Big-league lessons from father shape Ke’Bryan Hayes into top prospect with Marauders

Charlie Hayes still remembers the exact moment he realized his son would become a special baseball player.

Ke’Bryan Hayes was about 13 and at an Astros game with his father when someone launched a mammoth home run over the fence at Minute Maid Park in Houston.

Charlie Hayes exclaimed at the sheer distance of the bomb. “Man,” he cried. “You see how far he hit that?”

While the crowd around them celebrated, Ke’Bryan smiled and looked over at his father. “Yeah, he hit it a long ways,” the teenager said. “But did you see how fast his hips turned?”

“I knew right then,” Charlie Hayes says now, thinking back to the day more than half a decade ago, “that I had one of those kids on my hands.”

This is the sort of thinking that comes with growing up in the shadow of professional baseball. Charlie Hayes, Ke’Bryan’s father, spent 14 years in MLB and is most famous for squeezing the final out of the Yankees’ 1996 World Series win against the Braves.

Tyree Hayes, one of Ke’Bryan’s two older brothers, was an eighth-round pick by the Rays back when they were known as the Devil Rays and spent seven seasons in the minors before retiring after a year of independent ball in 2012.

Even if Charlie never drilled baseball into Ke’Bryan’s head, the 20-year-old Bradenton Marauders third baseman took to the sport by osmosis.

By the time he was 5 or 6, Ke’Bryan was playing travel ball and mashing home runs. When he was 8 or 9, his father founded the Big League Baseball Academy in Tomball, Texas, and Ke’Bryan could spend just about as much time playing as he’d like. He has the sort of talent that can only flow in major-league blood, but Ke’Bryan, ranked as the Pirates’ No. 6 prospect by MLB.com, is really more a coach’s son.

“Baseball is a crazy game,” Charlie said. “Out of all my kids, this was the least talented one, but the one that was a first-round pick.”

Pictures from Hayes’ childhood are still the subject of some chiding from Gelinda Hayes, Ke’Bryan’s mother. No matter where the photo was taken — in church for a funeral, in some faraway destination for a family vacation — Ke’Bryan could be found carrying a red Bam Bam-style Wiffle ball bat.

He was the sort of kid who would go outside and take 200-300 swings a day on his own. When he played for four years at Concordia Lutheran High School in Tomball, he filled all the clichés. He was the first one on the field and the last one off, Concordia head coach Rick Lynch said, only after practice he’d then drive over to Big League Baseball to take some more cuts in the cages.

Even though he never had the bulky frame to mash highlight-reel home runs or the lanky build to whip 95-mph fastballs by unassuming high school players, Hayes became one of the most complete players in the nation.

A chat with a Vanderbilt player still stands out to Charlie Hayes. He asked what he thought was a simple question: What’s your two-strike approach? The college player couldn’t give him an answer. Charlie never wanted his youngest son to rely on pure talent.

“He wasn’t a so-called showcase kid,” Charlie said. “He was taught the right way to play. Runner on second, no outs, he’s going to try to move the runner to the next base and make the job easier for the next guy.”

Ke’Bryan was raised on back fields and beneath bleachers. Tyree is nearly 10 years older than Ke’Bryan, and whenever Tyree was pitching, Ke’Bryan was somewhere in the crowd, but he’d soon sneak off to nearby diamonds with his father, pestering Charlie to play catch with him.

Hayes took a lot away from learning under an ex-major-leaguer. Nothing was more obvious to Lynch than Hayes’ competitiveness. Even on a roster stacked with future Division I or minor league players with the Crusaders, Hayes stood out as the leader. When Hayes was a sophomore in 2013, Concordia Lutheran squared off against Houston’s St. Pius X three times. The only time the Crusaders managed a win was when Hayes outdueled SPX senior Kohl Stewart, now the No. 6 prospect in the Twins’ organization, for a shutout win.

The next year, Concordia suffered a walk-off loss in the state championship game. During Hayes’ senior year, he delivered the winning hit in the top of the seventh inning to help capture a state title.

“He had that intangible of ‘throw down’ that a lot of kids don’t have,” Lynch said. “He willed himself to win.”

Charlie’s training came more through honing in on specifics rather than just getting Ke’Bryan out into game action as often as possible. Yes, Ke’Bryan did the travel circuit, only Charlie didn’t send him away every weekend. When the big tournament was in Atlanta, Charlie and Ke’Bryan may have stayed home in Tomball, saving a few thousand dollars and instead having Ke’Bryan field a few thousand ground balls.

Through his career as an instructor, Hayes has crossed paths with rising stars like Paul Goldschmidt, Pirates pitcher Jared Lakind and Kyle Drabek, a former top prospect in the Phillies and Blue Jays organizations. Hayes wanted to tap into the intangibles that those future big leaguers possessed and emphasize them at his academy.

“He wants them to take it more serious,” Ke’Bryan said. “I don’t really know how to explain it, honestly.”

For Ke’Bryan’s first two years in the minors after he was taken 32nd overall in the 2015 MLB draft, Charlie was in the crowd as often as he could be. This past offseason, though, he took a job as a coach in the Phillies’ minor-league system.

Now Charlie follows his son from afar. Last week, Ke’Bryan told Charlie he wasn’t feeling comfortable at the plate. When they got off the phone, Charlie pulled up Ke’Bryan’s stats and saw he was batting about .280.

“I wish I could hit .280 and not feel comfortable,” Charlie joked.

The crux of Charlie’s coaching philosophy is simple: Find some way to get better — even just a little bit — every day. It’s his emphasis on fundamentals that has drawn him back to coaching young players he doesn’t feel are always taught properly.

And his son may be his greatest evidence. Ke’Bryan’s physical tools aren’t overwhelming — he checked into spring training at 180 pounds, Charlie said — and the traits that made him a first-round pick typically centered around descriptors like “well-rounded” or “solid.”

Ke’Bryan thrives because he’s refined on the margins. His mechanics are sound and he makes up for athleticism concerns at third base with defensive savvy.

“He just always would tell me to work hard,” Ke’Bryan said. “There’s always a kid working every day, so one day you’re not working is one day you could be getting behind.”

This story was originally published June 5, 2017 at 4:13 PM with the headline "Big-league lessons from father shape Ke’Bryan Hayes into top prospect with Marauders."