Despite championship pedigree, this pitcher hopes to succeed in different sport
from Steve Miller, with YardBarker.com/www.yardbarker.com
It’s rare that an athlete can boast of having parents who both competed at the apex level of a major sport. When you’re talking about a combined 167 professional singles titles, 30 Grand Slam titles and a pair of Olympic gold medals, that’s some serious talent cache in the pipeline.
Jaden Agassi, the son of tennis legends Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, did not follow what most would see as a natural progression to the courts, but instead chose his first love, baseball.
Agassi was featured in a recent MLB story after being named as a pitcher on the German national squad (his mother’s birthplace). His team will complete in the upcoming World Baseball Classic (WBC) qualifiers in Tucson, Arizona in March, with hopes of advancing to the 2026 tournament.
The route to notoriety for the 23-year-old has been a rather unconventional one. Nonetheless, here he is, but how did this prodigy of tennis Hall of Famers get here?
After two years competing in travel games, he took his first trip to the mound as a junior for his Palo Verde High School team in Las Vegas and promptly suffered a deflating injury that led to Tommy John surgery.
After a lengthy recovery that ended his 2019 campaign, Agassi took another gut shot: COVID-19 hit and wiped out the 2020 season.
“It was crazy, not being able to play the game for two entire years,” Agassi told the Tribune Chronicle. “Looking back, COVID really helped me out in that I didn’t rush back. I had that extra time to get healthy and to fully recover. It was probably a blessing,” a humble Agassi said.
Now healthy, he displayed athletic promise that led to a scholarship with USC and later spent a summer in the California Collegiate League.
However, it was in the MLB Draft League while throwing for the Mahoning Valley Scrappers last season where Agassi began turning heads.
He was effective and ended up with a 2.96 ERA, posting a solid 9.2 K/9.
Months later, he and his German national teammates will try to overcome Columbia, Brazil and China in the qualifiers, looking to become the first German team to advance to the main tournament.
It’ll be interesting to see how the kid with the famous last name of tennis royalty does at this level, but he’ll likely bring fresh eyes to the qualifiers.