MARION, Iowa – They arrived at the Prospect Meadows Sports Complex early last Saturday morning from their homes in central Iowa to help launch the 26th season of play at the scout-approved Perfect Game Iowa Spring League.
And one day in the not too distant future – depending, of course, on various twists of fate and the alignment of the planets that often make predicting the futures of top prospects an iffy undertaking – they’ll meet on a very different stage. The one that sits in a bucolic, tree-lined neighborhood-setting about four miles southwest of downtown Fort Worth, Texas.
Winterset Senior High School junior right-hander/corner infielder Justin Hackett and West Des Moines Dowling Catholic HS freshman left-hander/first baseman Blake Larson are separated by two years of high school and their hometowns of Winterset and Des Moines by about 36 miles of US Highway 169 north and Interstate 80 east.
Their Perfect Game playing experiences have also been disparate, at least in terms of the national spotlight, with the 15-year-old Larson’s name already showing up on 2024 MLB draft boards. Being invited to the 2020 PG 14u Select Baseball Festival as a true 14-year-old tends to raise a player’s profile.
This spring, ahead of Iowa’s summer high school season, they are united on two very distinct fronts. Hackett and Larson will be suiting up for the Waukee-based Iowa Sticks Scout 2021 in the PG Iowa Spring League (PGISL) and they’ll be known as underclassmen who have already committed to head coach Jim Schlossnagle and the TCU Horned Frogs from the Big 12 Conference.
And on a cold but sunny Saturday morning, the only thing on the two players’ minds was getting back out on the field to play a spring season that everyone hopes will be completed unaltered and uninterrupted by the ever-present COVID-19 pandemic, which cancelled last year’s PGISL season.
“It’s definitely nice to be back out here,” Hackett told PG in between games of a double-header. “It was a little weird last year with Covid and we couldn’t get out in the Spring League. So it’s nice to get out here and at least see some arms and get some live hitters and get that experience before we go into the summer ball and fall ball seasons...It’s always nice, like I said, to get some games in before you go into the high school season.”
Hackett, a 6-foot-3, 210-pound top-500 overall prospect nationally in the 2022 class and the No. 1-ranked right-hander in Iowa, played in the PGISL as a freshman in 2019 and had the kind of season against top competition that can be expected from a ninth-grader.
This will be the first PGISL go-around for the 6-foot-2, 160-pound Larson, a prospect ranked No. 20 overall nationally and the No. 2-ranked left-handed pitcher in the class of 2024 (Nos. 1/1 in Iowa). Larson is the only freshman on the Iowa Sticks Scout 2021 roster, one that is otherwise comprised of top juniors and seniors with the exception of Urbandale sophomore (2023) first baseman/left-hander Sam Harris (No. 298, Duke).
The top 2021s are Urbandale right-hander Jackson Wentworth (No. 137, Kansas State); top-500 Iowa signees in Des Moines catcher Gehrig Christensen and Huxley shortstop Sam Petersen; Gilbert right-hander/infielder Easton Johnson (t-500, Creighton); Cambridge right-hander/third baseman Joe Husak (t-500, South Dakota State) and North Liberty right-hander/utility Keian Secrist (t-500, Kirkwood CC); Urbandale outfielder/first baseman Dillon Kuehl (t-500) joins Hackett as ranking amongst the top juniors.
“We have some really good kids; just good ballplayers and good human beings,” Hackett said. “It’s a goal of mine to just go out there and perform and bring home some wins.”
Larson is the youngster in the group and an eager learner, and he has already sat in some pretty high-minded PG classrooms over the last two years. In the present, he only wants to take the PGISL experience in to its fullest while soaking up as much as he can from his older teammates.
“It feels good, definitely, because this is my first time being around a couple of these guys,” Larson said Saturday. “Now that I’ve gotten warmed up to it, I feel like they’ve really taken me under their wing and showed me what it’s like to play with the older guys; I’m grateful that the season’s started. It’s a little chilly, but hey, when you’re playing baseball it’s great...
“It’s a lot of fun meeting new people, especially coming up with the older guys,” he added. “Being a younger guy, that’s just really important to me.”
Hackett has made the most of his PG experiences over the last three years having earned all-tournament recognition at five WWBA tournaments, including last year’s PG WWBA Underclass World Championship in Fort Myers, Fla., while playing with the Iowa Sticks Scout 2022.
Hackett plans on playing with his high school team again this summer and then will rejoin the Iowa Sticks in the fall, following the same gameplan he used in both 2019 and 2020.
As a sophomore playing for the Winterset Huskies in an abbreviated 18-game 2020 summer season, Hackett went 4-0 in 24 innings pitched with 44 strikeouts and a 1.46 ERA; he was 22-for-53 (.415) with four doubles, a home run and 21 RBI at the plate.
The offer from TCU came about, he said, because he played in as many tournaments as he was able to in an effort to gain the exposure that is so valuable for up-and-comers, especially those from Iowa. Horned Frog recruiters first approached him after his all-tournament performance in Fort Myers last summer and his path was set.
For such a young guy, Larson has already had some pretty incredible PG experiences so it’s no accident Schlossnagle and his staff at TCU were able to “discover” this remarkably talented kid from the heartland. He has already been named to six all-tournament teams in two seasons while playing first for Iowa Select and then Iowa Sticks teams, mostly at WWBA Midwest events held at Prospect Meadows.
But he was also invited to last year’s PG 14u National Showcase at the jetBlue Park Player Development Complex in Fort Myers where he turned in a Top Prospect List performance. That, in turn, led to an invite to the PG 14u Select Baseball Festival, which was held in Oklahoma City, Okla., over the 2020 Labor Day Weekend.
“It was a lot of fun and it was really eye-opening,” Larson said of the Select Fest experience. “We raised money for (Toby Keith’s) Kids Korral for kids who are not as fortunate and aren’t able to play baseball. I thought that was an amazing thing to be able to donate to that and I was really excited.”
Larson is using the PGISL as a vehicle that he feels sure will help him transition seamlessly into his first season of varsity high school baseball playing in Class 4A, Iowa’s big-school classification. Dowling Catholic is a member of the Central Iowa Metropolitan League (CIML), the largest conference in the state; the Maroons have won five state championships in school history, the most recent in 2011.
The IHSAA holds all four of its state baseball tournaments every July at Principal Park – the home of the Triple-A Iowa Cubs – in downtown Des Moines, and Larson has been a regular attendee throughout his youth; he now wants to attend as a player. “The atmosphere at Principal Park is just unreal; you’ve got to experience it,” he said.
It's interesting in that Hackett and Larson are just the two most recent PGISL alumni Schlossnagle has recruited to Fort Worth.
Lisbon left-hander Austin Krob, a 2018 grad who was at Kirkwood CC for one season, is now a sophomore starter with the Horned Frogs, and has already struck out 29 batters in 26 innings and carries a 3.16 ERA early in the 2021 season.
Des Moines 2020 righty Carter Baumler, a 2019 PG All-American who, like Larson, attended Dowling Catholic, had also signed with TCU. But the Orioles selected him in the fifth round of last year’s abbreviated MLB Amateur Draft and he signed for well-above slot; he underwent Tommy John surgery in November 2020 and is making his way back.
With two more high school seasons ahead of Hackett and four more in front of Larson, dreams of one day bringing Big 12 championships back to Fort Worth or maybe even playing professionally one day are on the farthest back shelf for both Hackett and Larson.
In fact, the 2021 high school season still seems a little distant with a full PG Iowa Spring League season in front of them. Who knows, it might even warm up one of these days?
“My approach now and moving forward is to just be grateful for the opportunities I have to play out here,” Hackett said. “Baseball is a game that will end one day and with something like Covid it could stop at any moment. It’s just about the process and being out here with your teammates.”
Larson is very much on the same page: “I’m just trying to be the best that I can be,” he said. “Come out and win every at-bat, win every pitch I can. Just think of the positives and (realize) that baseball could be over at one time and I’m trying to treat it like that. I’m going to come out here and be grateful for the opportunity that God has given me.”