Throughout the season, we'll present a regular wrap-up of some of the biggest stories surrounding University of Evansville Baseball. In this special edition of 'Five Things' we'll take a look at Kyle Freeland, who will make his MLB debut with the Colorado Rockies on Friday. We hope you'll watch it with us at 3:10 p.m. at Buffalo Wild Wings.
LEADING OFF: Freeland's debut a rarity in Rockies history.
At this point, it's a well-known story in the Colorado media. Kyle Freeland, a graduate of Thomas Jefferson High School in Denver, was selected in the latter rounds of the 2011 draft and elected instead to attend the University of Evansville only to be later drafted in the first round by his hometown Colorado Rockies in June 2014.
His emotional response to being selected by his hometown team was featured on major sporting outlets around the nation, and on Friday, he'll become the first player raised in Colorado to earn the starting nod for a Coors Field opening day since 2003.
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Alaska-born and Greeley-raised Shawn Chacon earned that start back in 2003. In fact, Freeland will become the fifth-ever Colorado-born player to toe the rubber for the Rockies, joining Durango's John Burke, Lamar's Scott Elarton and the Denver duo of Nate Field and Mark Knudson.
However, unlike those previous Colorado products, Freeland has never known a world that didn't include the Rockies franchise. Born just a month after the start of the team's first-ever season in 1993, he grew up watching the likes of Todd Helton, Matt Holliday and Larry Walker from the stands at Coors Field.
"Watching that '07 team get to the World Series, that will be in my mind forever," he reminisced to the Denver Post earlier this week. "I hope to get there soon in my own career."
That 2007 Rockies team included a familiar face for many Aces fans, Jamey Carroll, who played in every round of the team's run to the World Series. To this day, Carroll is the only UE player to have appeared in a World Series game.
However, before he can worry about pursuing that next dream, Freeland has a debut to worry about in front of his hometown friends and family.
"If I could choose how it would happen, I wouldn't have it any other way."
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ON DECK: Cape Cod proved life-changing.
Prior to the summer of 2013, Freeland had enjoyed an impressive opening two seasons in Evansville, but it hadn't quite yet registered in the same way outside the Missouri Valley Conference. That would all change in Hyannis, Mass.
Freeland, who had been named the No. 2 prospect in the Alaska Baseball League in 2012, became one of the hottest prospects in all of baseball after a dominating summer while playing for the Hyannis Harbor Hawks in the highly competitive Cape Cod Baseball League.
"One thing that helped a lot was the summer in the Cape Cod League," Freeland told the MLB Network in 2014. "I was able to accelerate a lot and go up against elite hitting and, basically, all-star teams every single appearance. That helped me a lot, and it was definitely a big turning point in my career."
The league, which dates all the way back to 1885, is the premier amateur baseball organization in the country. Last season alone, it counted nearly 300 alumni that had reached The Show, which translates to one in every seven Major League players.
It's impressive to play in the Cape Cod League, but it's something more to accomplish what Freeland did. How good was he? Well, the southpaw emerged as an all-star, and not just that, he led the league in strikeouts in the process and helped the Harbor Hawks claim the championship. By the time the college season rolled back around, Baseball America had anointed him the No. 9 prospect in the nation.
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IN THE HOLE: Freeland was a national phenomenon at Evansville.
While Freeland was a star in his own right with the Aces, people may not realize that he was akin to a celebrity to those working in the business.
"It was neat to be able to interact with people from publications like Baseball America on a weekly basis," said current UE assistant athletics director Dustin Hall, who served as the primary media contact for the UE baseball team in 2014. "It's not every day that the Wall Street Journal contacts you to do a story on your student-athlete. He was able to get some publicity back home with the Denver Post at the time as well, and then some Indianapolis media outlets picked him up as he was going through the draft process. He even did an interview with the radio network for Major League Baseball, which was also pretty neat. It was a busy time, but it was all worth it in the end."
"I don't think the general fan probably understood how big he was nationally," Hall continued. "I think as he went through the season, we started to notice the increase in attendance for Friday night games. It was really cool to see the people that would show up to watch Kyle pitch. When he made that last start against Illinois State, that was probably the biggest crowd of the year."
A tall left-hander with a wipeout slider, Freeland was must-see for scouts around the country, with quite a few of them salivating at the opportunity to add him to their organization. In his starts, which were well-attended both at home and on the road, fans were just as likely to see an army of people holding up radar guns behind home plate as they were to see people eating hot dogs, hamburgers and other traditional baseball fare.
"We had an entire section behind home plate at Braun Stadium reserved for scouts," Hall explained. "When we played Wichita that year, it was probably 80% full. Obviously, teams were sending multiple scouts to some of those games, and during the Wichita game, there was probably 50-60 there just to watch Kyle and Wichita's Casey Gillaspie, who was also a first-round pick."
Following the season, which included Freeland being named Missouri Valley Conference Pitcher of the Year, he was named to five separate All-American teams.
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CLEANING UP: The 2014 Evansville squad was special.
Freeland may have grabbed the bulk of the headlines in 2014, but what can't be lost is that he had a special team around him as well. After being projected to finish sixth in the preseason, the Aces picked up series wins against all but one league opponent to lay claim to their second-ever Missouri Valley Conference regular season title.
The team boasted of a 15-6 league mark, and in addition to Freeland, featured all-conference honorees in current Aces assistant Jake Mahon, Kevin Kaczmarski, Kyle Pollock, Boomer Synek, Cole Isom and Sam Johns.
Pollock and Johns also joined Freeland in being drafted after the season. After leading the country in batting average a season later, Kaczmarski would join the New York Mets organization, and Synek, who graduated last season, went on to become a Pittsburgh Pirates farmhand.
Like Freeland and former Ace Eric Stamets, Kaczmarski also spent part of spring training this year in camp with the big league club.
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FINAL OUT: Freeland was the third-ever first rounder in school history.
While Freeland may be just the fifth-ever UE player to make the bigs, he's actually the third to be selected in the first round of the MLB First-Year Player Draft.
Even his selection of eighth overall has been topped.
Throughout the 1990s, Andy Benes was a household name in Evansville thanks in large part to his local roots and his five years pitching for the local favorite St. Louis Cardinals. Before that, however, he was the most dominant pitcher in the UE history. The 6-foot-6 right-hander was a strikeout machine for the Aces, fanning an unbelievable 188 hitters in 146 innings while helping Evansville claim the Midwestern Collegiate Conference crown in 1988.
Benes would follow that up by becoming the No. 1 overall pick in the 1988 draft, and he'd help the United States claim a gold medal at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.
Fourteen years later, Steve Obenchain would join the first-round club after setting a school record with a 1.38 earned run average. A member of the famed Moneyball class by the Oakland A's, he was selected 37th overall in the 20002. He was recently featured in a Today Show piece about life after baseball.
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