Hello and welcome to another wonderful and, hopefully, entertaining baseball season. Let\u2019s jump right into it. I went to see high school phenom Grady Emerson play and I can confirm, he\u2019s good. Starting a brisk and VERY windy morning tilt in a tournament at lovely Wylie East High School, Grady and his FW Christian teammates thumped an Anna team whose beautiful off-white and purple uniforms were a personal highlight for me. In short: even the most novice eye would notice Grady Emerson after a 15 second scan of the field as he\u2019s bouncing around at shortstop with a pro\u2019s gait and demeanor. Posted in many mock drafts to be the second player coming off the board in this summer\u2019s selections, Emerson 100% looks the part. Aside from his mature yet projectable build and mannerisms, the next thing that will surprise you Rangers fans when you see him play is his coach. Rusty Greer, the Cardinals\u2019 skipper has long left his days as the Red Baron and fully embraced a Santa Claus-esque snow white goatee. Aided by Assistant Coach and fellow Rangers great, Curtis Wilkerson, Rusty appears to be taking his role as Grady\u2019s finishing instructor seriously. They seem connected and that\u2019s good\u2026because one of them is a career .300 hitter in the big leagues and the other is 18 years old.<\/p>\n
Grady is everything you think an early pick should be: he\u2019s strong, fast, shows a good approach, has a good shot of sticking on the left side of the infield and has a ridiculously pretty left-handed swing. I was immediately impressed with the angles he takes at shortstop and his on-time, internal clock. I spent some time with several scouts last week who\u2019ve seen him and none of them said it makes sense to spend anymore time on Grady Emerson\u2026 because none of them pick in the Top 5. North Texas has a solid recent history of producing some very talented high draft picks (Hi Jordan Lawlar and Jett Williams), but the obvious connection at the moment is to former #2 pick Bobby Witt Jr. Rusty\u2019s son Mason and Bobby Jr were tight as youngsters and Rusty has mentioned watching what his neighbors, the Witts, went through in 2019 while leaning on that wisdom in guiding Grady. Regardless of where Grady is popped in this summer\u2019s draft, it\u2019s clear we have another local to track on his road to The Show.<\/p>\n
Enough talk. Get a load of this kid: (fair warning: it was really windy)<\/p>\n
As always, enjoy baseball!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hello and welcome to another wonderful and, hopefully, entertaining baseball season. Let\u2019s jump right into it. I went…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":635084,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2393],"tags":[5,4,149,38866,1567,69,3240],"class_list":{"0":"post-635083","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-texas-rangers","8":"tag-baseball","9":"tag-mlb","10":"tag-rangers","11":"tag-rangers-prospects-and-minor-league-news","12":"tag-texas","13":"tag-texas-rangers","14":"tag-texasrangers"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116265953869390101","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635083\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/635084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}