Bats' Amir Garrett picked hardball over hoops – The Courier-Journal
Darrow Garrett remembers when he quit being impressed with his son, Amir.
It happened when Amir was a kid. He picked up three balls, and “without knowing what he was doing”, according to Darrow, he juggled them.
“He’s that type of athlete that picks up on things,” Darrow Garrett said. “If you tell him something, he absorbs it. He’s able to act upon it.”
Plenty have watched as Amir – a California native and former elite basketball recruit who is now a top Cincinnati Reds pitching prospect and Louisville Bats player – continued to amaze with athletic feats.
There was the time where, as a high school freshman, he recorded seven interceptions in just three games of eight-man football. Or the time he threw a one-hitter in his first high school summer league game using only his fastball, which was clocked as fast as 88 miles per hour. Or that he could dunk a basketball before really picking up the sport.
“I’ve been blessed to coach some great players,” said Glen Evans, Amir’s youth baseball and football coach. “But I’ve never coached a better athlete than Amir Garrett.”
A 6-foot-5, 210-pound left-hander, the 24-year-old Garrett has posted a 2-2 record and a 2.35 earned run average with 19 strikeouts and 11 walks in 30 2/3 innings since being called up to Triple-A Louisville. He is considered a top 100 prospect by multiple baseball outlets, which puts him on track to the big leagues and another step in what has already been a storied athletic past.
“I’ve always been able to adapt to situations, I think, no matter what I was doing,” Amir Garrett said. “I picked up basketball my freshman year of high school. So I was able to adapt to that and become one of the best basketball players in the country by the time my senior year came around.”
As his father explains it, Amir grew up dabbling in sports, but he didn’t get serious about any particular one until his freshman year at Cavalry Chapel Christian School in Las Vegas. Evans remembers watching as Garrett, wearing untied shoes and a backpack as a freshman, tossed himself an alley-oop off the floor and backboard, dunking the ball. He hadn’t started playing basketball until that year.
Amir’s reputation on the hardwood grew over the next four years. There were stops at three more schools, mainly due to the fact, as Amir puts it, that the prep basketball scene in Las Vegas during his earlier years “wasn’t any good anymore.” Garrett won a state title as a junior at Leuzinger High School in Los Angeles and eventually was recruited back to Las Vegas to play for national power Findlay Prep – a program that played a national schedule and rarely played Vegas-based teams. He was eventually rated as the No. 22 small forward prospect in the nation by ESPN.com as a senior.
“When I picked up basketball, I just found a new love for basketball. It kept my mind off things and I just let it go,” Garrett said.
Even then, Garrett’s father said, baseball scouts were coming to basketball games and giving Darrow business cards, telling him to call if Amir ever got the itch to play baseball again. Amir hadn’t played baseball since his freshman year of high school, in large part, Amir says, because if his grandfather passing away earlier that year.
“He’s the one that taught me baseball,” Amir said. “It hurt too much to play baseball, because I was always thinking about him.”
It was a decision that hit Darrow hard, emotionally.
“The day Amir told me he wasn’t gonna play baseball no more, I cried,” Darrow said. “I said, ‘Son, you can’t do this, man. You have an opportunity here.’”
Darrow believed it so much, he set up a tryout bullpen session for his son at the College of Southern Nevada shortly before Amir left for a basketball career at St. John’s. Garrett said he agreed to the tryout in part due to the same reason he left the game initially: His grandfather.
“I realized, it wasn’t a good reason to put it down because of my grandpa passing away. He’d be even more proud of me for playing,” he said.
A number of Major League scouts showed up. A second session in front of another group of scouts only increased interest, as his fastball was reaching the mid-90s.
“I didn’t really think much of it, and they were like ‘You could get drafted,’” Amir Garrett said. “I was like ‘Oh, OK.’ I didn’t put much thought in to it. But I was blessed to be able to get drafted, and it paid off.”
The Cincinnati Reds took Amir in the 22nd round of the 2011 Major League first-year player draft. They offered him a $1 million signing bonus, a higher-than-normal amount for a player drafted in that round.
Amir signed with the Reds, but he also headed to St. John’s, planning to spend his falls and winters on the hardwood. In the summers, he took the mound in the Reds’ farm system, initially splitting his time between rookie league ball in Arizona and Billings, Montana, all the while balancing two sports and the fitness that came with them.
“I was already in shape playing basketball, so there really wasn’t nothing much to do,” Garrett said. “… So I just did my basketball workouts, and I was in plenty of shape when I came from basketball. And when I left baseball, it was just the start of school and preseason workouts. So I was able to get in shape within like a month and a half, a month, so it wasn’t that big of a deal.”
In April 2013, Garrett opted to transfer from St. John’s and head closer to home.
Cal State Northridge coach Reggie Theus showed up with his entire coaching staff at one of Amir’s minor league games in Arizona to show him how serious he was about getting him on his roster.
“I was looking at him at that time and understanding the comments that were being made and understanding that the success that he was having at the time,” Theus said. “I was always worried that someone was going to offer him the right amount of money and he’d not play basketball.
“But that’s also a good thing. So I was hoping that whatever happened, would happen for the best for him.”
After failing to get a hardship waiver for immediate eligibility – a waiver Theus says Garrett should’ve been granted by the NCAA for family reasons – Garrett spent a redshirt season honing his skills on the court, while also keeping up a workout regimen with baseball. But in August 2014, he called Theus and let him know he was giving up basketball.
“Oh man, that hurt me,” Amir said. “Because Coach Theus, we go back, even before I was going to Northridge. I knew him, he was a close friend of mine, to my family. And I’m just like, man, when I told him, I kind of just had to take a deep breath and be like, ‘Coach Theus, I’m not coming back.’ And I could tell it hurt him. And he was like, ‘I want you do to do what’s best for you.’”
In his two seasons with the Red Storm, the former elite recruit averaged 6.2 points and 4.2 rebounds in 55 career games. Being three years into his college basketball career – after sitting out his year at Cal State Northridge – and facing the realization that younger players may get opportunities for professional contracts over him, Garrett said he chose to drop basketball partially due to the fact that he was becoming an older prospect in the basketball world.
“I was still young in the baseball world,” Garrett said. “But in the basketball world I was getting older, 21 years old. Guys they have in the (NBA) are 18, 19 years old.”
Garrett also attributed his rough basketball career to a lack of focus due to playing two sports.
“That’s the only thing that was,” he said. “Because there’s times I started out hot (for St. John’s) and (then) my numbers went down. It was just a lack of focus. I wasn’t able to focus on either sport, so I wasn’t getting any better. I was just staying idle, you know, and just went off my own instinct.”
Amir the pitcher rose from Single-A Dayton to Triple-A Louisville in less than two years, crediting his recent quick rise through the Reds system to his decision to stop splitting time between baseball and basketball.
On the mound, Bats coach Delino DeShields thinks a little work on his pitching repertoire will go a long way to getting the prospect to the major leagues.
“Well of course he creates a lot of angle, you know, being so tall,” DeShields said. “But the key for Amir, and like most these young pitchers, it’s gonna come down to the fastball. His fastball command really improved from his first time out. (In his) last outing, it was like he was just playing catch out there. But it starts with his fastball command.”
With so much athletic talent and all his accomplishments and with so little organized athletic experience throughout his life, how has Amir done it?
“I pick up on things quick, I guess,” he said.
