Inside Baseball: Heyward wields big bat, potential

Even before the Braves' Jason Heyward became baseball's version of LeBron James - a multitalented, physically and facially mature wunderkind - he gave his high school coach several reasons to believe that day was coming: his abilities, his work ethic, his patience, his size, his demeanor.

And on those long bus rides back to McDonough, Ga., when Heyward and his Henry County High teammates would stop at a McDonald's for a quick dinner, Troy Baker got to see one more attribute.

"The whole team would be in line and it would be, 'Give me a triple cheeseburger. Give me a Big Mac. Give me a quarter pounder,' " Baker recalled last week. "Then Jason, who was only a sophomore, would walk up and say, 'Give me the grilled chicken salad' or 'Give me the grilled chicken sandwich.' He took care of his body, which was unusual in a kid that age."

Heyward is 20 now, 6-foot-5 and 240 pounds. And as the Phillies will find out this week in Atlanta, the rookie's legend is as fully formed as his physique.

Though he has played only a handful of major-league games, Heyward already is being portrayed as a 21st-century hybrid of Roy Hobbs, Derek Jeter, and Dale Murphy. He is a five-tool star who homered on his first big-league swing and who possesses a drive and humility that, frankly, seem too good be to true.

Even his choice of a number, 22, a tribute to a high school teammate, Andy Wilmont, who died in an auto accident, is movie-script worthy.

Heyward calls teammate Chipper Jones "Mr. Jones." Grizzled Braves manager Bobby Cox, not one prone to superlatives, has compared his rightfielder to Mickey Mantle. And Hank Aaron, who tossed the first pitch at the Braves' opener to Heyward, has predicted the youngster will resurrect baseball among African Americans.

"I know it's a cliche to say this kid is a coach's dream," said Baker, who was Heyward's coach for his sophomore and junior seasons at Henry County. "But he was one. No way I will ever get another player like that.

"Most coaches wouldn't say this about a player in a sport they played, but even though I taught him what I could, I promise you he taught me more about baseball and life than I taught him."

After belting a 476-foot home run off the Cubs' Carlos Zambrano on the first big-league strike he saw, Heyward has continued to impress. He's hitting .300 with three homers and 12 RBIs.

His rapid ascension to the big leagues, and the remarkable narrative that accompanied him, began in Stockbridge, Ga., a town 35 miles south of Atlanta.

Heyward was born in Ridgewood, N.J., but his Dartmouth-educated parents, both engineers, moved to Georgia in 1992, when Eugene Heyward got a job with ITT Industries. (His mother, Laura, is a Georgia Power systems analyst.)

The grandson of a career military man, Heyward was raised, his former coaches said, to be polite, respectful, and humble, traits the Braves insist he has brought with him to the profane big leagues.

"The thing I like about Jason," C.J. Stewart, an ex-big-leaguer who became the young Heyward's batting coach, said last week, "is that he's made it cool to be humble."

His potential was honed not on the sandlots but in the kind of baseball-only cauldrons that forge the top draft picks. For several years, Heyward not only got instruction at Stewart's school but also attended the prestigious East Cobb Baseball Academy in Marietta, Ga., a program that has turned out 14 No. 1 picks in the last three years alone.

"I steered him toward baseball and he liked it right away," said Eugene Heyward, who drove his son daily on the 120-mile round trip between McDonough and Marietta. "But every year I would ask him if he wanted to stay with the sport. He never hesitated."

His father's question was a logical one for a youngster who was 6-1 as a sixth grader and who was coveted by his middle-school football and basketball coaches, some of whom didn't understand his refusal.

"Jason's parents didn't want him to risk injury in other sports," said Baker, who also coached football at Henry County Middle School. "My philosophy at the time was you do what you can to help your school. As a Braves fan, I saw Chipper Jones, who was an all-state wide receiver in high school; Tom Glavine, who was a hell of a hockey player; John Smoltz, who was offered a basketball scholarship to Michigan State.

"But Jason kind of changed my thinking. Lots of times when a family tries to specialize a kid in one sport, the kid gets burnout. That never happened with Jason. He's just as passionate about baseball now as he was then. It's still fun to him."

The legend began to blossom in Heyward's sophomore year at Henry County when, in a state playoff game, the lefthanded hitter belted a 90-plus m.p.h. fastball from Buster Posey, now a Giants catcher, 450 feet.

Henry County would go on to win the state title that season despite an 0-4 start that tested the attitude of everyone on the team - everyone but Heyward.

"We had some difficult times," said Baker. "A lot of people showed their true character by getting down on themselves or getting down on the team. . . . Jason was not one of those guys."

Heyward, who played first base as well as right field and was 5-0 as a lefthanded pitcher his senior season, ran up his most impressive figures as a sophomore. Henry County never repeated as state champs, in large part because other teams stopped pitching to Heyward.

"At first coaches didn't know him, so they'd tell their guys, 'Hey, let's go after him,' " said Baker. "Then pretty quickly it was, 'Hey, Henry County has this kid, don't dare throw him a fastball.' In his junior and senior year, people got smart and said, 'Let's let the other eight guys beat us.' The bat got taken out of his hand his senior year. When scouts came to see him, they just watched him trot down to first base."

That - and perhaps the fact that the Braves, who help support the East Cobb program, were eager to keep him under wraps - helps explain why he lasted to No. 14 in the first round of the '07 draft. But, his coaches said, the opposition's tactics never discouraged him, never made him go after bad pitches.

Even as a senior, said Jason Shadden, Baker's replacement as Henry County's baseball coach, Heyward was the first at practice and games and the last to leave. Every swing in BP had a purpose.

"If there was a prom that night," said Shadden, "Jason would be in the cage that afternoon."

And now, four months before he's even old enough to partake of a postgame beer in the clubhouse, he's a phenom at the big dance.