Corbin Carroll has taken MLB by storm. His Seattle legend began when he was 14

Jake Mintz

FOX Sports MLB Analyst

Nobody had seen the freshman play before.

They’d certainly heard about him — any incoming ninth grader with a pulse and a glove was on the radar of the Lakeside High baseball program — but until one chilly Seattle afternoon, it was all little more than hearsay. Sure, there had been rumors, gossip, glimpses of his raw speed during the fall football season and a few glowing reports from local Little League coaches, but 15-year-olds have a tendency to stretch the truth, you know?

In the winter of 2015, Corbin Carroll was simply a talented kid who’d never played an inning of high-school baseball.

“He had mentioned to me: Yeah, I’m talking to Oregon State right now.” Remembered Ryan Shaw, a senior captain and the team’s best player during Carroll’s freshman year. “I was like, dude, you’re 14, you’re not talking to Oregon State.

“It turns out he was.”

Sometime in mid-December, Shaw, an All-Metro catcher who would go on to play at the University of Richmond, sent a message to the Lakeside Baseball group chat regarding the team’s first captain’s practice of the season. Of the 30 or so kids in the WhatsApp group, only four actually showed up, the others deterred by the crummy conditions blanketing Seattle’s Magnuson Park that Saturday.

Besides Shaw, the only attendees were fellow captains Sam Kuper and Kellen Goodwin. And, of course, a 5-6, 130-pound freshman named Corbin Carroll.

“It’s 35 degrees. It’s raining sideways, the wind is blowing. The marine layer is going hard. We’re having a miserable time out there,” said Kuper. “And the only other guy who shows up is this little 14-year-old who we’ve never seen before.”

At his very first batting practice toss, Carroll swung and missed. Then he rolled a harmless dribbler to where the second baseman would be. To an unfamiliar eye, the kid might have appeared rattled, eager to impress the older guys.

“I’m like: ‘Ok, buddy, no need to be nervous.'” Joked Kuper.

The next pitch was storybook stuff. Despite what appeared to be a low-effort swing, the undersized freshman launched one high into the air with rocket-fuel backspin. The ball cut through the mist and rain, soared through the crisp Northwestern air, well over the fence in right field before crash-landing on a grassy berm about 370 feet away with an unceremonious thud.

“To this day, when I see Corbin hit a home run in the major leagues, I think of that moment.” Said Shaw.

Carroll, much to his own dismay, doesn’t remember the swing. He keeps in touch with Shaw and his high-school coach Kellen Sundin and can recall captains’ practices happening at Magnuson Park, but a specific image of that particular day has faded from the All-Star’s memory.

Granted, a lot has changed in the last eight years since he knocked that meaningless homer. Carroll has gone from a slight teenager to the 16th pick of the 2019 draft to one of the sport’s most electrifying young players. In just 118 big-league games, he has already garnered the appreciation of NBA legend Kevin Durant, agreed to a $111 million contract extension with the Diamondbacks and emerged as the runaway favorite for the National League Rookie of the Year.

And as one of the greatest prep ballplayers in Seattle history, the 22-year-old will make his triumphant return on Tuesday night to the city that shaped him, as the NL’s starting left fielder in the 2023 All-Star Game. It will be his first time playing at T-Mobile Park.

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Lakeside High School is not an athletic juggernaut; far from it.

The girls’ soccer team won state in 2021 and the swim team had a nice run in the middle of last decade, but the selective private school is most famous for its superb academic reputation — Lakeside is regarded as one of the top private schools in the region, if not the entire country. Microsoft moguls Bill Gates and Paul Allen went there together in the ‘70s. Amazon megaboss Jeff Bezos sent his kids to Lakeside. The school claims that “typically 100% of graduates attend four-year colleges

It’s the type of institution that turns scions and well-off, intelligent Seattle kids into entrepreneurs and lawyers and titans of industry. Considering the school’s athletic mediocrity and the Pacific Northwest’s formidable climate, Lakeside High is not where you’d expect to unearth a future MLB superstar. Especially considering that Coach Kellen Sundin doesn’t recruit.

“It’s such a crazy academic place,” Carroll’s high school coach explained “So you couldn’t get anybody into the school anyway. With Corbin, I didn’t know what we were getting into, I just knew there was some buzz about him.”

“The way I describe it to people is that it happened in steps,” Carroll explained to FOX Sports before the Home Run Derby on Monday. “At first I just wanted to start when I got there, then I wanted to do well, then I wanted to play in college. Eventually, pro ball became a real possibility.”

Very few kids make their varsity baseball team as freshmen. Even fewer become contributors. Carroll, despite a four-year gap between him and his beard-growing, car-driving peers, shined almost immediately as a varsity starting outfielder, leadoff hitter and key pitcher for a Lions team that reached the 3A State final for the first time in school history.

“There’s this sense that this guy can’t possibly have as much power as he does because he’s so compact. Yes, he has bat speed. But there’s just incredible backspin. I’ve never seen balls with more carry than the ones that come off his bat.” Said Shaw.

Unsurprisingly, Carroll continued to excel, showing well enough on the showcase and travel circuit to earn himself a commitment to UCLA as a sophomore. Then, ahead of his senior year, a precious invite to Team USA’s 18u National Team. That summer in stars and stripes cemented Carroll’s status as a likely first-round pick as the Washington Stater stood out on a team that also featured the likes of Anthony Volpe, Bobby Witt Jr. and Dylan Crews.

“Coach [John] Savage from UCLA called me that fall and said ‘I don’t think Corb is going to get to school,” Sundin remembered. That proved true.

During his senior season at Lakeside, Carroll exceeded sky-high expectations, setting the conference ablaze with a comically good 1.859 OPS. Students, locals and an avalanche of scouts started visiting Magnuson, an unspectacular city park ballfield with no more than a few sets of bleachers.

But what most people remember from his 12th-grade season in the spring of 2019 is that video.

You might have seen it at the time; a lot of people did. In fact, the clip of Carroll’s no-called-time megablast went so viral that Max Debiec, the opposing sophomore pitcher from powerhouse O’Dea high school, had people tagging him in it online for a week afterwards. Debiec, now a rising junior at Texas A&M with pro aspirations, still jokingly refers to Carroll’s moonshot off him as “the incident.”

“I was working really quick, just trying to not get embarrassed, which I ultimately did.” Debiec said. “I remember trying to throw it past him as hard as I could and he just hit it way out of the park.”

“I remember seeing the video.” Said Kuper, who was a senior at Whitman College the year of Carroll’s internet-famous blast. “The ball landed right on the berm, same spot as a few years earlier. That was when we realized he’d be legit, legit.”

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Carroll’s rise to stardom has been remarkably quick — he played in just 142 minor-league games and many of his Lakeside teammates are only now graduating college — but the scale and ease of his ascension surprises nobody. Not a soul had anything remotely negative to say about the Arizona rookie. Nothing tinged with an iota of doubt or jealousy.

“It’s big for the kids,” Debiec suggested. “I guarantee you every one of them knows who he is, they’re all looking up to him around Seattle. Having someone like him, someone who is that good, is just big, big, big for Seattle baseball.

People describe Carroll as regimented, driven, quiet and self-motivated, a youngster fully aware of his immense talent, who effortlessly dodges the pressure and noise swirling around him.

During the chaos of All-Star media availability on Monday, a Seattle-area reporter asked the local kid whether all the additional attention from his hometown might create any added pressure to his homecoming. Carroll laughed off the suggestion. It’s evident that the D-Backs phenom cannot be consumed by the weight of expectations.

He has simply never felt the pressure. Not as a big leaguer and not as a promising high-school senior with rows of scouts flooding his games. Carroll has approached every day of his big league life with the same calm self-certainty that enabled him to roll up to Magnuson Park as an unknown freshman on that cold winter day and inspire instant awe.

He wowed ‘em then, and he’s wowing ‘em now. There are just a few more Seattlites watching nowadays.

Jake Mintz, the louder half of @CespedesBBQ is a baseball writer for FOX Sports. He played college baseball, poorly at first, then very well, very briefly. Jake lives in New York City where he coaches Little League and rides his bike, sometimes at the same time. Follow him on Twitter at @Jake_Mintz.