When I was a student at Indiana University in the early 1990's, the Kansas City Royals announced that they were holding an open tryout one morning near Bloomington. My roommate and I got up early and headed out to seek our fortunes. He was a graduate student who had gone to Ole Miss for his undergrad, and I'd gone down there one weekend the semester before for a football game. He'd been a student manager for the baseball team there so he got us hooked up with a couple of Ole Miss baseball shirts. I wore it to the tryout that day.
When we got there, we signed up with the scouts. This was when the Royals were one of the top organizations in baseball. They'd won the Series in '85, and Brett & Saberhagen were still around. We got loose, and the scouts had us break off into positions. My buddy was a catcher, so he went off to the bullpen to work with the pitchers. I was a first baseman, and went off to take fielding while others were hitting.
Quite simply, I had the day of my life. I picked every low throw out of the dirt cleanly, snagged a couple of vicious line drives and even managed to pull a fastball over the right field wall. It was all I could do not to jump out of my skin and act like I'd been there before.
There were three first basemen there that day. There was one kid straight out of high school, and he was helpless out there. I was a good local player having a great day, and then there was the third guy. He came to the plate, pulled out a wood bat and drove five straight pitches over the fence. He pulled a business card, handed it to the chief scout, and left. Turned out he was fresh from playing in the College World Series. That left me and the other guy to finish out the day playing first base. He got worse, and if anything I got better.
So what was the great moment? Near the end of the day, one of the scouts complimented me on my bat speed and asked me what my average had been that season at Ole Miss. That was my great moment. A major league scout thought I was good enough to have been playing baseball at a powerhouse SEC school.
Now the funniest thing I was ever part of on the diamond happened a few years later. I was playing on a MABL team in Indianapolis that was in the middle of the pack. Something clicked mid-season, and we couldn't stop winning. We ended up playing in a tournament called the Hoosier State Games. Kind of a mini Olympics for Hoosiers. We were one of four teams to enter, and won the semi-final easily. Easily because we had ringers. Our shortstop's sister was dating a few of the guys on the Indianapolis Indians, and a couple of them wanted in. One of those guys knew a lefty pitcher who had just been named all Big-10 at Illinois, and he came to pitch the final for us. This guy was confident as hell. We knew that the other team had a few former pros as well, but he figured he couldn't be beat.
They led off in the top of the first, and our ringer struck out the first two guys he faced. Then came the third guy. He was about forty years old, and we heard he'd had a cup of coffee with the Brewers several years prior. He walked to the plate looking broken down and arthritic. Our guy sneered as he blazed a fastball past him for strike one. I had a great view from first base as the batter turned the next pitch around for a home run that went well over 400 feet to left center. As he hobbled around the bases, you could visibly see our pitcher's ego completely deflate. He lost the strike zone completely and didn't make it past the third inning. He kept muttering to himself on the bench, "That guy's older than my dad..." Hilarious. Taught me just exactly how good MLB guys are when someone who barely made the Show tore up a really good amateur team.