After a January conditioning session for the Aragon baseball team, head coach Lenny Souza was chatting up some of his former players. It was a casual conversation filled with jokes and laughs — just regular guys catching up with each other. It looked like nothing out of the ordinary, except one of the guys just happens to be a professional athlete.
Sam Tuivailala was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals in the third round of the 2010 Major League Baseball amateur draft as a 17-year-old out of Aragon High School. Last year, he made his major league debut with the Cardinals in September. Now the 22-year-old is working with some of the Aragon pitchers on their technique before he heads down to Florida in February for the Cardinals’ spring training.
“It just feels right to give back,” Tuivailala says. “Sometimes I forget that people look up to me, because I still feel like that kid at Aragon. But when kids ask for help I always give them whatever I can do.”
In his time with the Dons, Tuivailala was a superstar at the plate and on the mound, hitting .371 with 10 home runs as a shortstop. As a pitcher he had a 1.15 ERA, and struck out 111 batters in 85 innings over his junior and senior seasons. Tuivailala also played varsity basketball and varsity football at Aragon.
“He was a lot smaller as a freshman,” Souza says. “He didn’t want to come up his sophomore year. He really sprouted that summer before junior year. That’s one of the challenges of being a three-sport athlete, because you can’t ever fully dedicate yourself to one sport. Now we’re getting to see what he’s really capable of when he’s playing baseball year-round.”
Tuivailala was a quarterback, defensive back and punter for the Aragon football team. Athletic director and football head coach Steve Sell says, “He’s a freak of nature. Every now and then you get an athlete that fits that. I encouraged him to at least keep punting. I knew baseball was his thing and he didn’t want to risk injury, but if he would punt, he could have been an NFL punter. He was scary good. He could fall out of bed and punt the ball 50 yards.”
“People told us his junior year that [playing professionally] was a possibility,” Souza adds. “The summer between his junior and senior year, we started realizing that this was definitely a possibility, and that playing at the Division I level would definitely happen. It took a little while to figure it out, but once he sprouted, it was pretty clear.”
College scouts and MLB scouts alike took notice of this emerging star at Aragon. Programs would frequently send scouts to Aragon for practices and games to watch Tuivailala pitch. “When all of the scouts started to come it was definitely different,” Tuivailala says. “[I was] throwing to the catcher and seeing five or 10 radar guns behind the screen. I definitely felt the pressure on me. But I just went out there and had to play my game, and not really worry about that. That was an adjustment to make.”
Even though Tuivailala made it to the big leagues as a pitcher, he was actually drafted by the Cardinals to play shortstop. After hitting only .220 in two years of rookie ball, the Cardinals management approached him about converting to a pitcher.
“I’m pretty sure that they knew pitching was in my background,” says Tuivailala. “We had high-level prospects that year, so it pushed my time away [in the rookie league]. I was happy when they told me, but at the same time I was kind of sad because the position didn’t really work out for me, and as a competitor I have high expectations on myself. But I was happy to do anything it takes to get up [to the big leagues].”
Tuivailala’s best pitch is his fastball, which has been clocked at 100 miles per hour, and is routinely higher than 95 mph. He struggled with his command in his first two years back on the mound, but last year he shot through the entire minor league system and reached the big leagues.
“Obviously a fastball is the biggest pitch a pitcher should have, but at the same time you need something else to help out that fastball,” Tuivailala says. “I learned pretty fast that professional hitters are gonna hit that fastball, so I [needed] to get the offspeed going. That’s what I’m focusing on a lot — to work on my curveball and changeup. It just keeps the hitters thinking.”
Since Tuivailala went through so many levels of the Cardinals’ farm system, that means changing teams, cities and teammates multiple times spontaneously. “Switching teams was difficult, but luckily in spring training, I played with a good group of guys and basically became closer with them,” Tuivailala says. “It was nice to see some familiar faces as the season went on. For the most part, all the guys in the organization were good guys, and it made things easier to transition between leagues.”
When Tuivailala got the call up the Cardinals in September, Souza was one of the first people he called (after his mother of course).
“It was weird. It was kind of surreal,” Tuivailala says. “I didn’t really know what to say or how to react. I just smiled at my manager, got some goosebumps. It was weird knowing that the odds were against me, and my hard work paid off. It was a great time to call my mom and let her know about the good news.”
Souza adds, “He got called up on a Monday officially. He called me on Saturday and told me. Immediately I looked at their schedule and saw that [the Cardinals] finished the season in Arizona. So [Sam] hooked me up with flights, tickets and on-field passes. The coolest part was knowing the journey that he went through.”
