CU’s Schram signs with Orioles

BLUEFIELD — Greyson Schram’s appearances at Bowen Field this summer have been as a member of the grounds crew, manning the rakes, pulling the tarp and fetching food for the coaches.

Those days are over. Now his appearances will come in the baseball games themselves.

Schram, who hit .508 this spring as a senior for the Concord University Mountain Lions, signed an undrafted free-agent contract with the Baltimore Orioles organization on Tuesday evening, the excited ballplayer confirmed. He is being assigned to Bluefield.

“I’m speechless,” he said by phone. “All this hard work, this childhood dream ... . Now I’m actually able to fulfill my dreams.”

“I just got lucky and I was in the right place at the right time.”

He passed a physical at Bowen Field on Tuesday morning, he said. The facility was almost deserted because of the minor league day off coinciding with the Major League All-Star Game.

“I’ve got to come in a little early before the players and everybody show up tomorrow (Wednesday) to get my uniform and everything,” he said. “Then I’m good to practice with them until my contract clears.” He said that would happen on “Friday at the earliest.”

Concord athletics director Kevin Garrett, who was his baseball coach for four years, said, “He’s got a great attitude. He’s willing to do the extra little things that’ll make you a better player and separate you from the other players.”

Garrett said that even in Schram’s freshman year, “he was a weight-room nut. He was always in the (batting) cages, trying to do anything to get a little advantage. That kind of effort, along with him being the easy-going person that he is, makes him a perfect baseball player.”

After Schram was passed over in the June Major League draft, he was hired by the Bluefield Baseball Club and put on the grounds crew, fulfilling a college internship requirement that he put in 400 clock hours.

He said, “I’m way past that, working 12 hours a day for a month and a half.”

He said Mike White, head of the grounds crew and the head baseball coach at Bluefield College, helped him get the tryout that led to his signing.

“Coach White ... kind of lets us, for all the hard work we do, take some BP (batting practice) when our work is done. He was throwing the ball to me and I started hitting them over the trees,” Schram said.

“One of the coaches walked in and saw me hit it. He went back and told the scout, Rich Morales, who was a coach for the Orioles, and it kind of progressed from there.”

Schram said White “has done a lot for me. ... Before I got the tryout, the coaches were asking, ‘What kind of arm does he have? How does he swing it?’ ”

He said Morales “couldn’t work me out until there was an opening. He pitched me some BP, and he liked what he saw. He called in Einar Diaz, the manager.”

Morales signed him as a catcher, he said. He played that position sparingly the last couple of years for Concord, being used mostly as an infielder. “Last time I really caught consistently was my sophomore year,” he said.

Diaz was a catcher for 15 years in the majors. Schram said he thought that phase of the workout was so Diaz could “get his opinion of me. Since he’s going to my coach, he wanted to see if he could turn me into something better.”

He said he got to talk to the Orioles players before games, and got to know some of the coaches “on a name basis.” That included “food runs,” often at the request of pitching coach Larry McCall.

It was a big change from his spring routine at Concord. In 38 games, he won the “triple crown” in West Virginia Conference baseball, topping the league in batting average, home runs (20) and runs batted in (81).

He stole 11 bases in 13 tries, recorded a 1.103 slugging percentage and a .599 on-base percentage.

He topped NCAA Division II in home runs per game (0.53), RBIs per game (2.13), slugging and on-base percentage. His .508 batting average was second best in the nation and the second best in WVIAC history.

That led to player of the year awards in the conference and the Atlantic Region, and all-American honors by three different selection bodies.

Still, the draft came and went, and his name wasn’t called.

Schram talked about the disappointment. “Scouts, they always look down on D-II,” he said. “There’s good competition in Division II baseball, we just get passed on. There are at least four or five standout players in most every conference, and not everybody got a chance.”

His former coach Garrett said, “When you look at the stats that he put up, you wonder what does a person have to do to get drafted? We were very disappointed. We had said, somebody’s got to take a chance on this kid cause his numbers are phenomenal. ...

“Someone with the ability he has doesn’t come around every year, and he made it look effortless.”

After receiving the word of Schram’s signing, Garrett said, “I told him, ‘It doesn’t matter how you got there, it only matters that you’re there.’ He’s got a shot. Now it’s up to him.”

Another Concord player, pitcher Drew Bailey, was drafted by Arizona in the 2010 draft. Having two Mountain Lions signing with major league teams in the same season is unprecedented, Garrett said.

“Two professional baseball players at little Concord, in the same year. It’s something special,” Garrett said.

— Contact Tom Bone at

tbone@bdtonline.com

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