Will Venable hit the ball nearly 400 feet, raced to third base and tried to slow the moment down.
Just two pitches into his major league debut with the Padres last night, Venable was on third base with a triple, and the crowd at Petco Park was cheering him.
Rockies ace Aaron Cook was rubbing up the baseball.
“It was kind of surreal,” Venable said.
Venable came home to score the game's first run. Then the Rockies took over. Behind two home runs from Garrett Atkins, third-place Colorado rolled to a 9-4 victory that ended last-place San Diego's three-game winning streak.
Venable still had his moment, which came with one out in the second inning. After taking a strike from Cook (16-8) with the bases empty, Venable hit a low slider to the right-center wall, then further excited the crowd with good footspeed.
His thoughts as he stood on third?
“I can't believe I'm here,” Venable would say after his 1-for-4 night. “This is great. Got the first one out of the way.”
Fellow rookie Nick Hundley would hit a home run for the second consecutive game, but rookie starting pitcher Dirk Hayhurst wasn't so fortunate. He gave up a three-run home run to Atkins, which broke a 1-1 tie in the third, setting up the sinkerballer Cook's fifth win in six career decisions at Petco.
Venable joined the Padres yesterday after the club put outfielder Scott Hairston on the disabled list. A center fielder who batted .292 with 14 home runs for Triple-A Portland, Venable started for the injured Jody Gerut. The Padres had planned to promote him Monday, when they can expand their 25-man roster.
“It was good to see Will get his first big league knock off a very good pitcher,” said manager Bud Black. “He looked in place. He looked comfortable in a big league setting, sort of what I saw in spring training. He's a guy that in competition looks composed.”
When Venable pulled on a Padres uniform yesterday, it culminated a an unusual ballplayer's journey that included stops in the Ivy League and the NCAA basketball tournament.
Basketball was Venable's favorite sport as recently as four years ago when the 6-foot-2 athlete patrolled the backcourt for a Princeton team that won 20 games and led third-seeded Texas at halftime in the 2004 NCAA Tournament.
In spring training six months ago, Venable recalled being impressed by how athletic an NBA-caliber guard is, based on his experiences against Longhorns such as Royal Ivey and Brandon Mouton, who each would draw NBA paychecks.
“Basketball is a game where athleticism is going to take over,” said Venable, who scored 16 points against Texas. “We knew Texas was going to make a run. We just tried to minimize their run. In the end, it was too much to handle. We had a better plan than they did. But the nature of basketball is that athleticism is going to take over.”
A 6-foot-2 left-hander, Venable said it's harder for athleticism to pay off in the batter's box. Adding to his challenge, his devotion to basketball kept him off the baseball field as a high school senior and for most of his sophomore year at Princeton.
At 25, Venable is older than many rookies who are prospects. But his ascent was fairly brisk after the Padres obtained him with a seventh-round draft pick in 2005. The left-hander batted .288 with 36 home runs and a .357 on-base percentage in 435 minor-league games. A good baserunner, he succeeded on 83 percent of his stolen-base attempts.
The Rockies, meantime, trotted out a former University of Mississippi quarterback: Seth Smith, who backed up Eli Manning for three years without playing a down. Reprising his knack for stinging the Padres, Smith hit a two-run pinch-hit double off Clay Hensley. The two-out drive, which raised the lead to 6-3 in the eighth, improved Smith to 4-for-5 against the Padres.
Tom Krasovic: (619) 293-2207; tom.krasovic@uniontrib.com
