You have reached a degraded version of ESPN.com because you're using an unsupported version of Internet Explorer.For a complete ESPN.com experience, please upgrade or use aESPN.com20dThe best MLB prospects we ever saw: The Kid, that swing and phenoms' feats,This was supposed to be opening week, the time when MLB fans everywhere look forward to making a season's worth of memories. Since we won't have games to get excited about for a while, we thought it would be fun to take a walk down memory lane by reliving some of our personal favorite baseball moments.In the third of our weeklong series focusing on a different baseball theme each day, we asked our MLB reporters to tell us about the best prospect they ever saw, with only one rule: They had to have seen them in person.The best home runs we ever saw.The best MLB games we ever saw.The best MLB web gems we ever sawJump to.The Kid From the opposing dugoutStras or Trout? Encountering TroutMauer's swing Kershaw. In churchPrice was right Sold on SolerAce on the Cape Going old schoolTim Kurkjian: A first look at The KidThe day he was drafted out of Moeller High School in Cincinnati by the Mariners with the No. 1 overall pick in 1987, Ken Griffey Jr. Was as close to a guaranteed star as the draft had ever seen. His swing was fundamentally perfect, he could run, he had a great arm and he glided through the outfield.'
MLB “The Show” went into demo mode while I scrolled through Reddit. I just realized I was subconsciously really pulling for Baltimore to come through here in the bottom of the 2nd. I’m a Braves fan.
All the Mariner draft picks came to work out at the Kingdome, you know, so they could see where they all wanted to end up eventually,' said then-Mariners catcher Scott Bradley. 'Junior is 18.
He gets in the cage. Most kids would be nervous. While he was hitting, he was carrying on a conversation with the writers, who were all around the cage. He hit line drives all over the field.
Then he took a rest. The next round, he hit ball after ball into the upper deck in right field.
I've never seen anything like it.' After Griffey's first full season in the minor leagues, the Mariners didn't want him to make the big club in the spring of 1989. They wanted to start him at Triple-A.' So they played him against every tough left-hander in the Cactus League so he would fail and then they could send him back,' Bradley said. 'But he hit every one of them.
So they had no choice. He made the team.' Tim Keown: Seeing a superstar from the opposing dugoutI'm going to cheat and choose two.
I was an end-of-the-bench catcher on the Cal baseball team, what I like to describe as the fifth of four catchers, and the highlight of my brief career was occasionally catching bullpens during home conference games. (The paparazzi were intense.)At that time, 1984, that meant a really good seat, or squat, to watch some of the best college baseball players ever: Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Randy Johnson, Shane Mack, Mike Devereaux. But the most complete amateur player I ever saw was Arizona State center fielder Oddibe McDowell. As a college player, he was a revelation. He hit a home run into the track stadium beyond right field at Evans Diamond and sprinted about 40 yards to track down a line drive to the gap in left-center like he was taking out the garbage. He was fast, strong and absolutely drenched in confidence.
He wasn't the best big leaguer, but nobody would have predicted that back then.I'd never seen anything like McDowell until a scout friend of mine told me I had to accompany him to a high school game in Alameda, California, in the spring of 1996, which brings me to the second of my favorite prospects: Jimmy Rollins. Like any good scout, Doug McMillan made sure we got to the park about 30 minutes before Rollins took infield. 'He doesn't look like much,' he told me as we walked toward the field, 'but he's going to be a bleeping star. I've never been more sure of anything in my life.'
When I saw Rollins, I was skeptical; he was 5-foot-6, maybe 150 pounds, but as soon as he fielded a ground ball, any cynicism dissolved. His talent was incandescent, and his joy brought joy.Buster Olney: How could you choose between Stras and Trout?Forgive me, but I have two as well.No. 1: The late and great San Diego Padres general manager Kevin Towers pitched in the minor leagues, and his strength was always in evaluating pitching, which is why he got my attention with a spring phone call. 'I just saw the greatest pitching prospect ever,' he said flatly, and he proceeded to detail all of the extraordinary elements of the college right-hander. The guy throws 100 mph; he has excellent command; and, in Kevin's eyes, he had the robust build - 6-foot-4, with tree-trunk legs - to sustain that promise.
That was the first time I heard anybody mention the extraordinary ceiling of San Diego State underclassman Stephen Strasburg.No. 2: In the middle of May of 2012, I was chatting with Oakland GM Billy Beane, and he mentioned how much he loved to watch Los Angeles Angels rookie Mike Trout - who had just been called up from the minors - because Trout's extraordinary speed changed everything.
The way infielders had to hurry their actions, the way he affected positioning. Billy said, 'He's going to be the best player this year.' I followed up: 'You mean the best player on the Angels?' 'No,' he said with a laugh, 'the best player in baseball.' Billy knew of what he spoke.Sam Miller: A quick encounter with TroutIt happened that in 2010, Mike Trout's first full season in the minors, I had to write a daily update on the Angels' minor league system. So throughout the season's first three months, I stared at Midwest League box scores every morning and watched this incredible prospect hype growing like Jack's beanstalk.
He was only 18, hitting.360 in Class A Cedar Rapids, with minimal power but feats of speed that were hard to grasp. In a monthlong stretch early in the season, he hit.400 with 19 steals, as the league's youngest player.Then, still 18, he got promoted to High-A Rancho Cucamonga, 45 minutes from my office. So I took a point-and-shoot camera to his home debut, trying to document his arrival in California with a slideshow of blurry-ish photos. It was tricky to get his face in any of them, because my attention clearly made him reticent.
He would see me out of the corner of his eye and try to keep his face angled away; to my interview request, he asked for time to stretch first, then stretched for over an hour, glancing over constantly to see if I'd left yet. There were very few fans at those games, and he was still relatively unrecognizable, and I was trying to screw it all up.
I was sympathetic, but it was hopeless: His talent - the fastest strong player I've ever seen, and the strongest fast player - was simply too much to hide. Less than a year later, at 19, he was in the majors.Jeff Passan: Meeting Kershaw. In churchThe first time I saw Clayton Kershaw was in church. It was a Sunday morning, May 11, 2008.
We were in Mobile, Alabama. I was there to write a story about this fairly new phenomenon to baseball - prospect worship - and arrived to a gift-wrapped metaphor when he spent that morning in chapel.Kershaw was 20 and bore the look of someone who would be carded wherever he went. His face was incapable of sprouting whiskers. Successes and failures hadn't yet hardened him.
He was just the kid with a left arm kissed by something magical.When he pitched the next day, Kershaw happened to turn in the second-worst outing of his minor league career. He was livid.
As he returned to the dugout, he took off his glove, held it in his left arm, readied to chuck it against the wall. Calmed himself down. Even then, Kershaw was as acute mentally as he was physically.And don't let the five runs he allowed in 3⅓ innings that day fool you. They certainly didn't distract the scouts sitting behind the plate.
A fastball that topped out at 97 mph. A curveball that left his hand as an illusion. He wasn't even throwing the slider, which eventually evolved into his best pitch. And yet the purity of the stuff, the fact that it emanated from this unique, perfectly calibrated left-handed delivery - even on an off night, it was undeniable.Two weeks later, Kershaw made his debut with the Los Angeles Dodgers. Outside of a brief return to Double-A to manage his innings that summer, he has remained there since.
The best prospect I'd ever seen, it turned out, happened to be the best pitcher of his generation too.Dan Mullen: Yes, I really wrote a college paper about Joe MauerJoe Mauer happened to come through New Britain as baseball's top prospect right about the time I was really starting up my journalism career at UConn.