Photograph by Herb Collingridge IV | sxc.hu
In the high-profile world of professional sports, the “can’t-miss” label is frequently slapped on athletes barely old enough to vote. These are players in their late teens or early twenties expected to be the next star in their respective sports.
Some live up to the hype. Others falter.
Even before Colby Rasmus was setting records in high school, fans labeled the phenom a future Major League Baseball star. A five-tool player with a picture-perfect swing and sparkling defensive skills, Rasmus was an easy first-round pick for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 2005 amateur draft.
“Colby is, across the board, above average in all facets of the game,” says John Vuch, Cardinals director of Minor League operations. “Typically, a player who plays like that at the Major League level is going to be one of the elite players in the game. There’s nothing in his game that indicates he would not be one of the better players around. Hopefully that turns into reality.”
Entering his fifth season of professional baseball, Rasmus knows expectations are high. Prior to spring training, Baseball America—the bible of both the majors and minors—rated him the third-best prospect in the game and the Cardinals’ top prospect for the third year in a row. He’s often compared to Cleveland Indians superstar Grady Sizemore, another five-tool center fielder who’s established himself as one of the game’s premier players. Last winter, Cardinals manager Tony La Russa said the young prospect has the talent to bump aside an established outfielder when he’s ready. At press time, all signs pointed toward that happening this season.
Yet Rasmus gives a low-key response when asked about such soaring expectations: “It doesn’t really matter to me. All I can do is play. People are going to say what they want to say. I have no control over that. This game is hard enough without having to worry about any of that other stuff.”
When he says these words, he’s lived them.
Though only 22, Rasmus’ trajectory toward Busch started long ago.
His father, Tony, coached him from the age of 4 through his senior year of high school. Growing up in the South, Rasmus “pretty much learned everything” from his dad, he says.
Long before being dubbed the Cards’ next great hope, Rasmus was known as the pitcher and first baseman from the Phenix City, Ala., Little League squad that made a Cinderella-like run in 1999. The then-unknown team made it all the way to the Little League World Series before losing to a team from Osaka, Japan. Years later, Rasmus told the Montgomery Advertiser, “I can be at a tournament in Florida, and somebody will walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, didn’t you play on the Little League World Series team?’”
If the lefty had a future in baseball, his father once believed, it was on the mound. Now in his 10th season as head coach at Russell County High School, Tony maintains that his firstborn was the best pitcher he ever coached in Seale, Ala., even outshining Rasmus’ brother, Cory—a pitcher drafted by the Atlanta Braves in ’06—and Texas Rangers’ first-round pick Kasey Kiker. Rasmus demonstrated his pitching potential as a high-school freshman, when he compiled a 10-1 record and a whopping 107 strikeouts in 76 innings.
Of course, Tony realized his son had talent, but he never saw Rasmus as a surefire Major Leaguer. “He’s always been a pretty fair player, but I don’t know if I ever felt like he was bound for the Major Leagues,” he says. “I thought he had a chance to be a great baseball player one day if he put everything together.”
In high school, Rasmus displayed his athletic prowess beyond the baseball diamond; Tony says his son had an even greater passion for basketball than baseball. Prior to his sophomore season, though, he developed an ache in one elbow while shooting hoops. “After that injury, he never could pitch again like he could before,” Tony says. “Every time he tried to throw a change-up, it hurt his elbow. So that’s when he decided, ‘I’m not going to be a pitcher anymore, I’m going to be a hitter.’”
It seemed like a long shot, considering Rasmus hit just one home run during his freshman and sophomore years. Undaunted, he stayed after practice and took extra turns in the batting cages. The result was apparent during his junior season, when he hit .490 with 18 home runs. As a senior, he elevated his game even more, leading Russell County High to a national championship and hitting .484 with 24 home runs, surpassing Bo Jackson for the second-highest high-school season home-run record in Alabama.
Scouts sat up and took notice. In 2005, Auburn University offered Rasmus a full-ride scholarship—just before the Cardinals decided to act. With superstar Jim Edmonds inching closer to retirement and the team’s farm system in need of strengthening, Cards top brass drafted the heir apparent to center field.
Expectations for Rasmus soared throughout Cardinals Nation in 2007.
Playing for the Double-A Springfield Cardinals that year, Rasmus batted .275 with 29 home runs, 72 RBIs, and 18 steals while establishing himself as the Texas League’s premier defensive center fielder. After such a stellar showing, it seemed a virtual certainty that Rasmus would play in St. Louis at some point during the 2008 season.
With Edmonds traded to San Diego in December 2007 and an outfield position open for the taking, fans speculated that Rasmus would make the opening-day roster. But Rasmus’ father warned him to be realistic. “I told him, ‘You really don’t have any kind of a chance to make that big-league club,’” Tony Rasmus recalls. “He wouldn’t hear it. He said, ‘I’m gonna make it, I’m gonna make it,’ and there wasn’t really a backup plan in case he didn’t make it, which I knew was going to happen.”
Still, Rasmus proceeded to make his case, amassing an eye-popping .467 on-base percentage (thanks in large part to a team-high 13 walks) and two homers during 33 spring-training at-bats. But with two weeks of spring training left, he was assigned to the Memphis Redbirds, the Cardinals’ Triple-A affiliate. Despite Rasmus’ strong showing, the Cardinals decided it was better for the crown jewel of their farm system to regularly play in the Minors than to see intermittent playing time in St. Louis.
At the time, Rasmus told media outlets he was upset by the demotion; now he has a more subdued perspective. “I did what I could, and I didn’t make it, so that’s all I could ask out of myself,” he says. “It just wasn’t the right time for me.”
When he began the ’08 season at Triple-A Memphis, fans expected Rasmus to pick up where he left off the previous season by lighting up the Pacific Coast League. Instead, he slid into a funk, batting just .214 during the first two months of the season. Rasmus insists his early-season struggles had nothing to do with the disappointment of missing the Cardinals’ opening-day roster. “I would say [my struggles] were mental, but not because I didn’t make the team,” Rasmus says. “Triple-A was a lot different atmosphere than I was used to. Triple-A is kind of individual, and I just wasn’t having fun playing, which is the main thing.”
His father sees it a different way: “When he didn’t make it, he absolutely was kind of wandering around out there, not knowing what to do.”
Rasmus’ season suddenly took a 180-degree turn in June, when he hit .337 with four home runs and 15 RBIs. His father credits the turnaround to an improved mind-set. “The day he called me and said he was through worrying about [not making the Cardinals], he hit .340 from that day on,” Tony says.
Rasmus’ positive momentum was stymied in early July by an abductor-muscle strain. When he returned to action several weeks later, he played in just five games before spraining the MCL in his left knee, effectively ending his Triple-A season and preventing him from appearing on the U.S. Olympic baseball team in Beijing.
Rasmus played a handful of games in the lower levels of the Minors last August, but his early-season struggles and subsequent injuries prevented him from getting a September call-up to the Cardinals. At the time, La Russa said, “He hasn’t earned it.”
“I had hoped to [get called up], but once I didn’t, I wasn’t too upset or anything, because I didn’t have a good year,” Rasmus says. “I wasn’t really surprised, considering how everything went last year.”
After last season’s ups and downs, Rasmus decided it was time for a break.
Against the Cards’ and his father’s wishes, he decided to sit out winter ball and return to his hometown. “I just wanted to get away from baseball for a little while because baseball has been pretty much my life for my whole life—just eating, sleeping, and drinking it,” he says. “I think that might have been a reason I struggled a little bit in Memphis. I just kind of got a little worn out with everything.”
For months, he didn’t touch a baseball or bat. Instead, he hit the weight room. He adjusted his mind-set. He relaxed.
When Rasmus reported to Cardinals camp in February, it was apparent that he hadn’t simply taken a vacation. He showed up to Jupiter, Fla., with a bulked-up physique, weighing 210 pounds and “feeling great.” Fueled by countless power shakes over the years—his dad’s suggestion—and solid workouts, he bench-pressed 315 pounds in the off-season. His locker, once situated near other Minor Leaguers, was beside veterans.
Through spring training, Rasmus saw an impressive number of at-bats and turned in solid offensive numbers, though his strikeouts were among the team’s highest. Still, Cardinals GM John Mozeliak told the press there’s a “high probability he does see Major League time this year.”
Yet Rasmus says he doesn’t view this season as a make-or-break campaign: “That’s one thing that I learned about last year: Just don’t worry about it and play the game.”
Mike Rainey has written about sports for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, CDM Fantasy Sports, and The Journal Times in Racine, Wis.
