Former Cardinal Gibbons, USC player Max Schrock makes MLB debut with Cardinals

His team was coming off a two-and-a-half week hiatus because of COVID-19. The road trip was made by rental car. The stands remained empty except for teammates spread out in the first few rows in the name of social distancing, watching a game played with seven innings instead of the standard nine.

If you could have told St. Louis Cardinals infielder Max Schrock, of Chapel Hill and Cardinal Gibbons High School, at the beginning of this year about the unique circumstances surrounding his MLB debut, he understandably would have been puzzled.

But even in 2020, achieving a childhood dream of making the big leagues remains memorable. For Schrock, 25, the moment came this past Saturday at Guaranteed Rate Field in Chicago as the Cardinals won 6-3 over the White Sox in the second game of a doubleheader. Batting eighth in the lineup, Schrock picked up a pair of hits over three at-bats and started at second base.

“It was absolutely incredible,” said Schrock in a phone interview Sunday evening. “Obviously the circumstances were weird, but it was a dream come true for me, regardless of whether there are fans or whether my family’s there or not. It’s still my dream and I was still playing in a Major League Baseball game, and that’s how I took it. The whole journey was absolutely crazy.”

In terms of the big picture, the professional journey Schrock alluded to began in 2015 when he became a 13th-round pick of the Washington Nationals following his junior season at South Carolina. Two trades later, Schrock established himself in the Cardinals organization, spending 2018 and 2019 at the AAA level with the Memphis Redbirds, where he showcased defensive versatility – second base, third base and left field – and a consistently solid approach at the plate – he’s hit .300 with a .354 on-base percentage in his minor league career – which in tandem gives one a decent shot at making it to the bigs.

And this weekend, the journey was a four-and-a-half-hour drive from St. Louis to Chicago alone in a rental car, one of 41 the Cardinals got for their players and staff as a precautionary measure to safely travel to Chicago for the team’s first weekend of games following a COVID-19 outbreak that began in late July and included 10 confirmed cases among players. Schrock at the time was based in Springfield, Mo., at the Cardinals’ alternate site, but he headed to St. Louis on Aug. 5 when the team selected his contract.

Ten days later, the debut came. The nerves were never really there — he thinks his wife, Sarah, was more nervous watching on TV than he was playing — and he led off a four-run fifth inning with a high-hit blooper to right field, his first big league hit. Did he have time to soak it all in?

“Well, I had a few seconds to think about it because the ball was stuck up there in the air for a little while,” Schrock joked. “But yeah, once I saw it hit the ground and I hit first base, it was kind of like, ‘take a breath, look around.’”

Talent shown at Cardinal Gibbons

Over a decade ago, Schrock’s travel ball coach, Ron Powell, reached out to Gibbons’s Jim Liebler to let him know about the type of player he would soon be coaching. Powell gave Liebler a pro comparison for the incoming freshman: Brian Roberts, the Baltimore Orioles middle infielder and two-time All-Star. Coincidentally, Schrock, like Roberts, grew up in Chapel Hill and played collegiately for the Gamecocks.

“I actually laughed because we had never had a player like that,” said Liebler, the longtime head coach of Gibbons.

Fast forward to present day and Schrock is now the first Gibbons player to make the big leagues. As a freshman in high school, Schrock’s talents were easily identifiable: quick hands, sound fielding and consistently putting the barrel on the ball. By the time he was a senior in 2012, Schrock led the Triangle in homers. “The Max Schrock Show,” as Liebler called it, featured about a dozen pro scouts at each Gibbons game.

In a story that Liebler likes to tell, Schrock once hit a foul ball so far in a game at Sanderson that it prompted the sudden departure of most of the scouts there to watch him. What more did they need to witness?

“They were basically like, ‘we saw everything we needed to see,’” Liebler said. “It wasn’t even a fair ball.”

‘The grind of baseball’

In addition to his tangible skills, Liebler sensed something in Schrock that he still sees several years later: confidence that’s “impossible to shake.”

Schrock agrees with that assessment from his old coach, noting he’s always handled the mental aspect of his game fairly well.

Like most big leaguers, the journey wasn’t always straightforward. A pair of trades showed him how unpredictable the game can be, there were injuries and five seasons and 480 games in the minors taught patience and discipline

“The grind of baseball is a little bit magnified just because of the number of games,” Schrock said, “and I think going forward, later on in my career, I started embracing that a little bit more. It made it even more special when I finally got to make my major league debut.”