At some point upon being driven through Downtown on the way to PNC Park, it dawned on Travis Swaggerty that he was over water. And on top of that, soaring so much higher than he'd ever expected.
"That's the bridge. I mean, the bridge," the kid was fairly gushing Friday in referring, of course, to the Roberto Clemente Bridge spanning the Allegheny. "I didn't even realize we were on it, but I looked around, I looked at the stadium, and it was just as beautiful as it looks ... you know, on the video game."
Hey, I did mention he's a kid.
Swaggerty, a 20-year-old outfielder out of the University of South Alabama, was the Pirates' top pick, 10th overall, in the Major League Baseball Draft on June 4. This was his introductory press conference in the big media area of the ballpark, with the team's brass all attending, as well as his father, Travis Sr., and it was clear he was more than caught up in the moment from the second he leaned into the mic after Neal Huntington's formal welcome.
"I have goosebumps," Swaggerty would say. "I’m sitting here shaking still because it finally kind of set in. I got drafted on the 4th. That’s 11 days ago. That’s a long time and it still didn’t really set in. My dad, he's sacrificed so much for me to be here, and there are so many people I need to thank. Sorry, I'm getting a little choked up. I'm a Pittsburgh Pirate now. I'm really here."
Yeah, here he was. Earlier in the day, he and Huntington put pen to paper on a $4.4 million signing bonus — just below MLB's recommended slot of $4.56 million for the No. 10 overall pick — and, on Saturday morning, he'll be reporting to the West Virginia Black Bears, the Pirates' short-season Class A affiliate in Morgantown.
This after not being drafted at all out of high school in 2015, which is no small feat given that baseball's got 40 rounds and scouts often will take their children or a buddy's child just to say they were drafted.
I asked Swaggerty about his passion for baseball:
I asked his father, too:
Huntington's much more the analytical type than emotional, but he acknowledged the passion mattered.
"When we talked to our evaluators about Travis, what was fascinating was that one would talk about his ability to impact the game as a hitter," the GM said at the podium next to Swaggerty. "One would talk about his ability to impact the game by drawing a walk and stealing a base. One would talk about his ability to drive the ball into the gap or into the seats. One would talk about his ability to make those plus plays in center field that a special defender can make."
It was then that Huntington got a little extra demonstrative.
"One would talk about his toughness, his grittiness, how he shows up every day to help his team put one in the win column. One would talk about this young man's intense drive, about his willingness to do whatever he needed to do to be great. And as you'd hear each of them talk, you recognized we had a chance to have a pretty special young player."
That'll be determined over time, of course. The road is excruciatingly slow in baseball, and all that's known now is that Swaggerty really loves the game, plays it really well and really, really wants to stick in center field — "That's always been home to me," he'd say without hesitation — and that he's now taken the largest leap of all.
"Not yet," he'd clarify when that came up. "I'd like to be out on this field for real in a couple years."