RALEIGH, N.C. — During Trea Turner’s three years at North Carolina State, the only opponents who could stop him were the ones manning the entrances to the local taprooms. When Turner was a freshman, his buddies on the baseball team would bar-hop on Friday and Saturday nights, many of them bearing driver’s licenses that indicated they were eligible to consume alcohol legally when, in fact, they were not. Turner wanted to go with them. Turner, at first, tried to go with them. He wasn’t going anywhere.
He was skinny as a strip of yarn, listed on the Wolfpack’s official roster as 6-foot-1 and 171 pounds — measurements that had to have been taken while he had lifts in his shoes and paperweights in his pockets — and he had a face that made anyone who saw him question whether he was old enough to drive, let alone drink. It was rare that he could get his hands on a decent fake ID, and even when he did, he still failed to fool the bouncers around town.
“They’d be like, ‘Dude, you look like you’re 12. This is not you. You’ve got to go home,’ ” Brett Austin said. “He could not get into a bar with me.”
Austin is an assistant coach at N.C. State and Turner’s best friend. They were classmates, teammates, and roommates. He, head coach Elliott Avent, and associate head coach Chris Hart crammed themselves into a small office earlier this month to tell stories about Turner, to describe how a Palm Beach County kid so scrawny that he was cut twice from his travel team developed into the premier shortstop in Major League Baseball, into a touchstone so precious here that a giant photograph of him, crouched and poised in a fielding position, has been splashed on a wall inside the baseball program’s headquarters.
Now, Turner is 29, the free agent the Phillies had to have this offseason, the gift managing partner John Middleton purchased for his franchise and its fans for $300 million over the next 11 years. Here, he arrived at 18 with enough self-assurance, enough belief that he was bound for greatness in the big leagues, to jab back at his friends as they plopped down on their barstools and he slinked back to his dorm room.
“Trea didn’t really give a crap,” Austin said. “Like the fear of missing out, the FOMO, he didn’t have that. We’d give him crap about going out. He was like, ‘You guys enjoy the party now. I’ll enjoy the better ones down the road.’ ”
‘This kid’s a genius’
Avent has been the Wolfpack’s head coach since 1996, but he turned over most of his recruiting responsibilities to Hart in 2009, just as Turner was making his rise at Park Vista Community High School in Lake Worth, Fla. Turner wanted to play Division I baseball, and he wanted to study engineering; N.C. State’s engineering program is regarded among the country’s best. So once Turner had actually made his travel team and established himself as one of its top players, his coach emailed a video of the player to several ACC and SEC coaches, asking them to take a look.
Hart did. After watching Turner at a July showcase in Atlanta, he called him on a Wednesday and offered him a scholarship for the minimum amount he was permitted: 25% of N.C. State’s annual tuition, which in full was close to $30,000 for an out-of-state student. The scholarship offer was just Turner’s second. The first had been from Florida International University, whose coaches were expecting an answer from him the following Monday.
Hart was concerned. There was no way he could arrange for Turner to travel to Raleigh and visit N.C. State before Turner had to give FIU his answer. “I was like, ‘Trea, how is this going to work?’” he said. “He was very calm about it. ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll be fine. I’ll make the decision.’ ”
Turner picked N.C. State without ever having set foot on its campus. At his first official visit there, he met Austin while the two of them were chatting with other recruits about their SAT scores. “We didn’t do very good,” Austin said, “and Trea’s sitting there talking about how he got a 1,200 or 1,300. We’re like, ‘This kid’s a genius.’ I literally thought to myself, ‘I’m going to make friends with this kid so he can help me with my homework.’ ”
There was still no guarantee that Turner would end up playing for the Wolfpack, though, not after the Pittsburgh Pirates selected him in the 20th round of the 2011 draft — three months before the first day of his freshman year. Turner had told the Pirates that he wouldn’t sign with them for less than $800,000, but Hart, through a friend in the organization’s scouting department, learned that Pittsburgh was willing to give Turner every penny of it. He took Turner and his father, Mark, out to dinner, telling them that he could bump up Trea’s scholarship money just a bit, feeling like he had a beautiful bird nestled in his hands: He didn’t want to smother it, and he didn’t want it to fly away.
Hart’s worry turned out to be unnecessary. First, Turner told him he was coming to N.C. State. Then, Turner called the Pirates and told them not to bother making him an offer.
“I didn’t want them to put the $800,000 in front of me, like I had to take it,” Turner said in a phone interview. “I didn’t want to be in that situation. I wanted to go to college.”
Once he arrived, it didn’t take long for him to wow everyone in the program, including Avent, who, because Hart had handled every aspect of Turner’s recruiting, never actually saw Turner play until the team’s preseason workouts started. “I’m not on the road enough,” Avent said. “I couldn’t make good observations. So I turned it all over to Chris. He would still always run it by me. With Trea, he wanted to offer him. I said, ‘Fine. Go ahead.’ ”
Turner had told Hart that, as a high school senior, he had run the 60-yard dash — a standard evaluation tool in amateur and professional baseball — in an impressive 6.5 seconds. Hart was skeptical … until Turner ran a 6.2 that fall. The bouncers might have chased him out of those bars, but they weren’t going to catch him.
As part of their strength and conditioning test, the N.C. State players had to do a broad jump. “We’re sitting there measuring egos — who can jump the farthest?” Austin said. “I felt like we had a pretty athletic group. I felt like I was going to beat everybody. And Trea jumps eight feet past everybody. I’m looking at this little string bean kid. ‘Where the hell did this come from?’ We’re all sitting there thinking, ‘This kid’s a freak.’ ” Avent nicknamed Turner “Seabiscuit,” after the famous thoroughbred.
“To say I sat there that fall and said, ‘Oh, my God, this is the best player who’s ever played at N.C. State,’ I don’t think I had those thoughts,” Avent said. “But it didn’t take long to figure out that’s the best player who ever played at N.C. State.”
An upperclassman, Chris Diaz, was already entrenched at shortstop, so Avent and his staff put Turner at third base and moved Andrew Ciencin from third to first. “The slower, fatter senior had to move over to get the young buck in the lineup,” Ciencin said. Compared to Turner, though, every player was slower and fatter. He batted .336, stole 57 bases — still the program’s single-season record — and was thrown out just four times.
Though his high school and travel coaches had been terrific, Turner said, he received a measure of individual instruction at N.C. State that he hadn’t before. The coaches there taught him how to read a pitcher in the stretch and take a catcher’s arm strength and pop time into consideration before trying to steal a base.
Hart and another assistant, Brian Ward, started Turner lifting and kicking his left leg in the batter’s box to time his swing better, generate more bat speed, and hit the ball in the air more frequently. In 110 games over his final two seasons at N.C. State, Turner stole a total of 56 bases, one fewer than he had in his entire freshman season, but had 47 extra-base hits, including 15 home runs, and a .972 on-base-plus-slugging percentage.
“He had surprising power at the plate,” Duke head coach Chris Pollard said in a phone interview. “He was a guy who, when he first got to N.C. State, if he got to first, he was going to third. You couldn’t stop him. He was one of the very best guys I’ve seen at stealing third. But as time evolved, he didn’t steal as many bags as he could. He grew into a guy who could hurt you with power.”
Drafted again — this time in 2014 after his junior year, this time by the San Diego Padres with the 13th overall pick — Turner spent his offseasons in his early years in pro ball working out and hitting with Austin, whom the Chicago White Sox had taken in the fourth round of that same draft. It was a continuation of their routine at N.C. State, where Avent would chase them out of the batting cage after a couple of hours and order them to get some rest. But by then, Turner had separated himself from Austin — one of them on the track to stardom, the other in awe of his pal.
“Junior year, I was selfishly always trying to outperform him because I figured if I could outplay him, I was going to have a pretty good game,” said Austin, who never advanced beyond triple A during his playing career but was the Washington Nationals’ bullpen catcher for two years while Turner was with them. “I had this little inner game with me and him, which he probably didn’t even know about, but I was competing with him. And he was, at that point, way better than what I was.
“He would take a swing and say, ‘My right knee felt weird on that. It wasn’t doing exactly what I want it to do.’ So he would step out, think about it, analyze it, and literally make the fix in one pitch. I’d be like, ‘How do you do that, dude? It takes me 30 minutes to feel one thing or anything at all.’ He’s able to feel his body better than anybody. The proprioception is elite status.”
Has Austin ever had an edge on Turner in anything? Sure. Their families get together in Florida a couple of times each year, and the two of them have some knock-down, drag-out games of Sequence and Catan. “I’m better than him at cards and board games,” Austin said. “I kick his butt.”
A better party to attend
So Brett said you couldn’t get a fake ID.
Turner laughed.
“Obviously, I looked like a baby,” he said. “Things are done in college that are pretty frowned upon, and I just knew I was a kid and it wasn’t necessarily going to work out for me. I definitely focused on baseball quite a bit and missed out on the fun college stuff here and there.”
What he did, instead, was hang out in the dorms, or sometimes head to a par-3 golf course near campus that stayed open on Friday nights. Fitting, then, that Austin was chipping balls on a short-range course one morning in early December when he texted Turner: Hey, do I need to get a red shirt?
Austin and Hart left Turner alone for most of his month as a free agent last fall. Still, they were in touch with him and their contacts in Major League Baseball enough to know that he met with the Padres first and that the Chicago Cubs considered him their prized target, just as the Phillies did. Austin thought the Phillies — coming off a World Series berth, with fellow former Nationals Bryce Harper, Kyle Schwarber, and hitting coach Kevin Long in the fold — should be Turner’s target.
“I told him he was crazy not to go to Philly,” Austin said. “ ‘You’re going to win. If you want to win, go with the Phillies. I have no say. This is obviously the biggest decision of your life. But if you want to win now? Yeah.’ ”
Two days later, Turner texted him with the details: 11 years, $300 million, a flight to Philadelphia for a press conference. The best player ever at North Carolina State had a better party to attend, and no one would dare turn him away at the door.
