A BROKEN HAND? That couldn't stop a 10-year-old Nico Hoerner.
Playing in Oakland's Babe Ruth League, Hoerner suffered the type of injury that would send major leaguers to the injured list. For most kids, it would knock them out of competition, at least until the cast came off months later.
Instead, Hoerner picked up a bat with one hand, learned a new position and kept playing.
"I broke my hand catching because the umpire wouldn't scoot back and the hitter just swung and hit my hand," Hoerner recalled to ESPN. "It was my left hand, my glove hand.
"It was my first time playing outfield actually because I could only throw underhanded. I couldn't squeeze it but I would still pitch. And hit. With one hand in a cast."
To those who knew the future Chicago Cubs infielder, his desire to keep playing no matter what it took came as little surprise. Even from his first days playing baseball, Hoerner was an intense competitor -- sometimes, a little too intense.
Often the most talented kid on the field, Hoerner had trouble keeping his emotions under control. There was sobbing on the mound. And questioning umpires. And staring down his teammates when they made a mistake.
"I remember seeing him pitch for the first time," Hoerner's former youth coach, Eric Clayton, said recently. "The umpire called a ball and Nico threw his glove up in the air and walked halfway to home plate, yelling 'BALL?!? BALL?!?' And then there was a ground ball through the wickets at short and Nico again threw his glove up and stared down his shortstop.
"I was like 'Who is this kid?'"
Hoerner was just 8 years old at the time, playing against 10-year-olds in Oakland's ultra-competitive Babe Ruth League. His dad, Fred Hoerner, chose the urban league for his son's development rather than the North Oakland/South Oakland Little League that featured better manicured fields -- but less competition.
"I was usually the only white kid on the team," Hoerner recalled. "I remember being like the first time really being aware of race and stuff. ... Oakland Babe Ruth was a better option and it ended up being a pretty pivotal choice in my life."
HOERNER'S PATH TO the league began with a simple car ride with his dad. The younger Hoerner was just 5 years old when he first got noticed -- at an auto repair shop.
"I was taking the Volvo to get some work done on it," Fred Hoerner recalled. "And we got out of the car and a tennis ball for the dog fell out of the car and bounced once. And Nico grabbed it with his left hand and transferred it to his right really quickly. He was 5. And the mechanic, Charlene Peterson, she kind of sidled up to me and said, 'So I saw the way that kid went for that tennis ball. Does he want to play baseball?'"
Peterson sponsored a team in the Babe Ruth League, which included mostly Black players. Playing at Greenman Field, and then later at Lowell Park, forced Hoerner to focus even more on the details of the sport as he played on all-dirt infields with graffiti on the surrounding buildings and people grilling in the outfield.
Greenman Field was located in the shadow of the Oakland Coliseum where the A's played.
"I remember playing a game at night there," Hoerner said. "And the A's were having their fireworks night while we were playing. So it kind of created a 'Sandlot' scene where kids are playing under their own lights, but then there's like the fireworks going on of the major league team right there.
"To this day, I think that all-dirt field made me a better defender."
Hoerner showed promise right away while navigating his new world with his new teammates and coaches.
"He was tiny, and he was blond, and he was white, and the parents loved him," Fred Hoerner said. "They just wanted their own kids to care about something and nobody cared more than Nico. And they loved him.
"They also loved that he beat the other team most of the time."
One of Hoerner's coaches, Gordon Greenwood, was a lawyer from the area. The two stay in touch to this day; coach proud of his former pupil and player proud of where he came from.
"Nico played in the league that was probably 85% African American, about 10% Latin and a sprinkling of other races after that," Greenwood said in a phone interview. "So it's quite a story that nobody's really told really that here he is, this little blond kid. The only one. There's a whole cultural sort of story that underlies all this."
Hoerner recently recalled how the experience shaped him.
"I think in that space, I just grew up a lot, met some really amazing people and coaches along the way there. And I felt like it kind of further cemented my connection to the Bay Area and Oakland in particular in a way that's pretty strong in my life."
AS HOERNER'S BASEBALL skills began to get recognized, so did his reputation for having a quick temper both on and off the field.
"I had a lot of trouble controlling my emotions at that age for sure," Hoerner said. "It was a bit of a problem."
"He was never directly diagnosed as ADHD," Fred Hoerner said. "He just had way too much emotion and thought channeling through his spinal column and he hadn't matured yet to control this. So he was always like a hose when you turn the water on and it's whipping all over the place."
That assessment of Hoerner was confirmed by several other people, including his mom, Keila Diehl.
"Up to high school, he was just sobbing on the mound," Diehl said. "Whenever they lost, we'd be like, 'I'm not driving him home. Who's driving him home? I'm not driving.'"
But Hoerner's parents also noticed that when the intensity of competition increased around him, their son would rise to the occasion.
"He would relax," Fred Hoerner said. "We could see him visibly relaxed, pitching in the most frightening, scary, loud competition."
The elder Hoerner analogized it to a person taking medication. Nico's medication, in his parents' eyes, was competitive baseball. That left Hoerner thriving on the baseball diamond in one sense -- though he was always just one mistake by a teammate or loss by his team away from an emotional outburst any time he took the field.
Finally, after a session of drills during which Hoerner got so frustrated that he was "beet red," Coach Clayton pulled him aside and told him to go home and set up a row of dominoes. Then he told him to push the first domino down. When they met up again, Clayton asked Hoerner what happened when the first domino fell.
"They all fell down," Nico answered.
"You're the first domino on your team," Clayton responded. "You're the best player on your team. When you go down, your whole team goes down."
AS HOERNER BEGAN to age out of Babe Ruth ball, he was getting noticed more widely for his baseball prowess and travel ball teams started calling. Not that his mom really believed in any of it. She just wanted him to get a summer job.
"I was never very supportive of it because I didn't get it," Diehl said. "I'm like, 'Oh, that's cute.' Every boy wants to be a baseball player."
One day, Hoerner came home after winning an out-of-state tournament and his mom thought that was the end of baseball season, offering him a fun day in the city.
"He said, 'I'm sorry, Mom, I've got a tournament this weekend,'" Diehl recalled. "And I said to my child, he's like 12 or 13, I said, 'Are you f---ing kidding me, another tournament?" And he just looked at me and he was like, 'Mom, you don't get it.'"
When it was time to pick a high school, the Hoerners again made a decision that would put their son on a path not often traveled by a future major leaguer, choosing the Head-Royce School, a small private school known for academics, not athletics.
"You could barely find the field," Hoerner said with a laugh. "And it's like a rectangle because it's a soccer field with a baseball field in the corner. So it's 275 down the left-field line, 410 to right-center. It was hilarious when scouts would come."
Hoerner left Head-Royce as the best baseball player in the school's history, being named all-league four times, winning conference MVP honors twice and winning Max Preps California Small School Player of the Year in his junior and senior seasons. And, unsurprisingly to anyone who saw him swing the bat with a cast covering one hand on Oakland's youth league fields nearly a decade earlier, Hoerner never missed a game during his high school career.
The field that he starred on has since been turfed over and now serves the school's soccer, softball, lacrosse and flag football teams. The current baseball coach, Ben Burg, was at a rival school when Hoerner was at Head-Royce. He remembers Hoerner vividly as one of the best players in the league and noticed a moment that would make his youth coaches and parents proud.
"He's the starting pitcher in the game," Burg recalled. "We have a huge range of skill in this league. There's a routine grounder and the shortstop bobbles it. Nico turns around, looks at him and says, 'We got you.' That stood out."
Dominoes.
WHEN CHOOSING A college, Hoerner's path was much more straightforward than it was in youth baseball or high school. He headed to Stanford, where his parents taught classes in the school's humanities program.
Hoerner played an immediate role for the Cardinal, starting all but one game at second base his freshman year and making the All-Pac-12 team as a sophomore, but it was during his junior year that he became a national star. He led Stanford in batting average, runs, hits, triples and stolen bases and was named a second-team All-American and a finalist for the Brooks Wallace Award honoring the nation's best collegiate shortstop.
The Cubs selected Hoerner with the No. 24 pick in the 2018 MLB draft, then showed even more faith in him when they called him up to the big leagues in September 2019 after just 75 minor league games. He was home with his parents after the minor league season had ended when he was called on to replace injured Cubs star Javier Baez.
"I didn't know how weird that was at the time," Hoerner recalled. "But thinking about it now, no one is at home when they get that call. I had hit once in like seven or eight days. I was going to the beach."
The unexpected nature of his debut didn't keep Hoerner from flourishing in his 20-game cameo to end the season as he hit .282 and solidified himself as a part of Chicago's major league roster for years to come, playing a season at shortstop before moving over to second when the Cubs signed Dansby Swanson to a free agent deal.
Hoerner, now 29, boasts the third-lowest strikeout rate since entering the league and has already posted 22.3 career WAR, helping him earn a six-year, $140 million extension before the season began. A two-time Gold Glove winner at second base, he said he is often told he's a "throwback" player, but it was MLB's recent rule changes -- eliminating the shift, rewarding contact hitting and encouraging stolen bases -- that further shined a light on his skill set.
"Baseball got pretty static there for a bit, right?" Hoerner said. "I think the game is in a really good place and I think players in the middle of the field that can take away runs and create runs are really valued right now, which is pretty cool."
Now, two decades after he could be found sobbing on the mound following losses in Oakland's Babe Ruth League, Hoerner is best known in his own clubhouse as a great teammate. That's not to say he has rid himself of all of the emotion of his youth baseball days -- he has just learned to channel it.
"He's a giver," teammate Pete Crow-Armstrong said. "He makes an out and before he's talking about his at-bat or anything like that, he's cheering for the next guy up. The way he does it, you can tell it's his way of processing his own anger. I really like how he does that."
It's something manager Craig Counsell noticed about his new second baseman immediately after joining the Cubs almost three years ago.
"It's always been really impressive to me that he can turn the page and that he's probably doing it for himself, in a way," Counsell said. "If you start giving gifts to other people, that's what makes you feel better. And it's a great thing, really hard to do, but Nico does it as well as anybody I've ever seen."
Now the same dominoes that shaped Hoerner's journey are playing out in his major league team's clubhouse.
"I didn't quite understand how he did it or why he did it," Crow-Armstrong said. "I've gained a much better understanding of what the point is. He helps himself out but he ends up giving in that moment to every one of us.
"That's why I call him every teammate's favorite teammate."
