, he hit .302 last year and raised his game even further this year. Throughout it all, he said he feels his father’s presence whenever he takes the field.
“It made me grow up and mature. I kind of realized that there are a lot more important things than baseball,” Willis said. “And I feel like that kind of changed my game. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with taking sports serious, but I think I kind of took it too serious my freshman year. And I just drove myself crazy, working out way too hard, focusing way too much.”
So here he is now, at a crossroads in his baseball career, uncertain but excited with what the coming days could yield. Failure to get drafted or signed as an undrafted free agent would lead him to an internship he has lined up with the Department of Justice, and potentially one day to an acting career with a move out to Los Angeles. Yes, Willis wants his skeptical friends and family to believe him when he says a move to Hollywood could be a real possibility should his baseball career not continue.
Regardless of what happens. he is at peace knowing he has given the game everything he has, and has faced a challenge in life that a baseball game could never match.
“I feel like when you go through something like that, it makes everything else so much easier to cope with and deal with,” Willis said. “Ever since that, I’ve never been in a pressure situation. In the regional last year, I never felt like I had to get a hit. I never feel like I need to hit this pitch out of the park. I’ve never felt the pressure to show off to anyone, I know it’s a game and just to go out there and have fun, and that’s it.
“And I don’t care if I make it to the World Series in the next 10 years, I will never feel pressure again on the sports field again. The worst thing that could possibly happen to me in my life, has already happened to me. And I’m alive, I’m fine, I’m doing alright.”
Photos Courtesy/George Mason Athletics
