The goal, of course, is to one day wear the uniform, toe the rubber, play keep-away with the Green Monster.
Until then, simply strolling onto the field to be introduced at Fenway Park will have to do.
It’s not a bad place to start.
Daniel Moore, the former North Rowan star and current Tar Heel, just completed a remarkable summer in the Cape Cod Baseball League. Not many freshmen earn invitations to the nation’s oldest and most prestigious summer wooden bat league. Fewer still lead their team in wins, strikeouts and earned run average — or pitch in the Cape Cod All-Star game.
Moore did all that and then some. His reward was a quick trip to Boston to be introduced with his fellow all-stars before the Red Sox battled Toronto.
“Everything you watch on TV is at these ballparks. I was actually on one,”Moore said. “My name was introduced, I was on the big screen. Even though the crowd wasn’t that into it, even though I was not playing, that’s still something real special.”
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Just about Moore’s entire summer fell into that “real special” category.
After an up-and-down freshman season at North Carolina, he arrived in Chatham, Mass., with no expectations. But arrive, he did, and right on schedule — one of his best moves of the summer.
“Going up there, I was very glad even to be a part of it,”Moore said. “Once I got there, I found out I was going to be a starter on the team, mainly because other guys didn’t show up early.
“I got the first opportunity, had good starts early and put myself in the rotation. Other guys had one start, and if it didn’t go well, they got knocked out.”
Moore enjoyed every one of his starting assignments for the Chatham Athletics. He had several for the Tar Heels, but ended the Atlantic Coast Conference season as a long reliever.
Twice this summer, Moore came away a hard-luck loser. Close, low-scoring games are the norm in the Cape thanks to the wooden bats that many young collegiate hitters are learning to use for the very first time.
Moore’s blazing inside fastball shattered a fair share of those bats. The 6-foot-6 lefty racked up six wins and an impressive 0.95 earned run average — best of any starter — and made the most of the few runs the A’s got for him.
“Every game was tight. It was always who could get the clutch hit, who’d get it done at the end,” Moore said. “Every team had 9-10 guys on it who were just awesome. I didn’t know how much better it could get than the ACC.”
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Moore’s 5-5 record as a UNC freshman didn’t earn him any accolades, but being selected for the Cape Cod All-Stars more than made up for it.
The all-star game itself turned out to be a mere formality —thousands of fans and loads of pro scouts simply can’t compare to Fenway Park.
Each player was introduced before the Boston home game. The Cape Cod stars all shook hands with Red Sox infielder Lou Merloni, who first made a name for himself in the Cape.
And, as always in Boston, there was Peter Gammons — the ESPN baseball analyst. Moore made sure he spoke to Gammons, and not just as a stranger in passing. The two met last year at the North Carolina alumni weekend.
Yes, Gammons is a Tar Heel.
“Every time I see him, it’s fun to pick his brain. He knows our baseball team at UNC as well as he knows all the major league teams,”Moore said. “It’s incredible. Since I was 11 or 12 I’ve seen him on ‘Baseball Tonight,’ and now I go up and talk to him and he actually knows who I am.”
After all the pre-game fun, the Cape All-Stars watched Boston’s relief pitching blow a late lead to Toronto as the Blue Jays went on for the win.
If you need pitching help, Boston …
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Tar Heels head coach Mike Fox kept close tabs on Moore and two other UNC players in Chatham.
“We get pictures of him at Fenway, Peter Gammons is there. That does our program a world of good,”Fox said. “More than anything else, though, we’re happy for him —and we hope it carries over.”
College coaches have two primary goals for their players in the summer:get better, and don’t get hurt.
Moore hasn’t had to worry about the injury bug, but he did suffer through a period of “dead arm” during his freshman year.
North Rowan finished second in the state playoffs. That long senior season was followed by an even longer, more grinding American Legion campaign, in which Rowan County again finished second.
By the time Fox got his hands on Moore for fall workouts, there wasn’t much left.
“I had thrown a lot of innings and probably didn’t need to be throwing when I got back to school,”Moore said. “It took a while to build back up to what I had in high school. I’ve just now got my good stuff back and I feel a lot better going into this year.”
Moore’s fastball was clocked consistently in the low 90s in Chatham, said A’s secretary and web site coordinator Bob Sherman, who helped the Post follow Moore’s progress all summer.
Just as important as velocity, though, Moore said he worked on locating his fastball: up, down, in, out. He also put in time on that crucial third pitch — a changeup to go along with his curve.
“My breaking ball’s a lot sharper, a little more deceiving,”Moore said. “Hopefully I can carry what I accomplished this summer into fall, then spring.”
That’s what Fox has in mind, too.
“He was playing with very good players up there. Most of the guys who go up there see that and they want to match what somebody else did, prove they belong,”the Tar Heel coach said. “He did that.”
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There also are things Moore didn’t do in Chatham.
For example, most of the hi-jinks featured in the film “Summer Catch.”
Previews for the movie starring Freddie Prinze Jr. have already hit theaters. The film is about a fictional Chatham A’s player trying to make it big —and have as much fun as possible at the same time.
“It was pretty funny, but I wouldn’t say it was a realistic movie,”said film-critic Moore, laughing. “It’s good that we’ve got a movie about the Cape League, more exposure, but obviously with any movie you’ve got that Hollywood thing. They’re not worried about it being exactly right.”
Chatham is actually a quaint, quiet town for the most part. Moore said everyone seemed to know all the players’ names, asked for autographs and provided a great fan base, with 1,400 people showing up every night for games.
“It’s a bunch of 19-, 20-year-old guys playing baseball and working at odd places,”said Moore, who worked at a hardware store every morning from 8 to noon. “It’s mostly high school kids and older people spending their summer there.”
When the Athletics made the Cape playoffs, Moore said nearly 5,000 people spent their evenings crammed into the high school park to catch the action. Chatham finished second, losing in the ninth inning on a wet infield after what Moore called a perfect swinging bunt.
“There was no play at all,”said Moore, who had thrown five innings of scoreless relief prior to the ninth. “The guy couldn’t have bunted it in a better place.”
Second place wasn’t too bad for Moore’s first year in the Cape, though. Not with the first-rate numbers he put up. Chatham is already looking forward to the encore, in fact.
“We hope he will be back in Chatham next summer because, in addition to being an excellent young pitcher, he is a mature and classy young man,”Sherman said. “He certainly will be a leader back at UNC and was a leader on this team. There are not a lot of freshmen in this league and he was mature as any of the older players.”
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Contact Steve Hanf at 704-797-4287 or shanf@salisburypost.com
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