BATTER UP!
Sox top pick raring to go
Not even the mother of Red Sox first-round draft pick Nick Yorke thought her son would be a firstrounder in Wednesday’s MLB Draft.
A half-hour before the draft, a family adviser assured Robyn Yorke, a four-time All-American softball player at Fresno State, that it was unlikely Nick, a standout high school player as a sophomore and junior at Archbishop Mitty in San Jose, Calif., would be drafted on Day 1, which included only the first round.
“We’re good, nothing is really happening so don’t worry,” the adviser told Robyn.
But Robyn wanted to play it safe. And instead of having Nick drive her youngest son, sophomore Zachary, to baseball practice two hours away, Robyn grabbed the keys herself and offered to drive the boys, just in case.
“I’m so glad I was in the car,” she said.
Tears began falling from Robyn’s eyes as she spoke on the phone Thursday, a day after the Red Sox made Yorke the surprise of the draft by taking him at No. 17 overall. He was ranked outside the top100 by most major prospect ranking organizations and ranked No. 139 by MLB.com.
Robyn had watched him struggle to recover from a torn labrum that required surgery his sophomore year. His arm was weak going into his junior season, when he served as a designated hitter for much of the year, playing some outfield to preserve his arm.
Because scouts hadn’t gotten to see him play much defense, it was difficult to project him from his time playing mostly second base as sophomore in high school.
Robyn knew he could hit. She had been his first and longest coach, teaching him how to hit lefthanded until he was 5, when her father flipped him around and said, “this kid is a righty.”
“I had all three of my boys batting left-handed because I batted left-handed, I was a switch hitter,” she said.
“My dad and my fiance at the time said, ‘he’s not left-handed,’ and turned him back around righthanded at 5 years old. My other two stayed lefty. Apparently it didn’t look right to my dad.”
Adapting all the time
The family moved around a lot after Robyn got divorced when Nick was 3 years old. She coached him until he was 12.
“The last year I coached, I felt like, ‘you shouldn’t be out here, why are you coaching 12-year-old baseball?’” she said to herself. “But the fundamentals of baseball and softball are the same. The fundamentals of fielding and catching are the same. It was fun. I enjoyed all my years of coaching, especially the years they were on the same team.
“All three of them got to be on the same team last year in high school and that was one of the most special years for me. All three kids in the lineup, same schedule, first time in my life, one schedule. A lot of videotaping because one of my kids was always up.”
Nick called his mom “my personal hitting coach for the last 18 years.”
“I think it starts back when I played softball,” she said. “My dad was my coach and one of my favorite all-time things was to break down at-bats with my dad, whether they were mine or the Angels. We went to a lot of Angel games living in Huntington Beach. So when my kids were little we did it all the time, breaking down at-bats, talking about pitches, about better approaches, what went good and what went bad, how to make changes. It’s something we’ve all done.
“I coached all them until my youngest was 12 and then I said I had enough. No more All-Star games, no more stress. We’ve moved several times. We lived in Orange County until Nick was in fifth grade and moved a couple times in Orange County. I got a divorce when he was 3 so we had a couple moves and then moved up to Northern California. My fiance at the time was doing a startup company so we moved up here and have been here since.”
His mom’s coaching and his brothers’ camaraderie were the one consistent for Nick.
“I think it’s funny because I call it a strength and a weakness,” Robyn said. “He talks about it a lot, of moving schools and having a lot of different experiences. But those are all people who are still in his life. The amount of emails I’m getting from when we lived in Huntington Beach, in San Jose, etc., it’s kind of neat. It’s a neat resource of people we’ve had pockets of life with.”
Loud contact
Despite not showing much defensively in 2019, Nick Yorke defended his league MVP title by hitting .533 as a junior.
“He’s not huge physically (listed at 6-feet tall, 195 pounds), but especially as a hitter, the ball just jumped off his bat,” said Chris Houle, longtime baseball coach at Junipero Serra, a divisional opponent of Archbishop Mitty. “He never seemed to swing at pitches out of the strike zone. He did not strike out a lot, even by high school standards. It was always loud contact off his bat.
“You just dread when he comes up… He was good with two strikes, loud contact even with two strikes. Just a really poised kid, even as a sophomore. That’s the one thing I remember. Sometimes the younger kids in a tough league, sometimes you can overwhelm them a little bit. Maybe you try to intimidate them in some way. But he was very poised.”
Houle also described Yorke as a dangerous baserunner who had a tremendous feel for the game.
But in her conversations with
representatives from other MLB teams, Robyn was frequently answering questions about Nick’s shoulder. How healthy was he? And is he capable of playing around the infield or will he only play second base?
“I think a lot for Nick was his arm,” she said. “He played with a torn labrum his sophomore year. He had the surgery and it was weak when he came back at the end of his junior year. He was overly excited for his senior year to prove to everybody there’s no arm issue. He’s super disappointed he didn’t get to do that. But he feels 100%. So a lot of the conversations have been about the concerns over the arm.
“And we weren’t concerned with the arm. Once the surgery happened and we did the rehab and he was throwing balls in the hole with no problem, we knew he was good to go. I don’t know if everyone else did since they didn’t get to see that.”
The Red Sox took a leap of faith without seeing much from Yorke in his senior season due to the coronavirus canceling most of his games.
It was a shock to the baseball world, and to the Yorke family.
Robyn has been one proud mother.
“This entire process of him talking to people, the scouts, the Zoom calls, I am so proud of him,” she said.
“The questions they ask are not easy. He’s 18 years old. And you just go, ‘wow, you’re holding your own, you know what you want, you’ve held your line and you’re answering these questions beautifully.’ I’m most proud of how he did throughout this process. It was a grind.
“I’ll tell you, yesterday, hearing his name come up was emotional. We all said, ‘You earned this. You deserve it.’ ”