Mauer, Cooperstown Linked Since Long Before Induction Weekend

By KRISTIAN CONNOLLY
COOPERSTOWN

As far as I know, only one person in history can claim to have both grown up one block from the National Baseball Hall of Fame AND scouted a future Hall of Famer before the player even made his Major League debut.

That person is me, and the player is 2024 Hall of Fame Inductee and former Minnesota Twins catcher/first baseman/DH Joe Mauer.

From 1987 on, my childhood home has been on Fair Street, within view of the Hall. In October 2002, I was sitting with the Twins’ scouting and player-development staff in a Minor League stadium in Fort Myers, Florida, evaluating a few dozen of the organization’s top young players ahead of the coming offseason.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. My Mauer story starts earlier than 2002.

Folk hero Paul Bunyan is an iconic figure in Minnesota, as the tale goes that Bunyan’s footsteps created the more than 10,000 lakes in the North Star State. Bunyan is a larger-than-life character of myth and legend. But he is a work of fiction. To find a real larger-than-life figure (with perhaps some elements of myth and legend) in Minnesota, one could not do any better than pointing to an 18-year-old, 6-foot-5-inch high school sports phenom from St. Paul named Joe Mauer in 2001.

Mauer’s amateur exploits are well chronicled, but here are just a few: He received Division I college offers in three sports. As a football quarterback, he led his team to the state title in 2000, and to the title game in 2001. He won just about every national player of the year award there is to win. He signed a letter of intent to play QB at Florida State for coaching legend Bobby Bowden. In basketball, Mauer was All-State in his junior and senior seasons, and finished with over 1,000 career points. As for baseball, Mauer struck out only one time in high school (more on that below), batted well over .500 in his career, and tied a national high school record by homering in seven consecutive games. He won multiple national player of the year honors in 2001, as well as helping his team to a state title. He was a member of the Junior National Team from 1998-2000, and was MVP of the 2000 World Junior Championship, batting .559 with 15 RBIs as the U.S. won the silver medal.

And that was all before being drafted by the Twins, at which point Mauer became the seventh Minnesotan to be selected in the first round, and the first to be selected first overall.

The 2001 June Draft is more or less where my Mauer story begins, though technically it starts five months earlier. After a year working for the Hall of Fame, and with the help of future Hall President Jeff Idelson, I was literally in my first day as an intern in the Twins’ media relations department when former Twins center fielder Kirby Puckett and former Twin and St. Paul native Dave Winfield both were elected to Cooperstown by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.

On that frigid and icy January day, I’d not been in my windowless, basement cave of an office at the Metrodome—getting introduced to colleagues throughout the Twins organization as “the kid from Cooperstown”—for more than a few hours before the entire building, and Twin Cities sports pages, were suddenly all about Cooperstown.

Fun fact: Before 2001, just three Hall of Famers could call themselves “former Twins”—Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew and Steve Carlton. Since 2001 and the very day I joined the Twins’ front office, that list has grown to not only include Puckett and Winfield, but also Paul Molitor, Bert Blyleven, Jim Thome, Jack Morris, David Ortiz, Tony Oliva, Jim Kaat, and now Mauer. That’s a 333 percent increase in Twins Hall of Famers after a Cooperstonian joined Minnesota’s Major League front office! I’m just saying.

But back to Mauer. When the Twin Cities sports pages weren’t about Puckett, Winfield, and Cooperstown in 2001, they were often about Mauer. Aside from his high school feats, there was the not-so-small matter of the local MLB team having the first pick in the upcoming draft. The tale of Mauer being drafted—and the perceived difficult decision the Twins faced between selecting Mauer or college right-hander Mark Prior—is well-documented. Suffice it to say that from where I was sitting (which was either inside of, or across the hallway from, the Twins’ draft war room), it was an interesting time to be in PR and baseball information for a big-league ball club.

In fact, that specific draft experience—the two weeks of scouting meetings I periodically sat in on, and the draft itself—catalyzed my desire to learn how to scout, leading me to Fort Myers in October 2002, and to evaluating Joe Mauer.

Every fall, the Twins (and many other clubs) run what is called “Instructional League” for a few dozen of their top prospects. The 2002 season was Mauer’s first full season of Minor League ball, and afterward the organization invited him to their Spring Training/Minor League complex for a six-week instructional experience.

Earlier that year, I’d had my second opportunity to observe the Twins’ draft process, and I’d expressed interest in learning to evaluate amateur and professional players. With the invitation and blessing of both late Twins scouting legend Mike Radcliff and then-Twins GM Terry Ryan—two of the best teachers I could ever have had the privilege of learning from—I had a personal scout school in Fort Myers that October.

Among the assignments everyone had that week was to grade out the Twins minor leaguers we were observing.

Scouting is all about projecting potential. Most apparent on any scouting report are the numbers used for those projections. When scouting, you’re not only putting numbers on the player’s present-day skills, but most importantly you’re projecting what they’ll be in the future, basing it all on a Major League standard. Grading is done on a 2-8 scale for a player’s tools (skills), and for their overall future Major League role. In general, a rating of 5 indicates “Major League average,” and the scale then works up and down from there.

A future projection of a position player’s big-league role more or less looks like this: 8 for franchise players, the best players in the game who also offer valued intangibles; 7 for players who are All-Stars in their average year; 6 for good regular players who are usually offensively-oriented and excel in some but not all tools; 5 for average big-league players who provide consistent, everyday value to a club; 4 for below average Major Leaguers who are best suited to backup, utility, or platoon roles; 3 for strictly backup players; and 2 for someone who doesn’t project to be a pro.

In terms of rating specific player tools (hitting, power, arm, running speed, etc.) and how they measure on a Major League scale, it’s 8 for premium, 7 for very good, 6 for above average, 5 for average, 4 for below average, 3 for fringe, and 2 for no MLB value.

So what did I see when I watched 19-year-old Joe Mauer in 2002? Here is how I graded (projected) him for the future, and what I wrote about him then:

Hit tool: 8 … Raw power: 6 … Projected power: 5 … Run: 5 … Baserunning: 6 … Arm strength: 5 … Arm accuracy: 5 … Fielding: 5 … Hands: 6 … Range: 5 … Aggressiveness: 6 … Instincts: 7 … Makeup (personality, leadership, mentality, attitude, work ethic, etc.): 7

Overall future projection: 7 (perennial All-Star)

Notes: Ready to hit; selective; takes pitch where it came from; excellent bat control; big catcher … future 1B/RF?; calm athlete; easy excellence

So yeah, I do feel pretty good about all of that 22 years later. Giving Mauer a 7—there are plenty of 7s in Cooperstown—was no doubt a risk for my 24-year-old, scouting-apprentice self as I tried to delicately walk the line between learning a new skill and being confident enough to practice it with conviction while working with, and learning from, the professional evaluators around me that week. But I did it, and stood by it. That’s what being a good scout is all about.

My career with the Twins ended just before Mauer’s MLB-debut year of 2004 –a year in which Mauer played for the Twins at Cooperstown’s Doubleday Field in the annual Hall of Fame Game (go ahead and ask me about the Hall of Fame Game sometime…). But I later personally attended four games in which Mauer played, including being able to witness the (near) end of his blistering American League MVP Award season in 2009, when he finished with a career-best (and 2009 MLB-leading) .365 batting average (the highest ever recorded by a catcher in post-1877 MLB history). In the games I saw him play in person, Mauer combined to hit .375 with a double, four runs scored, six walks and zero strikeouts over his 14 plate appearances.

In the end, I feel like I saw at the big-league level what I thought I was going to see when I evaluated the Minor League player in 2002. As a scout, that’s an especially good feeling. That’s the goal.

Frankly, though, there are the much better feelings that come from being able to write something like this reflection—more than two decades later and on the eve of the player’s Hall of Fame Induction—about someone who appears to have remained such an admirable person. Based upon the brief time that I was around him at the Twins, I can attest to Joe Mauer’s kindness, character, genuineness and attentiveness to those around him. What I’ve read, heard, or witnessed since—including as part of a national newsroom that covered MLB exclusively throughout Mauer’s playing career—only confirms my own experience.

A couple of recent examples of what I mean: One, the way Mauer addressed and thanked a young boy for his question during Mauer’s introductory press conference at the Hall of Fame this past spring. I’ve been around a lot of pro athletes in my life, and I can almost guarantee you that no other player—whether Hall of Famer or cup-of-coffee guy—has the inherent humility, warmth and grace that Mauer displayed at that moment. And he displayed those things during what was likely one of the biggest individual moments of his own baseball life, but was surely the biggest moment to date in the life of that young person.

Two, Mauer’s reported interaction with Paul Feiner, the ONLY high school pitcher to ever strike out Mauer. As reported by “Sports Illustrated” and Feiner himself, during a pregame ceremony for Mauer’s 2023 induction into the Twins Hall of Fame at Minnesota’s Target Field, Mauer and Feiner were reunited for the first time since a 2000 state playoff game (in which, by the way, the pitcher Joe Mauer struck out 13 batters—and also hit a home run). That day in 2023, Feiner was brought out as a surprise guest to deliver the baseball for Mauer’s ceremonial first pitch, and afterward Feiner recalled that, “Joe reached out warmly and said in my ear, ‘You aren’t gonna throw me that dirty curveball again, are ya?’”

That’s Mauer again showing the ability, humility, and thoughtfulness to share one of the biggest moments of his own life and turn it into one of the biggest moments of another person’s life, too.

Forget about baseball. Joe Mauer the human being grades out as something far more rare in my experience, both inside and outside of pro ball: Mauer appears to be a Hall of Fame person.

Congratulations, Joe. Many players I’ve scouted have become big leaguers. Many, many more have not. Such is the life of a scout. But of all the players I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching, you’re definitely the most deserving of this immortalizing honor. Welcome to Cooperstown. Maybe I’ll see you around Main Street sometime.

Kristian Connolly grew up in Cooperstown and spent 16 years working in Major League Baseball as a media relations professional, a scout, a news editor and content producer, and a player representative. He now resides in Fly Creek.