Making His Pitch For Pros For Chewelah Ace Tucker Tupek, School Is A Means To An End - A Professional Baseball Career

Chewelah High senior pitcher Tucker Tupek still hasn’t gotten the message.

In recent years, professional sports leagues and the National Collegiate Athletic Association have waged all-out campaigns aimed at young athletes stressing the importance of a high school diploma and a college degree.

The message is simple: Athletics aren’t everything, so have an education to fall back on.

Tupek has one dream right now: to play professional baseball. He is hoping to be selected in baseball’s June draft.

If Tupek works as hard in the classroom as he does on the baseball diamond, he could probably graduate with honors.

“I go to school for the sports. I go to class and I have about C-plus average. But I want to play pro ball. I read a Sports Illustrated article when I was 12 or 13 that had the salaries of every major-league pitcher. That’s when I said, ‘Hey, this is the game for me.”’

Fact: Major League Baseball reports that for every 20 players that sign a pro contract, just one will play an inning in the major leagues.

Tupek has a 4-1 record in league this season, with an earned-run average of 1.88. He threw his first career no-hitter Saturday in a 20-0 win against Newport. He walked one batter and struck out 10.

In his first three games this season, Tupek had a 3-0 record with 37 strikeouts and six walks. In that three-game stretch he had 20 at-bats in which he had 14 hits, including five home runs. He drove in 14 runs.

He has a 29-11 career pitching record.

Chewelah coach Lonnie Hoxie and Tupek’s parents, Dave and Liz, are concerned about Tucker’s priorities.

“I’d like to see him play college ball,” Hoxie said. “The Northeast A, let’s face it, it’s not a glamour league. But the colleges around here just seem to recruit from the Greater Spokane League.”

Tupek is a 6-foot-4, 190-pound right-hander from Coronado, Calif. His family moved to Chewelah three years ago.

“He’s dreaming a big dream, but if he isn’t drafted, my wife and I have been stressing attending a junior college or a small college,” Dave Tupek said.

“He hasn’t been a real strong student. His goal has always been to play professional baseball. If he’s good enough they’ll find him. But we want him to continue with his education as well as his baseball career.”

So far, the only contact the Tupeks have had from pro scouts occurred when the elder Tupek was in Southern California a year ago and ran into a longtime friend who is a scout with the Atlanta Braves.

“He gave me some forms for Tucker to fill out. We sent them in but haven’t heard anything since,” Dave Tupek said.

While Tucker’s parents and coach are wondering whether the competition he has faced is strong enough to generate attention from pro scouts, Harry Amend, a scout for the Philadelphia Phillies and the Freeman school district’s superintendent, said the size of the league a player comes from isn’t taken into consideration by pro scouts.

“I don’t think it matters at all what size of school a player attends, particularly if he is a pitcher,” Amend said.

“A pro scout scouts on tools. The three basic tools are hitting, running and throwing. The rule of some scouts is if a young athlete can do two out of those three things at an average major-league level, then he qualifies as a prospect.

“The tricky part as as scout is projecting what a kid can do as at high school versus what they can do six or seven years down the road at the bigleague level.”

In his 15 years as a Phillies scout, Amend has signed 14 players to professional contracts. One of those players is Phillies shortstop Kevin Stocker, who graduated from Central Valley.

Amend said of the 14 players he has signed, half of them came from leagues smaller than the Northeast A.

“If a player starts to perform in a way that indicates that they are a professional prospect, people will start to get the word.

“But you’d better be playing playing Legion ball in the summer, attending clinics, even attending professional tryout camps that every team has in the summer. Those are great opportunities for exposure,” Amend said.

While Tupek isn’t much of a student in the classroom, he is certainly a student of baseball. The one book he has devoured from cover to cover and carries with him more than any other school book is “The Mental Game of Baseball,” by H.A. Dorfman and Karl Kuehl.

In the off-season he was in the weight room at least every other day and gained close to 15 pounds.

“I’ve been a baseball coach for 12 years,” Hoxie said. “I haven’t had anyone on my roster with the talent or the work ethic Tucker has. I’ve had pitchers that threw the ball harder, but his finesse is unmatchable in our league. Every time he goes out he amazes me even more.”

Tupek has never suffered any major injuries. A month away from his 18th birthday, his body has some growing to do.

But even if a scout from every major-league baseball team showed up at the Tupek residence with a contract and pen asking Tucker to sign on the dotted line, his parents and coaches tell him that he can’t play baseball forever.

Fact: The average career span of a major-league baseball player is 3 1/2 seasons.

Dave Tupek played football at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and at the University of San Diego, but he never earned a degree after his playing days were over.

“I’m telling him to be a student-athlete first instead of being an athlete-student,” he said. “He’s limiting his options for later on in life like I did. I’m hoping that he’ll learn from my mistake, but right now, this is his dream.”