Around 9 p.m. one night last December, before Notre Dame’s season-capping, 33-9 Camping World Bowl win over Iowa State, Chuck Ristano and Scott Wingo were walking through the school’s baseball complex to fix a batting cage. It was then and there that the two assistant coaches ran across someone else hard at work: Cole Kmet.
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“There was no earthly reason why anyone should be at our facility,” Ristano recalled in a phone call with The Athletic. “Cole is a (NFL) prospect at this point. He’s in there by himself with the lights on, throwing a crate of balls against a net, just getting himself ready to start pitching.”
The story sticks with Ristano — who has coached 16 other pitchers drafted into the pros in his time with the Irish, including former two-way star and current NBA player Pat Connaughton — for two reasons. The first is that it illustrates that Kmet, who came to South Bend primarily for football, established himself as the top tight end in the NFL draft and was taken 43rd overall by the Chicago Bears last week, worked really damn hard at his “hobby” of being the closer/lefty fireman out of the bullpen for the Notre Dame baseball team. The second is that even with his NFL fate seemingly sealed, Kmet resisted casting baseball aside until the end.
“That will forever be burned in my brain,” Ristano said. “That a kid who has this much money and prestige hanging over him is still really struggling. Because I think he loves baseball as well.”
Two and half years earlier, the White Sox wondered how deep that love ran. Kmet’s football dominance cutting into his time for baseball dated back to his time at St. Viator High School in Arlington Heights. He played center field, he pitched left-handed, and put up “scary” offensive numbers as a right-handed power hitter for a team that won a state championship. Having committed to Brian Kelly at Notre Dame before even his junior season of baseball had started, football kept him busy and off the showcase circuit, but also off the radars of some pro teams and college programs.
“It’s not easy to hide a 6-5 power-hitting, left-handed pitcher,” Ristano said.
Cole Kmet helped lead St. Viator to a 2017 state championship. (Courtesy St. Viator baseball community)And yet, White Sox area scout J.J. Lally saw Kmet play in a game for the first time in April before the 2017 draft, and said he knows of teams that missed him entirely. Lally saw Kmet sit 84-88 mph from the left side, feature a promising slider from a funky and deceptive three-quarter delivery, flash a developing changeup, and tout plenty of athleticism, strike-throwing and feel for pitching for a scout to dream on. But the report he turned into his superiors was for Kmet as a hitter.
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“At the time Aaron Judge had arrived on the scene and so you see a really big guy in the batter’s box, hitting balls 400 feet, it gets your attention,” Lally said in a phone call with The Athletic. “I thought he was going to be a phenomenal baseball prospect. He was still very raw. Big, strong kid.”
If scouts honing in on Michael Kopech and Luis Robert when they were 14 years old represent one end of the spectrum, locating a high-ceiling hitting prospect two months before draft day is another. Lally quickly returned for repeat viewings, but then-scouting director Nick Hostetler did not even get to lay eyes on Kmet until the local kid came out to Guaranteed Rate Field for a pre-draft workout, where he took batting practice and “put on a show,” impressing both Hostetler and Hall of Famer Jim Thome.
The Sox were interested, but the difference between thinking a prospect is built like and touts the raw power of an Aaron Judge, and having absolute trust that he will tap into that potential, spans hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. Kmet’s focus on football already put him on the raw side compared to top-end high school draft prospects, and even with a plus run grade, he was just so physically large that a move to an outfield corner was a near-certainty, putting more pressure on the bat. Lally turned in a fifth-round grade on Kmet, and the Sox scouting department’s valuation of him was roughly a round or two lower. Something closer to a second-round valuation was believed to be necessary to pull Kmet away from football, and a promise from Kelly that he would be free to play baseball for the Irish in his relatively free time.
“We weren’t comfortable offering the money it would’ve taken to buy him out of the football and academic opportunity at Notre Dame,” Lally said.
But up to as late as draft day itself, the Sox were feeling out Kmet’s interest on a compromise: what if he headed to South Bend, went to school, played football, and when the semester ended, he reported to Camelback Ranch for extended spring training, got his swing in rhythm and got himself ready to play short-season rookie ball? There was precedent for trying it out (current NFL players Russell Wilson and Shaq Thompson played minor league ball during the summer) and there was a sense that baseball was much more than a hobby for Kmet. Maybe a taste of pro ball would get him hooked after a while.
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“Cole and his family, who are amazing people, they just wanted us to commit one way or the other,” Lally said. “It would have taken a big signing bonus to sign him and he would have committed to baseball full-time and then he would have skipped Notre Dame. I got the feeling he really wanted to do that. He really wanted to play baseball.”
But for many reasons, it was not to be. While the Sox were intrigued by Kmet, he would be a major developmental project with a long and uncertain path to the majors, and any bonus offer they made would reflect that. For someone with such a viable alternate path in football, it wasn’t enough certainty to pull him in the other direction. And while there was a precedent for two-way prospects spending their summer vacations riding the bus, there’s a through-line that neither Russell nor Thompson are playing baseball anymore.
“Ultimately, he made the right decision,” Lally said. “How many of those dual sport guys really work out? It doesn’t work very often. The time you spend trying to do both, there’s not enough hours in the day. Baseball, you really need to commit full-time.”
And yet, baseball didn’t die there. Kmet was understandably a no-show for fall ball with Notre Dame baseball, which didn’t allow him the time to continue developing as a hitter. But when football ended, he would start his throwing program and get ready to help the Irish on the mound. In his first collegiate game as a freshman, he came out on the road and pitched four innings of scoreless relief for a save against then-ninth-ranked LSU.
“My favorite thing about him is he would pitch when we asked him to,” Ristano said. “You run into those kids who say ‘I don’t care where you put me, just give me the ball when the game is on the line.’ Some people kind of act like they have that and it becomes really transparent false bravado. But there are some kids who truly believe it when they say ‘Give me the baseball and this game is over.’ And I think Cole just had that.”
Kmet made just two starts with Notre Dame, one of which was a marriage of convenience with football, as starting him the Friday before the spring game was the best way to squeeze innings out of him before he was lost for the weekend. But the bullpen assignment was a temporary move due to necessity, Kmet’s willingness to do whatever was asked and a cautious approach to an athlete whose primary obligation was football.
“Nobody wants to crash the Ferrari,” Ristano said.
Cole Kmet hits at Guaranteed Rate Field. (Courtesy Kmet family)Kmet was primed to step into the rotation had elbow soreness not ended his outstanding sophomore campaign (18 2/3 innings, 2.89 ERA with a stunning 27 strikeouts over just three walks), and Ristano said he would have become a weekend starter if he had been able to play a junior season. His 84-88 mph heat from the left side had cranked up to 90-92 mph, his slider had become a high-70s swing-and-miss offering, and Lally wonders if, with his size and built-up strength, Kmet would be hitting mid-90s by now if he focused entirely on baseball. Ristano worries that with all the plaudits about Kmet’s athleticism and makeup he might come off as hyperbolic, but believes Kmet the pitcher was on the way to being worthy of being picked in the first 10 rounds, or even the first five. Instead, he’ll just have to remember Kmet as one of his favorites.
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“He was a pro,” Ristano said. “I will be the first one to buy a Cole Kmet jersey when it hits the shelves and I’ll make sure my son and daughter have one as well.”
In his background research, Lally said he never heard a bad word about Kmet’s character in an industry that loves to gossip. He believes he had the demeanor to deal with the failure that minor league ball delivers in spades, the athleticism to excel in not just multiple sports, but multiple positions in baseball. If playing two sports with professional intensity was untenable for Kmet, it might be a sign that it’s untenable for anyone, and there will be no second comings of Bo Jackson, Deion Sanders or Brian Jordan anytime soon.
But Kmet was a guy who had a chance whichever lane he picked, and it almost was baseball.
“It’s going to bother me for a long time,” Lally said.
(Photo of Cole, Casey and Cooper Kmet: Courtesy the Kmet family)
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