Tyler Hallead signed a professional baseball contract with the Philadelphia Phillies organization Wednesday and nobody — seriously, nobody — saw that coming a year ago.
Not even Hallead, a 2013 graduate of Camas High School, could have envisioned such a scenario. After all, Tyler Hallead was not even playing baseball last year.
“It’s been a crazy ride,” Hallead said earlier this week, just before he departed for Florida to sign with the organization. The Phillies selected Hallead, a 6-foot-5, right-handed pitcher, in the 24th round of the Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft on Saturday.
Hallead’s journey took him from Camas to Portland and then Las Vegas.
He played for Concordia in Portland for a season after high school. He got a few innings, but nothing special. He would play a season of summer ball in 2014 as kind of “one last ride,” he thought.
“At that point, I thought I was walking away forever,” Hallead said.
His parents had moved to the Las Vegas area. He wanted to be near them so he moved to Nevada, getting a job at the MGM Grand hotel.
“I was just trying to make money, trying to have a career,” Hallead said.
His dad, former Camas baseball coach Joe Hallead, found a high school job in the Vegas. Joe was coaching summer ball in 2015 when a coach from the College of Southern Nevada showed up, asking Joe if he had any players who might consider playing ball at CSN.
Sure, there were a couple of high school athletes, Joe said. But he added another person to the list: His son.
“I ended up getting this crazy opportunity to just try out for this team,” Tyler Hallead said.
He had a week to prepare. He had not thrown for seven or eight months. Yet on that tryout, Hallead was consistently hitting 87 to 90 mph on the radar gun.
“They decided to take a chance on me,” Hallead said.
No scholarship. Just a walk-on pitcher. But a chance.
By fall ball, the combination of quality coaching and an athlete grateful for another shot led to Hallead hitting 93 mph.
“I knew this is what I wanted to do,” Hallead said.
By spring, he was a set-up guy in the bullpen before earning a few starts by the end of the season. His fastball reached 96 mph.
His statistics do not jump off the page, but his frame and his arm strength show a potential that the Phillies were interested in developing.
Hallead was sitting at home Saturday when he got a text from a college teammate telling him congratulations.
“For what?” Hallead asked.
“I looked on Twitter. I thought I was dreaming. This is a joke, right?”
He called Joe Hallead.
“Dad, I think I just got drafted.”
Then he got a call from the scout who recommended Tyler to the Phillies.
“He said, ‘You have a lot of upside. Just make sure you work hard.’ That’s when it finally began to sink in.”
Hallead did have two more years of college eligibility, but he said he felt he had to go pro now.
He signed Wednesday morning in Clearwater, Fla., and then had his first organized workout as a professional baseball player.
“This is something I’ve wanted to do my entire life,” Hallead said. “You never know when another opportunity like this will happen again.”
Especially true for someone who said thought he was done with baseball after the summer of 2014.
