SAN DIEGO — One night in May 2022, less than two years before he completed a meteoric ascent into the majors, Jackson Merrill left an impression on his future manager without taking a swing or making a throw.
Mike Shildt had been hired the previous fall as a player development consultant for the San Diego Padres. With Merrill’s minor-league season halted by a fractured wrist, the team invited its 2021 first-round draft pick to attend a home series against the Miami Marlins. Merrill soon found himself in the scouts section alongside Shildt, another baseball enthusiast. Shildt found himself in an engrossing exchange with a 19-year-old ballplayer.
“It was a conversation. There was no lecturing going on,” said Shildt, a former National League Manager of the Year with the St. Louis Cardinals. “It wasn’t like I was telling him, ‘Watch this, watch this.’ Yeah, I was pointing out certain things to him. But we were having a baseball conversation about the game.”
The conversation resumed the next night in the same Petco Park seating area. Shildt and Merrill were joined by San Diego’s 2021 second-round pick; Shildt learned that James Wood, who had just been sidelined with a wrist injury of his own, was more reserved but similarly astute. Yet only one of the prospects would remain in the organization through the following year and into this one, Shildt’s first as Padres manager.
Now, just 36 months after he was drafted out of a Baltimore-area high school, Merrill will be the youngest player in Tuesday night’s All-Star Game at Globe Life Field. The budding center fielder brings childlike energy and precocious maturity to each day. When he was named the National League’s Rookie of the Month for June, his teammates excitedly celebrated the achievement. Less than a week later, when Shildt revealed that Merrill would help represent the Padres in Texas, the home clubhouse at Petco Park erupted.
“I’ve had guys that have the work ethic,” Shildt said of other 21-year-olds he has coached in his career. “I’ve had guys that have had the aggression. I’ve had guys that had the baseball acumen. But I haven’t been with guys that have had all of it as much as he has, combined.”
A half-decade ago, Josh Merrill noticed his younger son was starting to grasp the sport in ways that required additional attention.
Jackson Merrill had shown natural talent and aptitude since he picked up a Wiffle ball bat as a toddler and, unprompted, swung it left-handed. From his older brother by 12 years, also named Josh, he learned how to succeed in various endeavors against advanced competition. From his schoolteacher parents, he learned how to treat people and how to apply himself.
The elder Josh Merrill coached Jackson from T-ball until age 16. Jennie Merrill had Jackson in her class at Severna Park Elementary from kindergarten through fifth grade. Both parents worked side jobs and logged weeks at a time on the road in support of their son’s travel ball career.
“I realized how much they grind,” Merrill said. “I also realized how much I want something.”
As a fifth grader, Merrill wrote down his dream: play in the big leagues. As an undersized sophomore, he made the varsity team at Severna Park High, starred at shortstop and demonstrated an innate ability to lead.
“Where he came from and his family and just the kind of person he is, he’s never going to take a day off. He’s never going to take it for granted,” said Severna Park head coach Eric Milton, a former first-round draft pick and 2001 Minnesota Twins All-Star. “He always brought the energy. He was always the captain of the high school team.”
Along the way, postgame talks in the family minivan rose to a new level of sophistication.
“His intuitiveness, the acumen, how to play baseball, to analyze his at-bats, it was just incredible how it took off,” Merrill’s father, Josh, said. “I knew once he got to that point, he needed someone a little bit more advanced.”
In late 2019, a mutual friend connected Josh Merrill with Juan Palacios, a baseball trainer who years earlier had coached a pair of standout youth infielders in his native Puerto Rico. During their first session, Palacios observed that Jackson Merrill, then in the midst of a growth spurt, was not optimizing his lower half when he swung a bat. Drawing on personal experience, he also saw a couple of other things.
“I told Josh that I saw the hands of (Francisco) Lindor and the power of (Carlos) Correa,” Palacios said.
Once a 5-foot-5 freshman, Jackson Merrill had grown to a lanky 6-1 by the time he started working with trainer Juan Palacios. (Courtesy of Juan Palacios)
Weeks later, a pandemic shutdown wiped out Merrill’s junior season. He recalls it as a “blessing.” With school reduced to virtual learning, Merrill continued to gain height and muscle as he worked daily with Palacios, upgraded his weight training regimen and scarfed down home-cooked meals. In the summer, Merrill displayed an improved skill set while playing for his travel ball teams. He soon flipped his college commitment from Army to Kentucky, one of the better programs in the country.
Still, as a potential first-day draft pick, Merrill eluded more widespread attention going into a delayed senior season. Maryland was already a sometimes overlooked source of amateur talent. The coronavirus pandemic prompted the state to move its fall sports to the start of 2021. Severna Park High’s baseball schedule, as a result, did not begin until May. A six-week sprint ensued.
“The day that Jackson graduated high school, he had a graduation in the morning, he had a playoff game that afternoon, and he had prom that night,” Jennie Merrill said. “It was the craziest year.”
When Padres general manager A.J. Preller and then-San Diego scouting director Mark Conner arrived at the Merrills’ home in the spring of 2021, they encountered a young man with rare clarity of thought.
Jackson Merrill was unfailingly polite. He fielded each of their questions with ease. And, memorably, he did not crack a smile the entire time. It wasn’t that he lacked interest in being drafted. The two executives left wondering if they had just paid an in-home visit to a teenager. It felt more like a business meeting with a determined professional.
The results on the field reaffirmed their interest, as well as the interest of others. Once the smallest kid on every team, Merrill entered his senior season having grown to 6-3. He ended it with a narrow loss in the Class 4A state final, a .500 average and 13 home runs, melding the all-fields approach his father had taught him with burgeoning power. He hit one of the home runs just after rolling an ankle. (Merrill sat out the next two games but still tied the Severna Park High record for homers.)
“I remember throwing batting practice, and he probably hit 10 (home runs) in a row,” Milton said. “I’m like, ‘OK, get out of the cage because we’re just losing baseballs.’”
The Padres, meanwhile, saw more than enough to be convinced. They had been the first major-league team to contact Merrill — area scout Danny Sader introduced himself to the shortstop and his parents in the fall of 2020 — and team evaluators maintained a regular presence around Severna Park, Md., as word trickled out and the number of scouts at Merrill’s games swelled from a handful to several dozen.
Then, on July 11, 2021, the Padres selected Merrill with the 27th overall pick, making him the highest-drafted player from the state of Maryland in almost two decades. The choice struck some analysts as ambitious, perhaps in part because of a shortage of current information.
On the MLB Network draft telecast, a portrait photo of Merrill appeared. It had been taken when he was still a babyfaced freshman.
“People always undersold him,” Josh Merrill said. “When he was drafted, ‘Oh, this kid played in Maryland. He’s not going to be able to hit minor-league pitching.’ And then when he makes the top-20 prospects (lists), people are doubting him and everything. So people doubted him along the way, and I think that sort of gives him a little bit of incentive.”
This year, of course, has topped the whirlwind that was 2021. In November, during a brief visit to his parents’ house in Maryland, Jackson Merrill acted on a recommendation from his mother: He renewed his passport. Four months later, in his first-ever trip outside the U.S., he made his major-league debut in Seoul, South Korea. He became the fourth player under 21 to make an opening-day start in center field since 1969.
“It’s just a continuous pinch-me moment going on here,” Josh Merrill said. “I thought the surrealness would stop, but it just keeps going.”
“Jackson belongs on a field. He loves the field. It’s like, that’s his happy place,” Jennie Merrill said. “But now it’s 40,000 fans while he’s on the field. So it’s a way different magnitude.”
Josh and Jennie already have attended close to 20 Padres games, or more games than Jackson played in a high school season three years ago. They’ll all be at Globe Life Field on Tuesday; Merrill earned his way there by rapidly acclimating to a new position and hitting .278 with 12 home runs, seven of which came in a 10-game span. Before spring training, the converted shortstop’s only center-field experience consisted of two travel ball games when he was 12.
A large contingent of friends and family will be in attendance next week when the Padres visit the Washington Nationals and James Wood, Merrill’s close friend and fellow Maryland native. San Diego’s ensuing series, at Camden Yards in Baltimore, is expected to draw a cheering section of about 500.
His name is Jackson Merrill, but you can call him Mr. June 🔥 pic.twitter.com/fBpo56r9C7
— San Diego Padres (@Padres) June 29, 2024
Merrill has handled the unprecedented attention with aplomb beyond his years. Padres hitting coach Victor Rodriguez considers Merrill the most confident 21-year-old ballplayer he has been around, including Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts. Third baseman Manny Machado has deemed Merrill perhaps the team’s hardest worker. “His IQ for the game, he’s well ahead of most guys that I played with that are his age,” said pitcher Joe Musgrove, adding that Merrill is “constantly asking questions and looking for ways to get better.”
For his comfort in major-league settings, around some players more than 10 years his senior, Merrill credits his family and upbringing. He and his parents acknowledge they did not predict this much success this soon, even as he offers a succinct explanation: “If you go and play and have fun, you can compete with anybody.” As he has done all season, he sought to shift the focus last week when asked about himself and the topic of leadership.
“I don’t like being the one to tell people what to do,” Merrill said. “Leading by example is so much easier for me. I just say something when it matters. There’s times when you got to say something. But most of the time you just go play ball, you know? It’s how our team is. Usually when one guy’s balling out, everybody’s balling out. So, lead by example.”
Two years ago, after injuring his left wrist on a tag attempt in an A-ball game, Merrill was unable to play for two months. As he sat behind home plate at Petco Park, he still managed to impress a baseball lifer and provide reasons to believe in his future trajectory.
“He’s got a real good idea and feel for what he’s doing,” Shildt said. “He shows up every day, he doesn’t give any at-bats away, and he’s got a real hunger to compete. It’s going to go either way, right? You have guys that are able to do that, that are going to be respected, and they’re going to bring people with them. And guys that don’t, they’re not going to be as consistent with that. You get a lot of credibility with what you’re doing when you have that consistency.”
(Photo: Brandon Sloter / Getty Images)