It’s hard to believe David Justice will be two days past his 57th birthday when he comes in from his San Diego home to give his former Thomas More college baseball team a pre-game talk Saturday.
The former Major League Baseball all-star with a career spanning 14 seasons and four teams – Atlanta, Cleveland, the New York Yankees and Oakland — with 21 postseason series appearances including six World Series – was always the young guy around here.
The Cincinnati kid graduated from Covington Latin School at the age of 16 after skipping the seventh and eighth grades as academics-first Latin School students do.
Then he headed for Thomas More as the youngest guy on the Saints’ basketball roster. No chance for a baseball scholarship since the Latin School didn’t have a baseball team.
But TMU did have one. His legendary coach, Jim Connor, made sure of that. And it made sense for the 6-foot-3 Justice to take a swing at it. Which the lefty did.
And that was the reason, on a day in May in 1985, that two local Braves scouts – Larry Grefer and Hep Cronin – prevailed on the Braves player personnel guru, Paul Snyder, who built those 14 straight division-winning teams in a 50-year Atlanta career as one of the top scouts in baseball history to come on up to Crestview Hills for Justice’s final college baseball appearance.
Just from his basketball alone, Hep and Larry, both basketball coaches themselves, knew the athletic Justice was too good a prospect to miss on. They obviously could not have been more correct.
All David did, and as often retold by Hep and Larry, was go eight for 12 in the doubleheader hitting line drives in every direction, a preview of his major league career that saw him finish with 1,571 hits, 305 home runs, 1,017 RBI and a .279 batting average.
That sweet swing, and Justice’s rangy 195-pound frame, convinced Snyder to move the unheard-of TMU player up on the Braves’ draft board to the fourth round. Justice’s Rookie of the Year honors, three-time All-Star selections, two World Series championships and Braves Hall of Fame selection, not to mention his $58 million in career earnings, more than validated the chance Snyder took on him.
In Saturday’s festivities at Thomas More Stadium in Florence featuring a doubleheader (games at 12 noon and 3 p.m.) against NAIA No. 9 Cumberlands (Ky.), Justice will talk to the TMU team at 9:30 before batting practice then do a chalk talk with fans at 10 a.m. and throw out the first pitch at 11:50.
Salutes to current TMU teams and alumni teams will occur between every inning. Should be a big day.
*** AND THEN THERE WERE SIX: No question Northern Kentucky University basketball had things going for the Norse, winning the Horizon League Tournament and NCAA bid before pushing No. 1 seed Houston in a first-round 1-16 game in Birmingham last month.
And three of the top six – starters Marques Warrick, Sam Vinson and Trey Robinson — would all be back.
Sure valuable players in Top-20 NCAA rebounder Chris Brandon and speedy point guard Xavier Rhodes, both seniors, along with super-sub grad student Trevon Faulkner – would be moving on. But who knew they’d be joined by a half-dozen more teammates who have put their names into the NCAA’s transfer portal.
Instead of losing three players, NKU Coach Darrin Horn has nine spots to fill. Two 6-3 guard recruits – Lloyd Memorial shooting guard Jeremiah Israel and Randall Pettus II, a point guard out of Bessemer City, N.C., will take up two of those spots.
We caught up with Brandon in a supermarket checkout line the other day and he said while he was working on finding an agent and seeing what pro basketball prospects – here and internationally – have in store for him, he “wasn’t sure what those guys are thinking.”
Most prominent of them is seven-foot basketball newbie Imanuel Zorgvol, a native of Suriname, who was in his third year of basketball and in line to step in for Brandon next year, after averaging 9.1 minutes a game (with 2.6 points and 2.8 rebounds a game) . . . Then there’s 6-3 freshman guard A’lahn Sumler, who would have had to compete with the two freshmen for playing time although whether he could handle the point was the question . . . Lithuanian shooter Hubertas Pivorius played important late-season minutes . . . Other departures come from guard Isaiah Mason, a sophomore from Bowling Green; Jake Evans, a junior guard who fought injuries during his 62-game NKU career, and 7-foot junior Noah Hupmann, a Covington Catholic alum whose playing time tailed off the last two seasons.
All told, that group averaged 42.2 minutes a game and 9.7 points.
*** FOR THOSE WHO HAVE ASKED, the Florence Y’alls open their season at home on Thursday, May 11, on Thomas More Night at Thomas More Stadium against the Gateway Grizzlies from Sauget, Ill., just across the Mississippi River from downtown St. Louis, with giveaway Thomas More Y’alls hats. Game time is 6:34 p.m.
