Asa Lacy, the Royals’ top draft pick, was dubbed a 1st-rounder at the ripe old age of 8
Kerrville Tivy High baseball coach Chris Russ can laugh now about how wrong he was to have laughed back then.
Thirteen years ago, Russ accepted a coaching position on a baseball team for 8- and 9-year-olds in College Station, Texas, that included an 8-year-old left-handed pitcher. The kid had a remarkably strong arm but was still learning to get the baseball to go where he desired once he uncorked it.
One of the team’s organizers, a Texas A&M sports management professor named Gregg Bennett, told Russ that the little lefty named Asa Lacy had the chance to be a first-round MLB draft pick one day.
“I was already in my seventh year of professional baseball, and I was kind of like, ‘OK, Gregg, whatever you say,’” Russ recalled in a phone interview with The Star. “I just kind of blew it off. All right, yeah, you’re sure he’s going to be a first-rounder. He’s 8 years old and you know that already.”
Well, the Kansas City Royals selected Lacy with the No. 4 overall pick in this year’s Major League Baseball draft. Lacy dominated in a junior season at Texas A&M that was shortened by the COVID-19 pandemic, establishing himself as one of the best pitchers in the country.
Russ had no way of knowing that outcome when he looked into the eyes of a happy-go-lucky 8-year-old kid, but he certainly saw it by the time Lacy pitched his final game for Kerrville Tivy in Texas’ Hill Country.
“He was just such a dependable guy on the mound,” Russ said. “His senior year, it was impressive to watch with the numbers he put up. It was ridiculous, just overpowering and overwhelmed people.”
Bats, not rackets
Lacy’s father, Phillip, played tennis at Sam Houston State. As a young child, his parents tried to direct Asa toward tennis.
For that matter, Lacy played several other sports as he was growing up. He played football through junior high and into his freshman year of high school.
He just didn’t take to them the way he did baseball.
“I played tennis. I played golf at an early age, and I was playing baseball at the same time,” Lacy said. “I remember hitting tennis balls with my dad and I used to hit balls over the fence like I was hitting a home run. So it was from early on; I just had that love and that passion for baseball.”
Lacy’s love of baseball played a primary role in his family’s move from College Station to Kerrville.
After playing on the 9U team, Lacy began taking pitching lessons from Russ, who pitched in both the New York Yankees’ and St. Louis Cardinals’ minor-league systems.
Before Russ moved to Kerrville to coach and teach at his former high school, Lacy started playing for a select team based in Kerrville and coached by Russ’s father, Freddie.
It started with a tournament in Colorado, and before long Lacy and his family were making the approximately 200-mile trek from College Station for baseball games and practices in Kerrville.
At the time, Lacy’s father worked out of the southern part of the state. So the family moved to Kerrville when Lacy was still in junior high.
“So we moved when I was 12 years old, partly for my dad’s work,” Lacy said. “I was also playing baseball in the town we moved to, but he was working in South Texas as an oil and gas consultant. So he was doing a lot of driving back and forth to College Station. So it just made sense and I’m very thankful for that, that we did that.”
Growing into an ace
By the time he reached high school, Lacy made up his mind to “commit everything I had” to baseball.
When he arrived at Kerrville Tivy, he found a familiar face greeting him on the baseball field. Russ served as the junior-varsity coach in Lacy’s freshman year, and when Lacy moved up to the varsity as a sophomore, Russ became the varsity’s head coach.
Lacy, always relatively tall and thin for his age — he graduated at 6-foot-3, 180 pounds — wasn’t a power pitcher as a high school sophomore. His fastball was in the low to mid 80s.
“He just had that something about his fastball that really wasn’t easy to hit, even at that velocity,” Russ said. “He had a good changeup — even as a sophomore he had a really good changeup.”
Because opponents had so much trouble hitting his fastball, Lacy simply didn’t throw his breaking ball much against hitters who couldn’t touch his heater.
By his senior year, he’d become dominant. He set a school record for wins (13) and earned All-State and District MVP honors thanks to his 0.93 ERA and 128 strikeouts in 97 1/3 innings.
“He was my big-game pitcher his senior year. I think he went 13-1, and you just put him out there and you knew you were going to win the game,” Russ said. “I think the one loss he had he was coming off the flu. He had the flu for a week and it was a couple days after that. He got out there and was not quite as sharp as he normally was.”
A reserved, even-keeled and level-headed young man who did well in school and enjoyed hunting and fishing in his free time, Lacy was a “pleasure to coach,” in Russ’ words.
On the field, Russ noticed as Lacy grew more intense and confident as he had more success in high school. He also began to embrace the behind-the-scenes aspects of being a top-flight pitcher. He even had a trainer he worked with outside of school.
“His senior year, he really started to fall in love with the process of getting better, lifting weights and all those things that come along with being a good pitcher,” Russ said. “He got to college and really started with coach (Rob) Childress studying film and also studying film on his own. He started figuring out ways to improve his delivery and figuring out how to get a little bit more out of his mechanics.”
The final step
Some MLB clubs showed interest while Lacy was in high school and talked with Russ about it, but Lacy was set on attending Texas A&M. Five relatives were Aggies, including his grandfather, a former A&M football player.
Under Childress in College Station, Lacy got bigger and stronger (he’s now 6-foot-4, 215 pounds) and improved his secondary pitches with the help of technology like a Rapsodo performance-measurement device. The mound presence Russ had seen blossom in Kerrville became more noticeable.
“This kid is a power arm with four plus pitches ...” Royals assistant GM/amateur scouting Lonnie Goldberg said. “He’s an animal on the field.”
Many evaluators rated Lacy as the top pitching prospect in this year’s draft. He’s viewed as a potential front-line starter in the majors.
In his second start of this season, he struck out 14 batters in five innings. His fourth and final start of the Aggies’ pandemic-shortened campaign featured seven no-hit innings and 13 strikeouts.
“When I step in between the lines and I step on that mound,” he said, “I just flip a switch, and it starts with my whole warm-up routine. But that competitiveness is definitely something that’s been in me for my entire life.
“It was just a matter of time before a coach brought it out of me and I’ve had a few coaches that have done a pretty good job, but no one better than Coach Childress. He truly just brought that fire out in me and let me run with it. And let me just be myself.”
Russ, who attended Lacy’s draft night party and watched him throw a bullpen session recently with easy 94 mph heat, admits Lacy has grown beyond even what he’d imagined he might become.
Russ still can’t help laughing when he remembers the prediction a professor named Gregg Bennett made about that 8-year-old in College Station.
“I haven’t seen Gregg in a long time,” Russ said. “I think he’s still at A&M. Maybe he’ll read this article and get a kick out of it. He did say he was going to be a first rounder, and he was right.”
This story was originally published June 14, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Asa Lacy, the Royals’ top draft pick, was dubbed a 1st-rounder at the ripe old age of 8."
