Don Money, baseball man since 1965, never had seen anything quite like this.
The Nashville Sounds were taking on the Omaha Royals in Nebraska, and Money, managing Nashville — Triple-A affiliate of his longtime employers the Milwaukee Brewers — stood in the third-base coaching box as his center fielder Lorenzo Cain dawdled from the on-deck circle to home plate.
“I started timing him with a stopwatch,” Money, now a Brewers special instructor, recalled Friday. “It took him 54 seconds. Then 56 seconds. I said, ‘Lorenzo, what takes you so long to get in there?’
“He said, ‘I’m just concentrating on what I want to do.’”
If the glut of superhero movies in recent years has taught us anything, it’s that nothing beats a good origin story. The 2014 World Series, which begins Tuesday night at Kauffman Stadium with the Royals playing host to the Giants, features an origin story for the ages in Cain, who won Most Valuable Player honors as Kansas City swept past the Orioles in the American League Championship Series.
That 2010 exchange with Money, in Nashville, underlines the qualities that turned Cain into an October superhero: patience and determination.
“Yeah, definitely, [I] started playing a lot later than a lot of guys on our team, or anybody,” Cain said Wednesday, less than an hour after the ALCS concluded. “But I was determined to be a great ballplayer. And a lot of hard work, a lot of great coaches and family also to push me to be the player that I’m becoming. It’s been a lot of fun. The hard work has definitely paid off.”
The 28-year-old put up a ridiculous .533/.588/.667 slash line in 18 plate appearances against the Orioles, and he added elite defense as the starting center fielder and late-inning right fielder — when the Royals have a lead, he slides over to relieve Nori Aoki in right and Jarrod Dyson takes over in center.
Watching him dominate these games, the last thought you would have is that Cain never played a game of organized ball until he turned 16.
“I’d like to know if there’s anybody that’s played at his level and didn’t play baseball until that late,” said Doug Reynolds, the scout who signed him for Milwaukee in 2005. “You had guys where you’d say he was a football guy and maybe he crossed over. But we’re talking about a non-athlete at any level.”
Well, Cain did enjoy basketball. But his freshman year at Madison County High School in Florida, he didn’t make the hoops team, as he explained to the Kansas City Star in an interview earlier this season. He was looking for some direction and his mother wouldn’t let him play football, so he eventually accompanied a friend named Jeremy Haynes to meet with the baseball coach, Barney Myers.
“What grade are you in?” Myers recalled asking Cain.
“Tenth,” Cain responded.
“Ever play ball?”
“No, sir.”
“Come out this afternoon.”
Cain came out — in street clothes, and without any gear. At this football-centric school, however, Myers couldn’t afford to be picky. He told Cain to reach into the cardboard box in the field house and help himself to some equipment.
The young man emerged, and Myers nervously fungoed a pop fly to Cain — who caught the ball with a lefty thrower’s glove on his right hand, removed the glove with his left hand and returned the ball with a right-handed throw.
“Coach!” Cain pleaded, according to Myers. “If I had one of those other gloves, I could get on it way faster.”
It wasn’t just that Cain hadn’t played the game, he barely knew anything about the game. Once, Cain joined a few of his teammates in cleaning up after practice, with each player grabbing a base for storage.
“We said, ‘Lorenzo, you’ve got home plate,’ ” Myers said. “He would try to figure out how to get home plate [from its moorings].”
Yet Cain proved tireless and focused, and he improved dramatically in a short amount of time. When Reynolds, then an area scout based in Tallahassee (and now a Brewers crosschecker), held a tryout camp for area prospects in the summer between Cain’s junior and senior years, Myers said he would bring Haynes and one other player.
Reynolds didn’t meet Cain before the activities began, though, so the scout found himself blown away by this unknown applicant who ran a 6.4 60-yard dash and who drove a few line drives over the scoreboard at Tallahassee Community College.
“Where are you from?” Reynolds asked Cain, according to the scout.
“Madison,” Cain responded.
“No, you’re not from Madison. I know all of the players from Madison.”
“I just didn’t play much last year.”
“Are you a football player?”
“No.”
“A basketball player?”
“No.”
Reynolds kept his eye on Cain, and following Cain’s graduation in 2004, the Brewers selected him in the 17th round of the amateur draft. In those days, the rules allowed a drafted player to attend junior college and remain his drafting team’s property for a year — a “draft and follow,” they called it. That process gave Cain more time to develop at Tallahassee Community, and it afforded Milwaukee more time to monitor Cain’s progress.
Jack Zduriencik, the Brewers’ scouting director, eyeballed Cain for the first time during that juco season.
“He was a pretty good athlete, and he kept getting better and better,” said Zduriencik, who is now the Mariners general manager. “He was just an athlete that was translating into becoming a baseball player.”
The Brewers landed Cain in 2005 with a $95,000 signing bonus, and he slowly climbed the organizational ladder until he made his major league debut in July 2010. At the end of that season, Milwaukee, ready to leap back into contention, packaged Cain with shortstop Alcides Escobar and pitchers Jeremy Jeffress and Jake Odorizzi and sent them to Kansas City in return for stud pitcher Zack Greinke, shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt and cash.
“We felt he had the talent to be a star as long as he kept his head on straight,” said Money, who managed Cain at Nashville and Double-A Huntsville.
While Greinke helped the Brewers reach the 2011 National League Championship Series then brought back young shortstop Jean Segura and two other minor leaguers in a July 2012 trade with the Angels, Cain and Escobar are everyday players for the pennant-winning Royals; Odorizzi became part of package that went to Tampa Bay for likely Game 1 starter James Shields in December 2012.
Cain didn’t stick in the big leagues until 2012. He has battled injuries and didn’t light it up offensively when he first became a regular. In the 2014 regular season, though, he put up a solid .301/.339/.412 slash line in a career high 471 plate appearances. And he might wind up with his first Gold Glove Award, too — his 2.7 defensive wins above replacement, as per Baseball-Reference.com, ranked second in the AL.
His stellar postseason validated his unlikely rise.
“I told him on the stand [after winning the pennant], a player that’s had setbacks with injuries and frustrations, how he’s committed himself and dedicated himself in the offseason [is great],” Royals general manager Dayton Moore said Wednesday. “Just to persevere and keep getting better as a baseball player. He’s applied a lot of the instruction and just kept giving a great effort.”
On Wednesday night, Myers texted Cain.
“I told him that made my heart feel so good,” Myers said.
Cain’s is a heartwarming story, for sure. This week, he will try to execute the perfect happy ending to this superhero reality show.