Six years after Jackie Robinson West, Ed Howard is a surefire MLB prospect

Late into an overcast afternoon in Williamsport, Pa., on Aug. 23, 2014, Jackie Robinson West shifted its starting shortstop, Ed Howard, on to the mound in relief to lock up the final outs of the U.S. Championship Game of the Little League World Series.

With one out and a runner on first, Howard induced a comebacker to the mound, and the rigidly trained shortstop came out. Smoother than you’d expect from a 12-year-old, Howard pivoted and fired to start a game-ending 1-6-3 double play. First baseman Tre Hondras laid out in full extension to snag the final out, and Howard clenched his fist and howled in triumph.

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Thousands of miles away the stands of Wrigley Field shook and swayed with riotous cheers, as fans had packed into a crowded concourse just to get a glimpse of the scattered collection of TVs that had switched to the game during a rain delay. Standing among them, Mount Carmel baseball coach Brian Hurry smiled silently to himself for a reason only he knew: That kid was coming to play for him.

“God, I wished you guys could have witnessed it,” Hurry would later tell Howard.

Three times per week this past winter, Howard woke up at 4:45 a.m.

When he beat the sunrise, Howard’s drive from his home in Lynwood to Mount Carmel High School shrank to about a half-hour. Howard, who turned 18 at the end of January, tried to be about 15 minutes early for 6 a.m. offseason conditioning. Those early-morning workouts wrapped up in time for him to eat breakfast before school started at 8. Like everyone else in the wake of COVID-19, there’s a lot of downtime for Howard now, but before that, he filled every down moment in his school day with homework to clear time for more training.

On a normal day, Howard was efficient enough that he could sneak a nap in before his nightly 7 p.m. session with his private trainer at the Southland Center, where he took batting practice, fielded and cycled through a dizzying set of workouts designed to add strength without sacrificing the agility and flexibility that brought national crosscheckers to 64th and Stony Island.

By 10 p.m. he was in bed, getting ready to do it again.

“I just don’t have the time to just goof around and play games and sit on my phone and talk and stuff like that,” Howard said, squeezing in a recent half-hour interview during his lunch period. “Because I always have something to do. And when I do get the chance to relax, I go to sleep.”

Howard has a baseball scholarship from the University of Oklahoma in hand. It’s one he will probably never use because he’s a projected first-round pick and the consensus top-rated high school shortstop in the country.

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His daily schedule — trimmed of all fat on the weekdays, stuffed in the summertime with travel ball and national showcases — has been a vastly complex construction for the last four years.

Like every other school in the country, Mount Carmel has closed its doors and instructed student-athletes to prioritize their health and social distance instead of prepare for a possible resumption of play. This is really the first pause in a very professional-level preparation for a long future in baseball.

“It’s not a job, I enjoy it,” Howard said weeks before the shutdown. “The more success I had, the more motivated I was and it was easy for me to come in early and work out, because I knew I was getting better.”

In 23 years as the coach for the Caravan, Hurry has had three freshmen play varsity. The first was Jerry Houston, the older brother of Jackie Robinson West star and current Mount Carmel player Josh Houston, and an eventual Illinois Class 4A player of the year. The second was Alek Thomas, son of White Sox director of conditioning Allen Thomas, who was selected by the Diamondbacks in the second round of the 2018 draft and is now a consensus top-100 prospect. The third was Howard.

Howard speaks of his freshman year with dissatisfaction. Not because he wasn’t dedicated or focused, and not even because Hurry used him only on defense. He was 140 pounds. He didn’t lift enough. He wasn’t quite ready.

“He was like a toothpick kind of at that point,” said Thomas, whose father consulted on Howard’s training regimen. “I think Ed might have felt a little pressure but I’m there to guide him and tell him ‘Ain’t no pressure here. You belong here.’”

Howard, who can dunk at 6-foot-3, could’ve played for Mount Carmel’s storied basketball program. But baseball has been first for Howard since his mother threw him wiffle balls in his backyard as a small child.

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In recent years, Howard has gone to Guaranteed Rate Field to watch his idol Tim Anderson play shortstop. He sees a model for the career of his dreams.

“Little stuff like me going to the game and hearing Tim’s walkup music,” Howard said. “The songs he plays are more like songs that black people listen to, you know what I mean? It’s just different. There’s a spot, there’s a place in the game for African Americans. I can see myself in him. That’s how I want my future to play out.”

Anderson’s agency Reynolds Sports is serving as Howard’s draft advisor. As a result, he got to meet Anderson for his 18th birthday. In typical Howard fashion, he celebrated by taking batting practice and fielding groundballs.

“Obviously if you spend your birthday working and taking groundballs, then you know what you want to be,” Anderson said. “I ain’t learned how to hit the ball off the tee like that until last year. Even infield work, some of the balls he was picking, and his footwork. I wasn’t really doing that stuff until I got to the big leagues to learn it and he’s already doing that stuff now. So, just imagine.”

Anderson’s path to the majors is a story of talent and work ethic overcoming a late start, so the parallels he and Howard see in each other are compelling because the latter’s story is all about precociousness. The polished footwork Anderson noticed was installed at age 7. That’s when Howard’s parents reached out for help beyond what they had already worked to establish.

After scratching and self-teaching his way from the 31st round of the draft to an eight-year big league career, Chicago Vocational High School product Lou Collier immediately threw himself into youth coaching after retiring in 2007.

He hailed from an era of South Side baseball where a future big leaguer playing in a park in Chatham or Roseland wasn’t much of a novelty (Emil Brown and Tigers draft pick Antoine Tellis at Harlan, for instance). But he was looking to restart the talent pipeline.

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Howard’s godfather caught wind of Collier’s 10-and-under team, and a tiny 7-year-old Ed, still a head shorter than most of his peers, came out with his father to try out.

After Howard swung and missed at the first 10 balls Collier fed him in a hitting drill, the former big-league shortstop saw Howard’s father grow nervous. Howard was undersized and trying out to play with older kids; it was supposed to be a tough sell even if he dominated immediately.

It was then that Collier turned to Howard’s father and simply said, “He’s ready.”

“Every swing he took was just as aggressive as the last one,” Collier said in a phone call from his home in Georgia. “Even though he was not having any success, his attitude didn’t change, his demeanor didn’t change. He just kept trying and listening, and trying to make the adjustments to have success. That’s what I had seen in him the first time I met him. After that, he adjusted and started hitting the ball pretty good.”

Collier’s methodology is to simplify defensive fundamentals for every player as if they’re in third grade, so Howard came in at the right time. He spent the early weeks on his knees, focusing on drills to perfect his hand movements before he even began to think about moving his feet. Then they transitioned to footwork and tested that work by increasing in speed, expanding the angles Howard had to handle. All this before he even reached Little League.

“Same system was in place for older boys, so he saw that he was no different and he wasn’t intimidated,” Collier said. “He accepted any challenge, and he was so young that he didn’t understand. For him it was just some more work, more training.”

By the time Howard appeared on the national stage at age 12 for Jackie Robinson West, he touted mechanics that were fluid and practiced enough that Barry Larkin nicknamed him “Silk” on the Little League World Series broadcast. The nickname is still stitched on Howard’s gloves and is occasionally shouted from the stands after nice plays.

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“I don’t tune it out,” Howard said. “It’s not a bad thing. It’s to always remind me that I’m ‘Silk.’ It just helps me with that confidence.”

“I never called him Silk,” Thomas said, laughing. “I think he calls himself Silk.”

“He’s gotten silkier since,” Hurry said. “That was through a lot of hard work. People don’t understand even at 12, the amount of time and effort Ed had already put into his game to be that. And again I’m crediting Ed’s father, Ed Sr., and Lou Collier. They got after it.”

Jackie Robinson West was the toast of the country and then they were not. A local coach from Evergreen Park Athletic Association Little League had filed a complaint with Little League International claiming that Jackie Robinson West coaches had recruited players outside their district boundaries, including possibly Howard, prompting an investigation.

Their U.S. title was stripped in January 2015 and the coaching staff was replaced, but fallout and outrage from the scandal spread beyond the architects of the scheme to the children who had once been celebrated.

“When they took the title, there were a lot of people who hated on us, going on social media and saying wild stuff to me and I’m like, 12, 13 years old at the time,” Howard said. “It just opened my eyes to the world at an early age, especially the baseball world.”

Howard is not an automaton who immediately processes every adversity as a lesson that will better prepare him for his career. He admits he spent some time being angry at Little League.

“I know I was excited when we had won,” Howard said. “I was proud and I remember the day they took it away from us. I was kind of angry, angry at Little League for doing us like that. But I remember trying to tell myself, ‘Let’s move on, keep working hard.’ When you play in that tournament, you get a lot of attention and stuff. But as you get older, it wears off. You can’t be 12 forever.”

Just by being famous, he had stopped being 12 already. Howard joined the ACE program that year. He had already committed to Mount Carmel, where he would spend his days with other commuter kids in the thrust of executing a life plan.

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The Little League experience taught him to keep his social circle tight and unchanging, made him cautious online, and wary of wading into his mounting pre-draft hype. It will probably take a close friend to tell him about this article because he has muted all of his notifications on social media.

But that experience also crystallized what Howard wanted to do. He enjoyed the packed crowds, the frenzied atmosphere and the tens of thousands of eyes watching him play. For as labor-intensive as his daily grind is, and as many reasons why his emergence could be a campaign to stick it to anyone who hurled insults at the Jackie Robinson West kids or overlooked baseball talent on the South Side of Chicago, Howard’s defining characteristic is pretty much the same thing he admires in Anderson.

“Body language doesn’t whisper, it screams,” Hurry said. “When you watch Ed, he might not say anything, but he’s screaming that he’s having fun.”

“Hopefully he learned a little bit of that from me because at Mount Carmel it was all smiles and happy for me and laughs and he knows it,” Thomas said. “Me being a goofy guy, hopefully, he didn’t get all the goofy, but he got some of that.”

“I’m always smiling,” Howard said. “A lot of my time my normal face will look like I’m serious or like I’m angry or mean, but as soon as you talk to me, I’ll probably just start smiling. It’s always been that way. It’s the same way on the baseball field. It’s way more fun and I play better when I’m more relaxed.”

A carefree attitude will serve Howard well over the next few months as his game is picked over and scrutinized, even without games to play in front of scouts and general managers. He’s a first-round talent because he’s a technically polished and athletic shortstop at a young age. His plus bat speed and mature plate approach lend confidence that he will continue to hit for average, and as he continues to build muscle on his slender, athletic frame, it could add some power to his current gap-to-gap offensive attack.

But when a multi-million commitment is on the line, and without a spring season for Howard to answer any questions with his play, teams will debate the impact a glove-first shortstop can bring if the power never comes along, or if Howard’s technical precision and athleticism can outweigh concern that he’ll grow to the height of a typical third baseman. On the other side of the coin, the upside is a true shortstop with above-average physical tools and elite makeup.

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“It’s a cathedral ceiling,” one league evaluator said.

It will not be too hard to find a team convinced Howard can tap into it, and The Athletic’s Keith Law placed Howard 20th on his list of top 2020 draft prospects.

“He’s one of the best defenders in the country,” Collier said.

“The most jaw-dropping things I’ve seen him do are definitely on the defensive side of the ball,” Hurry said. “He’s a good contact hitter, which I’m proud to say and I know that the professional game — if that’s where he ends up — I hope he stays a gap-to-gap hitter, all fields hitter, contact-type hitter. I think that’s best what suits his game on the offensive side.”

Hurry has a particularly striking picture of Jerry Houston up in his office. Thomas and Howard, soon enough, are primed to have more decorated professional careers, but the photo depicts a moment the other two envy. Houston’s arms are raised to his shoulders, his face is twisted into what could either be intense grief or exhilaration.

Hurry says it’s the moment after Houston had knocked in the winning run in the state championship game. It was the moment just before he collapsed in joy where he stood, even as his teammates dog-piled each other several feet away. Howard figures to be playing baseball through the next decade, but sitting in his coach’s office in January, he spoke only of trying to recreate that scene in June.

“I just stay focused on the moment,” Howard said. “Right now, I’ve got the season coming up. Our goal is to win a state championship. If I just focus on that, everything else will fall into place.”

Anderson gave Howard his phone number after they met, along with a promise that he will keep tabs on him and won’t let him slip up that’s three parts encouragement, but maybe one part threat.

It might seem like forever ago that Jackie Robinson West was the biggest sports story in Chicago. The scandal and fallout tarnished what should have been not just a warm local memory, but an enduring testimony to the talent and capability of African-American kids on the South Side to rise to the top of the baseball world if given the opportunity.

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But six years later, it’s clear that the latter point is not going to disappear. The JRW team is, on a large scale, filtering into college baseball and beyond, with Howard at the forefront showing that no matter what, these kids can play.

“It shows that, but honestly I don’t think anybody questioned whether we could play,” Howard said. “We knew that team could play, that’s why we ended up winning. If we couldn’t play we wouldn’t have won. It just shows that we took baseball seriously and we still do. It just shows that that team was special. I feel like in a lot of people’s eyes — Little League, they took it out of the history books but I still don’t think people will ever forget it, what we did in that 2014 Little League World Series.”

(Photo: The Athletic graphic)

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