Scout’s Honor

Casey Kotchman was scouted more thoroughly by the Angels than any draft pick in team history. When they made the 18-year-old first baseman their first pick Tuesday, it culminated years of research.

“I watched him pitch when he was 6,” said Howie Gershberg, a pitching coach in the Angel organization. “He learned everything fast.”

Said Angel coach Joe Maddon: “I saw him taking batting practice when he was 8. He had the sweetest left-handed swing.”

Even players got involved in information gathering.

“He was a heck of a bat boy,” Angel closer Troy Percival said.

Yet the one Angel representative who refused to report on Kotchman’s play for Seminole (Fla.) High was their scout based there.

Tom Kotchman, longtime Angel scout and minor league manager in the organization for 18 years, has watched Casey with only the gaze of a proud father.

When it came to his son, he left the scouting to other Angel personnel. What he worked on was Casey’s skills.

From the time he was 6, Casey, the 13th overall pick, spent summers with his father, who manages one of the organization’s two rookie league teams.

The Kotchmans, father and son, could be found on the field taking batting practice every day. Casey watched, listened and absorbed everything being taught the players, and that education paid off. Baseball America listed him as the high school player closest to reaching the major leagues in this year’s draft.

Kotchman learned the game so well at a young age that he acted as Class-A Boise’s pitching coach one night after his father, then the manager, and another coach were ejected.

And he has other fond memories.

“There is nothing more distinct than the smell of a pro baseball field,” Casey Kotchman said. “You smell the pine tar and the clay and the rosin bag and the mowed grass. That’s mixed in with the smells of what they’re cooking at the concession stands. You don’t get that smell on a high school or Little League field.”

For Seminole High last season, Kotchman batted .456 and struck out only twice. He had 14 doubles, a triple, five home runs and 32 runs batted in for the Florida 5A champion. And he had plenty of support on a team that finished 31-0. Seminole had five players drafted in the first 15 rounds.

Kotchman is considered the pick of the litter.

“I saw him hit when he was 8 and he was hitting line drives past the infield,” said Maddon, the Angels’ roving hitting instructor from 1987-93. “Tom sent me a videotape of Casey last summer and you could see he was something special.”

In the state championship game, Seminole trailed St. Thomas Aquinas, 4-4, after five innings. Kotchman’s two-run double sparked a four-run sixth. And an inning later, with a runner on first, Kotchman doubled again to set up the winning run, which scored on a balk.

“When they were losing, my hands were shaking,” Tom Kotchman said. “I was sitting with the scouts and had to find a way to deal with it. . . . As a father, to see that championship game, that’s why I coached at Boise instead of managing a full-season team.

“When I was in triple-A, I saw my wife and kids for three weeks in seven months. John McNamara said, ‘You can’t buy back time.’ I never forgot that. I saw that championship game and that was worth 11 years.”

Casey Kotchman spent at least part of those 11 summers with his father. As he grew older, the time in Boise decreased. Sometimes he spent only a few days, as his own summer baseball teams advanced through national tournaments.

He played for USA junior baseball teams the last three years. He was on the youth national team that won the 1999 world championships.

Defensively, Kotchman, 6 feet 3, 215 pounds, is ready to play in the majors, according to his father.

But a lot of what made Kotchman a top prospect was the result of summers spent on the entry level of professional baseball at Boise.

“It was just great being with him,” Kotchman said of his summers with his father. “I enjoyed being at the ballpark and getting to go in the clubhouse. As a kid, it didn’t look like he had a real job. I guess that I was kind of born into what he was doing.”

Indeed, Kotchman was knowledgeable enough at 8 to step in and help his father’s team during a 1991 game against Yakima.

Tom Kotchman was ejected after he and an umpire got into a furious argument, and, an inning later, so too was his assistant.

Gershberg, the team’s pitching coach, was left to manage. He used Casey to relay messages to his father in the clubhouse, and to run the bullpen.

“I had Casey getting the pitchers ready,” Gershberg said. “He knew what he was doing. He got Percival [who played for Boise in 1990 and ‘91] ready in the ninth to save the game. We came back and won and that game turned our season around. We won the Northwest League championship.”

But it was his father’s tutoring that got him to Tuesday’s draft.

“Every day, Tom would throw batting practice to Casey,” Gershberg said. “He did it the right way. Now, I’ve seen video of Casey and this is a real skilled player. He could be a 30-home run hitter someday.”

The trip to someday begins when he signs his contract. Tom Kotchman is advising his son, who is expected to receive a signing bonus of about $2 million. He may even wind up managing him, as Tom Kotchman will call the shots at Class-A Provo, where his son could be assigned.

“Very few people get to experience that,” Tom Kotchman said.