A decade after dominating Tucson’s baseball landscape, five former Canyon Del Oro High School superstars are struggling to stay in the Major Leagues.

By Christopher C. Wuensch

Photos by Scott Salisbury

Ian Kinsler will always remember the day his baseball career came full circle, like rounding the bases after parking a long home run.

How could he not? After all, his transformation from being overshadowed at Canyon Del Oro High School to Major League All-Star was affirmed in the city he grew up in.

It was the spring of 2006 and Texas Ranger manager Buck Showalter had summoned the rookie to his office at Tucson’s Hi Corbett Field. Kinsler wasn’t just heading East with the big club when they opened the season, he was to be the Ranger’s starting second baseman.

“My whole family was there, so that was pretty cool,” said Kinsler, proving that the magic of the game of baseball can make a well-spoken, intelligent 27-year-old man revert back to using high school vernacular.

“The whole family went out after the game to celebrate.”

His welcome-to-the Big Leagues moment happened several days later under the Texas-sized pomp only the Lone Star state can conjure.

“Opening day in Texas is ridiculous, because they have the planes, they have the huge flags,” Kinsler said. “They do everything big; it’s like ‘holy crap’ when you’re standing out there.”

Kinsler isn’t the only former CDO ball player from the last decade to experience the flooded sensation of standing on a Major League ball field to start another season of the storied game.

Of the roughly 12,000 current Major League players, only five can say they played their high school ball together. And while Kinsler’s CDO teammates Brian Anderson, Scott Hairston and Chris and Shelley Duncan played in a more than 1,700 games combined, Kinsler is the only former Dorado that’s a lock to experience the enchantment of opening day — and even then Kinsler, who is nursing a high-ankle sprain, will do so from the unforgiving confine of the disabled list.

The road to the pros hasn’t been a smoothly paved one, especially for Anderson, who joins his third organization in the last five months.

After stints with the White and Red Sox, the former first round draft choice finds himself fighting for his baseball life this spring with the Kansas City Royals.

That translates to countless hours in the batting cages for Anderson, 28, with KC’s hitting instructors, including hall-of-famer George Brett.

Anderson was among six Royals hitters who stayed after practice on March 17 to compete in a spirited simulated batting practice game where line drives to the opposite field are rewarded and anything else is an out. No matter how hard he works, however, Anderson was his ebullient self, relentlessly chiding his new teammates.

“No idea,” Anderson said of the role he’ll play with Kansas City this season. “I’m just kind of waiting to see how everything will play out”

The extra BP appeared to have paid off this spring for the outfielder, who has long been regarded as above-average with his glove.

Two days of St. Patrick’s Day in his hometown of Tucson, he made a case for one of the final slots on the Royals’ opening day roster by hitting for the cycle and driving in 7 runs while the Royals demoralized the Arizona Diamondbacks 24-9. Anderson is hitting .341 with 14 hits and 11 RBI entering the final weekend of the spring.

It wasn’t enough to land the 28 year old a role in the Royals’ outfield. In a bizarre twist — that smells like an April Fool’s Joke — Anderson might be considering a drastic career-altering move.

On Thursday, Royals manager Trey Hillman announced that Anderson has decided to become a pitcher, a position he hasn’t played regularly since his days as a Dorado. It certainly isn’t out of the realm of possibility. For proof, all Anderson has to do is look across the locker room to teammate Rick Ankiel, who has successfully transformed from Major League pitcher to outfielder.

“Brian Anderson has elected to become a pitcher,” Hillman said at Kansas City’s camp in Surprise via the team’s Web site. “I’m not sure how that process is going to go, but it’s got to start at the very bottom, so we’re kind of mulling through that right now.”

Anderson isn’t the only former CDO player from the school’s 1997 and 2000 state title squads whose careers are hanging in the balance like the soft curveballs.

Hairston, the first of the Dorados to pull on a Major League uniform, finds himself battling not only for a roster spot with the San Diego Padres, but, like Kinsler, a persistent leg ailment.

Although battling said calf injury for most of the spring, Hairston figures to play a role in the Fighting Father’s outfield this season, where he’ll team up with his brother Jerry for the first time in their careers. Scott moved to Oro Valley with his family late in his high school career when his father Jerry Hairston Sr. took a job in Tucson as a spring training hitting instructor for the Chicago White Sox.

Scott’s relocation for high school wasn’t lost on his brother, who attended high school in Naperville, Ill.

“It was too cold in Chicago,” laughed Jerry before San Diego’s March 17 game against Anderson and the Royals. Scott stayed back at the Padres’ complex in Peoria.

While Jerry torched Cactus League pitching at a .391 clip, his younger brother managed a paltry .200 batting average and just two home runs. His dinger on Wednesday off of reigning Cy Young Award winner Zach Greinke, however, and a recently hot bat may be enough to land him on the Big Squad for Monday’s opening game against — of all teams — his former team, the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Despite some of Hairston’s shortfalls at the plate this spring, hitting — the long ball in particular — is the Modus Operandi of the Dorado. The quintet enters this season with a combined 228 career home runs.

“Hitting,” Shelley Duncan says bluntly when asked about his spring checklist of things to work on. “Hitting is the most important thing.”

“I don’t really work on defense; (I) just go out there and do the best I can.”

You couldn’t tell that defense wasn’t a priority by watching the elder of the Duncan brothers on March 19. In the span of an inning against the Oakland Athletics, Duncan snared a scorched line drive for a brilliant unassisted putout before practically maiming a fan at the Indians’ stadium in Goodyear with a line drive of his own in the bottom half of the inning.

Two pitches later, he sloughed back to the dugout, the victim of a called-third strike.

Anderson and Hairston appear to be headed to the show. The same cannot be said for two of the most feared sluggers ever to don Dorado green and gold.

The Indians and Washington Nationals and Cleveland Indians reassigned Shelley and Chris, respectively, to the franchise’s minor league camps.

Shelley’s .286 spring batting average was .110 points higher than his younger brother’s — but not enough to land him a coveted roster spot in the Tribe’s and Nats’ crowded outfields.

Christopher C. Wuensch is the former sports editor of the Explorer in northwest Tucson and of the Bluffton Today in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. He currently pens the blog Prose and Cons where he writes about everything from UA sports to fighting Swiss hockey players.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 2nd, 2010 at 3:03 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.