A diamond gem
Pirates top pick never gives up on getting better
Mario Moccia had finished throwing batting practice to his 12-year-old daughter when New Mexico State University’s athletic director decided to stop by the baseball field on the way home.
As Moccia reached the entrance of Presley Askew Field, he saw two familiar faces standing next to a white Dodge Charger. There was Joey Ortiz, an Aggies product the Orioles drafted in the fourth round in 2019, and Nick Gonzales, the player the Pirates selected Wednesday night seventh overall.
In the COVID-19 pandemic that cut short the college baseball season, the two best friends and former roommates were simply looking for somewhere to practice.
“They actually said they had worked out at a rec field or something,” Moccia recalled. “I immediately thought, ‘Geez, for our two highest draft picks ever, I probably could have opened the field.’ ”
Dig a little more into Gonzales’ incredible work ethic, the obsessive drive that helped him go from a college walk-on to top-10 pick, and it becomes apparent that neither field availability nor proper lighting has ever stopped this 21-year-old baseball rat.
In a way — and with some tempered enthusiasm because he has yet to take a professional swing — Gonzales sounds something like the baseball version of Sidney Crosby — someone who does and says all the right things on and off the field and a player who centers his entire life around getting better.
“He’s performed really well,” Pirates general manager Ben Cherington said. “He’s talented, but he’s just also really curious and interested in learning. You can tell how important just getting better is to him. He’s a really thoughtful, curious guy.”
Those who’ve coached Gonzales know about his insatiable appetite for improvement. On Thursday, less than 24 hours after Gonzales was drafted, they were more than happy to share their favorite stories.
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Three weeks before the start of his junior season, Gonzales took a fastball in practice between the elbow and wrist. His coaches feared it might be a broken arm, but it turned out to be a bone bruise.
Gonzales was told to take a breather. No hitting for a week to 10 days. He pestered every single day, begging to do something.
Finally, once he was cleared, Gonzales erupted, which Aggies hitting coach Mike Pritchard witnessed firsthand after a scrimmage when Gonzales played nine innings at shortstop and had four or five at-bats.
Apparently that was not enough.
After the scrimmage, Pritchard ran home to get his dog and arrived back at the field about 90 minutes after the final out had been recorded to see Gonzales, hitting in a cage by himself.
“I’m out there in left field, throwing a ball to my dog,” Pritchard said. “I’m like, ‘Are you good, man?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, I’m good.’ I asked him, ‘How many balls are you going to hit?’ He says, ‘I don’t know. Maybe a thousand.’
“I just started thinking to myself, ‘Is this dude actually going to hit a thousand baseballs today?’ Because, I don’t know, he might do that. I left after about 30 minutes. I told him to shut it down whenever he was done and turn the lights on if he needed them.” Brian Green was Gonzales’ first coach at New Mexico State before he left for Washington State. It was Green who sat with Gonzales in the batting cage during the infielder’s freshman year and started tinkering with his swing.
Green told Gonzales to drop his elbow and raise his hands, theoretically increasing his bat speed and allowing him to let the ball travel a little more. They also talked about ways to engage Gonzales’ lower half.
A couple of loud swings later, Green realized they stumbled on something.
“I remember saying to Nick, ‘Holy [smokes]. Dude, you may have real power. Have you ever thought about that?’ ” Green said. “He said, ‘Yeah, kinda.’ ”
Despite being only 5 feet 10, 190 pounds, Gonzales hit 16 home runs as a sophomore and 12 more as a junior before his COVID-19 shortened the season. Those mechanical adjustments were a reason Gonzales was able to tear up the Cape Cod League after the 2019 campaign, becoming its MVP.
“Those minor adjustments are so major for some hitters,” Green said. Mike Roberts didn’t have any stories, per se, but Gonzales’ coach in the Cape Cod League drew an interesting parallel for Pirates fans.
He compared Gonzales to another player he managed with the Cotuit Kettleers — Josh Harrison — and one who currently works for the team in special assistant David Eckstein.
Neither possess great size, but they both had insatiable work ethics, the same as Gonzales.
Instead of flash, Gonzales has displayed what Roberts described as “old-fashioned work habits” or basically the ability to do things the right way, even if it’s sometimes boring.
For example, in batting practice, Roberts said it was easy to overlook Gonzales because he would be content smacking line drives instead of trying for tape-measure home runs. “Nick doesn’t stand out physically,” Roberts said. “But the thing you noticed about Nick was that he was very consistent and worked so hard every day. Nobody really noticed him until the game would start.” Or during practice, if you’re current New Mexico State head coach Mike Kirby.
Before one particular workout, Gonzales was taking swings left-handed. Kirby was blown away.
“It was a good swing,” Kirby said, “and I said, ‘I’m pretty sure you could hit about .330 left-handed.’ ”
That sparked a conversation where Kirby learned that Gonzales occasionally hit left-handed in high school at Cienega High School in Vail, Ariz. Turns out it was one of the the only ways pitchers would give him anything to hit.
“I saw that dude hit a ball about 380 feet left-handed to right-center field — not down the line hooking foul,” Kirby said. “If he did it in front of the Pittsburgh scouts, I guarantee you they say, ‘Yeah, we might look into that.’ ” Gonzales’ high school days bring back plenty of smiles for the coach of that team, Kelly Johnson.
Gonzales’ father, Mike, was one of Johnson’s good friends, so he had no problem having the older Gonzales as his first-base coach.
But it became functional whenever practice was ending, everybody wanted to go home, and Nick would routinely refuse.
“We’d have our meeting after practice and say, ‘All right, see you guys tomorrow,’ ” Johnson said. “We’d start leaving. Nick would run in and grab his glove and run back out to shortstop. His dad would grab the fungo and roll the balls out.”
So Johnson gave the older Gonzales the code to the lights and had him lock up the equipment. Keeping up with the younger Gonzales simply became too difficult.
“There’s not enough time in the day,” Johnson said.
• Gonzales almost always wears a watch and takes almost a militaristic approach to his work.
Some of that had to come from his older brother, Daniel, who played linebacker at Navy and now is stationed in Okinawa, Japan. (Daniel Gonzales watched his brother get drafted on a computer screen.)
Wearing a watch and adhering to exact times has become Gonzales’ way of maximizing how much he’s able to get done in a given day.
“Everything is very regimented for him,” Pritchard said. “On game days, he shows up to the field at a specific time — always early. He goes to the cage and hits. That’s just what he does. He has all of his little routines.”
Green loves to talk about Gonzales struggling with one small fielding detail and repeating it hundreds of times until he got it right. Or the recruiting visit Mike and Nick Gonzales made to New Mexico State, where Green doesn’t think Nick’s eyes drifted once — always straight-ahead, locked in on whatever he was doing.
Pritchard says Gonzales doesn’t drink and “is nonstop baseball all the time.”
“He’s everything that you want in a player and a person,” Pritchard said. “It’s just crazy that people like him exist.” Around Cienega, Gonzales’ sterling reputation isn’t contained to the baseball field.
To foster community involvement, Johnson — the high school coach — would have his players participate in a variety of charity initiatives.
The big ones were collecting shoes for the homeless, doing landscaping work for various schools in the area and reading to younger kids. Gonzales volunteered every time.
And not only did he raise his hand, but he also seemed to genuinely enjoy the experience, Johnson said.
“He loves doing good things for people,” Johnson said. “He’s comfortable in every situation. He’s willing to do it without complaint. I think he understands the gifts he’s been given and wants to give back.”
Johnson said Gonzales has been a regular at high school games, often stopping by to cheer on his alma mater. Once Arizona reopened and he was allowed, Gonzales would occasionally work out at Cienega, hitting and running with freshmen.
“Whenever he sees a kid that he doesn’t know, he’ll walk up and just start talking to them rather than the kid talking to Nick,” Johnson said. “Not even giving him pointers but having a conversation with him. He coaches kids. He embraces everybody. It doesn’t matter who you are.
“Watching that part of him is almost more exciting than the baseball end of it.” Moccia is loaded with good Gonzales stories.
Such as whenever he had to replace Green and hired Kirby and kept Gonzales — who was an All-American at the time — in the loop out of respect for the pillar of the program.
“Here’s our star player, who in theory could have transferred to Arizona or Arizona State, wherever he wanted to, and he was just like, ‘Hey, thanks for keeping me involved.’ ” Moccia said. “When a basketball coach leaves, you panic because everybody is looking for the exits. Here, Nick was about as mild-mannered with a head coaching change as could be.”
There also was one interview — Moccia didn’t want to divulge this coach’s name — where he asked the guy to make an introduction, and he opened by saying the biggest mistake his current employer ever made was overlooking Gonzales.
“We didn’t end up hiring him,” Moccia said, “but I thought that was funny.” Green has a thing where he often gets pictures texted to him by Gonzales.
Like in the Cape Cod League, when during a swing, someone snapped a shot of Gonzales only starting his swing when the ball was around 18 inches from home plate, a testament to his elite bat speed.
Or whenever many of his teammates were out at the movies on a Friday night, Gonzales would text his coach a picture of him hitting next to car headlights.
Green remembers Gonzales’ college debut, when he worried about starting him at Arizona because he worried it might be too much too soon and wound up having to insert him in the middle of the inning.
Gonzales responded by crushing a ball off the wall and never again came out of the lineup.
“Fans are going to love him,” Green said. “He’s disciplined. He’s respectful. He’s an absolute winner of a person. He’ll be out in the community. He’ll be respectful to every media person. He’ll give his time to everybody. He’s just one of the biggest winners from a great, winning family, a great story. I knew whoever got him, they were getting a big leaguer.”
“I asked him, ‘How many balls are you going to hit?’ He says, ‘I don’t know. Maybe a thousand.’ ” — Mike Pritchard New Mexico State hitting coach