NEW STAGE FOR ‘ONE-MAN SHOW’
If the Colorado Rockies think the pressure of negotiating a signing bonus might rattle Tyler Matzek, then they obviously didn’t watch him compete in the Southern Section baseball playoffs.
The senior left-hander from Mission Viejo Capistrano Valley High was unflappable during the Cougars’ run to the Division I title, pitching 18 1/3 scoreless innings and, in the final two games, driving in his team’s only runs.
“He’s a one-man show,” Huntington Beach Edison Coach Steve Lambright said. “He’s like a team himself.”
All Matzek did during Capistrano Valley’s 1-0 victory over Edison in the championship game was escape a pair of bases-loaded jams and homer down the right-field line at Angel Stadium.
“It was a storybook ending to a storybook high school career,” said Matzek, The Times’ player of the year.
Matzek is now reportedly seeking more than $7 million to sign with the Colorado Rockies, who made him the 11th overall pick in last week’s Major League Baseball amateur draft. Those demands may have been responsible for his sliding a bit, because some projections had him going as early as No. 2 overall.
“We took him with the intent of doing everything we could to make him a Colorado Rocky,” said Bill Schmidt, the club’s vice president of scouting.
Matzek has several bargaining chips in negotiations that are just getting underway. One is a scholarship to play for Oregon and Coach George Horton, who has promised to let Matzek pitch and play first base so that he can hit regularly.
“I’m more than happy to go to college,” Matzek said. “I could go up there and really jump-start a program and make my name the way [quarterback] Dennis Dixon did up there. Oregon football wasn’t super well known and he went up there and put it on the map.”
Matzek combines a fastball that typically runs from 90 to 94 mph with a late-breaking cutter and a solid curveball. The repertoire helped the 6-foot-3, 215-pound senior set school single-season records with 13 victories and five complete games.
He also hit .404 with eight home runs and 32 runs batted in.
“When you look at how he competed on the mound, his presence and his composure, you have to come away impressed,” the Rockies’ Schmidt said.
“He’s not just a guy out there trying to throw hard. He had different ways to attack high school hitters.”
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