Hit king
- 2004-07-01
- By Tom Shanahan, San Diego Hall of Champions, from the July issue of Student Sports Magazine
Matt Bush gently took hold of the precious piece of lumber that Ted Williams used in 1941 to hit .406, lightly squeezed the handle and carefully rested the bat on his shoulder.
Bush, the hometown kid the San Diego Padres took with the first pick of the draft, has tremendous bat speed, generating power that belies his 5-foot-11, 175-pound size. But he wasn’t whipping this bat around.
The young man held the piece of history as carefully as a baby while he visited the office of Bob Breitbard, founder of the San Diego Hall of Champions Sports Museum. Williams and Breitbard were classmates at San Diego’s Hoover High, and Williams donated the bat after his .406 season, the last time a Major Leaguer has hit .400.
“It’s not as heavy as I thought it would be, but it’s really strong,” said Bush, the shortstop/pitcher from San Diego’s Mission Bay High. “It’s a great feeling to hold the bat he hit .406 with. He’s the greatest hitter ever in baseball.”
Bush knows something about hitting, too.
In fact, you can call him California’s New Hit King after Bush set state career records for hits (211) and runs scored (190). The afternoon at the Hall of Champions was as if hitting had come full circle in the baseball hotbed of San Diego.
Ted Williams signed with the Pacific Coast League San Diego Padres straight out high school in 1936. Nearly 70 years later Bush signed two days after he was drafted to start his pro career in the minor league system of the Major League Padres.
Bush had been projected to be the fourth, fifth or sixth pick of the draft until the Padres surprised the baseball world by taking him first. The sudden turn of events all started when Bush called Tim McWilliams, the Padres area scout, and told him he loves the Padres _ he grew up idolizing Tony Gwynn and also held a Gwynn bat in Breitbard’s office _ and wanted to find a way to play for them.
“You have to give Matt a lot of credit,” McWilliams said. “He was pro-active. He wasn’t a kid holding out for a mega-bonus. He wanted to play for the Padres so much, he said treat me fair and I’ll be ready to sign. It all happened that fast.”
A day after Bush’s phone call to McWilliams, he took the mound in the CIF San Diego Section Division III championship game at San Diego State’s Tony Gwynn Stadium. Padres general manager Kevin Towers, scouting director Bill Gayton and other staff members were clearly visible in the stands, creating a buzz in the crowd.
Talk about putting pressure on yourself, but Bush didn’t flinch. He batted 4-for-5, scored four runs and pitched a five-hit complete game to beat St. Augustine 13-4 for the Bucs’ second title in three years.
“Matt never lets anything bother him,” said his father, Danny. “My wife and I are scared to death because we're so nervous at games, but Matt just goes out and plays hard.”
Bush became the first high school shortstop taken with the first pick since Alex Rodriguez in 1993. Buzzie Bavasi, the retired Padres and Dodgers general manager who still lives in San Diego and gets out to games, called Bush the best high school shortstop he’d seen since Rodriguez.
Within two days of the draft, Bush signed with the Padres for $3.15 million. He worked out with the team on June 15 at Petco Park before reporting to the Padres’ rookie team in Peoria, Ariz.
In 2004, Bush had 55 hits to push his career total to 211 and break the state mark while batting .447. He broke the record of 210 set by Gerald Laird, a catcher with the Texas Rangers, when he attended Westminster La Quinta.
Bush was remarkably consistent in four varsity seasons, collecting 54 hits (.458) as a junior, 56 (.452) as a sophomore and 46 (.428) as a freshman. But his senior year was tougher than it looked. The season was an experience that should help him in the minor leagues because he was forced to become a more selective hitter.
Bush opened with a leadoff home run in his first game in March. Now fast forward to a June 1 playoff game, Bush’s last home game. He led off with a home run for the fourth time of the season and the 6-0 win over Coronado advanced the Bucs to the Division III championship.
Bookend home runs may not sound remarkable for a player of Bush’s talent, but he was confronted with making several adjustments as a senior on and off the field.
Bush admits he started out the year swinging for power too much. He doesn’t like to walk, so with teams pitching around him, he took too many bad swings.
“This has been a year of adjustments for me,” Bush said. “I started out the year with my swing a little long because I was trying to hit for power. But I saw I had to shorten my swing because a lot of people weren’t throwing to me. I had to learn to be more selective as a hitter.”
In the month of April, Bush hit “only” .366. But by the end of the season, Bush was back to his usual numbers. In addition to hitting .447 (55-of-123), he had 11 doubles, 1 triple, 11 home runs, 46 runs scored and 33 RBI.
For a player coming off a dominant junior year, it’s not unusual to see a drop off in batting average in their final high school season. Even the great Ted Williams followed up a .583 as a junior at Hoover with “only” a .403 as a senior.
But Bush overcame his slow start.
“You have to be able to make adjustments in this game,” Bush said. “I learned a lot this year.”
And those were only the on-field adjustments. Bush’s personality isn’t to be a vocal team leader. He speaks softly and, if he chooses, can easily blend into the crowd in the dugout.
But early the year the Bucs were winning ugly. Dennis Pugh, the veteran coach of 27 seasons with the Purple Heart from Vietnam, said the team’s lack of discipline was making him “grumpy in my old age.” Bush sized up the situation and forced himself to speak up.
“I knew for the rest of the year I had to keep these guys up, and we had to be ready for every team we faced,” Bush said. “There were games early in the year when we were not getting up until the fourth or fifth inning. We had to come ready to play as soon as we stepped on the field.” Bush became the one who gathered players in a pre-game huddle outside the dugout. They would break the huddle by tapping fists with Bush.
“What I saw this year is a more mature Matt Bush,” Pugh said. “I was very concerned early in his career. Matt was quiet and led only by example. He hustled between the lines and played hard. But he wasn’t a rah-rah, bulldog kid. I’ve been impressed with the way he’s handled everything.”
Mission Bay eventually won its 17th Western League title in the last 21 seasons, its second San Diego Section title in three years and advanced to its third straight championship game.
Bush’s active leadership also prevented the team from splintering into jealous groups. Pugh feels that’s what happened in 2003 when some seniors blamed Bush for drawing attention of scouts away from them.
“The guys on this year’s team looked at all the scouts coming around as a plus because it was a chance for them to be seen,” Pugh said. “It wasn’t a distraction anymore.” Pugh likes to bat his best hitters at the top of the lineup, even if it means using a classic cleanup power hitter second behind Bush. With teams trying to pitch around Bush, junior first baseman Henry Sanchez thrived as the a 6-foot-3, 240-pounder hit .527 with 11 home runs and 40 RBI.
“Matt taught me a lot this year about playing hard all the time,” Sanchez said. “If scouts come out to see him, that gave me a lot of opportunities to show the scouts what I can do. Matt really helped me with the mental part of the game.”
Pugh and Sanchez say Bush maintained his leadership role even when the pressure of the draft might have distracted him.
“Matt came to me and said he didn’t want to be bugged by scouts anymore,” Pugh said. “I had to tell the scouts if they asked for a special workout, ‘It ain’t going to happen.’ They had seen him enough by then. Major League teams are always jockeying for position, and they were just looking for reasons to knock him down at that point.”
Pugh has had dozens of players drafted or advance to college, but he had never experienced anything like the attention Bush attracted.
“I was like his secretary with all the calls I got from teams and the media,” said Pugh, who added one call after Bush was drafted was from a company in the Midwest that wanted to make a Matt Bush bobblehead doll.
Bush also never let his impending millionaire status hurt his game, largely because he doesn’t have extravagant tastes. He wants to buy a house for his parents, Danny and Theresa; a house for himself; pay for the college education of his sister, Elizabeth, a sophomore last year on Mission Bay’s softball team; give $10,000 to Mission Bay’s baseball and softball teams; and safely invest the rest.
“I’d like to help my parents, and I’d like to set up my sister,” Bush said. “That’s the most important thing for her is to go to college.”
Next year is far off, but Pugh knows himself well enough. He says he won’t be able to prevent himself from casting unrealistic expectations on next year’s shortstop. A ground ball will be hit up the middle or in the hole, and Pugh will wonder why it was a base hit instead of 6-3 in the scorebook.
“He makes so many great plays, I take him for granted,” Pugh said. “Next year every time the shortstop doesn’t make a play Matt would have made, I’ll wonder what’s wrong with him. I know myself. I won’t be able to help it. I feel bad for next year’s shortstop.”
Bush was a five-tool player in high school _ hit, hit for power, field, throw and run. The only hitting question now is whether he can maintain hitting for power as a pro with a wood bat.
“He has amazing power for a kid who’s not real big,” Pugh said. “We’ll have to see if he can still hit for power at the next level with a wood bat. But with an aluminum bat, he hits for amazing power. But I think he’ll only get better at learning to hit with a wood bat.”
Bush hit every day in practice with wood. It’s a habit he started the summer after his sophomore year when he played on the USA junior national team for the first of two straight summers.
Defensively, Bush makes plays seen on a college or major league diamond.
“Where I really notice his defense is when I watch college or major league games,” Pugh said. “I don’t see any college shortstops with his defense.”
There aren’t any throws Bush can’t make with his arm strength. He’s been clocked at 94 and 95 mph as a pitcher, including in the championship game when he finished the season with a 9-1 record, 0.53 ERA and 94 strikeouts.
With a better changeup, teams might have considered Bush as a pitching prospect. In a third-round playoff game, Bush struck out 15 and threw only 64 pitches in seven innings.
“It was probably the greatest high school pitching performance I’ve ever seen,” Pugh said. “Just about every batter had an 0-2 count.”
As for Bush’s speed, he was an All-Western League safety his sophomore year. Pugh, who also coaches Mission Bay’s football team, says with Bush’s running ability and arm strength, he would have been the Bucs’ quarterback as a senior, but he gave up football after an injury early in his junior year.
Bush, who is Portuguese, says he loves to fish, which is another common thread with Williams. The tuna industry in San Diego is what brought the Portuguese to San Diego years ago.
So hitting is not all that California’s new Hit King has in common with Ted Williams, the great outdoorsman. The Kid, as Williams was always known in his baseball career, and the kid from the Padres’ hometown love to fish and love to hit.
But hitting is what Bush does best. That was easy to see by the way Bush respectfully caressed Williams’ bat from his .406 season.
