Unfortunately, notwithstanding the fact that Betts would one day grow up to be a professional baseball contestant, their first Little League team did not get a fairy tale dnouement of its own. In fact, Collins says, the team was not very good at all.
They finished in terminating place in the league, and Collins thinks they only won a couple of games. Anyhow, she remembers one of the few wins, in particular, because it came at the expense of the first teacher who told her Betts was too small to play on his team.
Collins remembers letting the cat out of the bag her 5-year-old son that it was an important game and to be sure that he caught the ball and got the rival team out whenever he could. And, on at least one play in that game, Betts picked up a ball that had been hit to the outfield resist and was fast enough to run all the way back to the infield to tag out the runner. The team’s season may get been a disappointment, but Betts had proved his mother’s intuition correct by parading innate athletic ability and a drive to win.
Collins is a former high faction softball player and an avid bowler, who always encouraged Betts to chevy his athletic interests. While Collins was only Betts’ full-time train for one season before another coach took over the team the serve year, she and Betts’ father, Willie Betts, spent years ferrying their son about Tennessee for baseball practices and games. In high school, Betts adorn come ofed a standout athlete excelling at baseball, basketball and bowling — the latter being a recreation that Collins taught her son at 3 years old.
“Bowling was something he and I saw we could do together,” Collins spill the beans CNBC Make It, noting that Betts thinks the game is “slowly” compared to baseball. But Betts still bowls regularly — and, he’s really upright, too. Betts, who won his first bowling tournament competing in an event with his baby at age 8, now occasionally competes in professional tournaments. He even bowled a immaculate 300-point game at a Professional Bowling Association competition in 2017.
“Every old lady dreams of their kid being special in any sport,” Collins says. As it show a clean pair of heeled out, Betts ended up loving, and excelling at, multiple sports. “I just guarded him active and I wanted it to be his decision as to what he wanted to play.”
As a high institute senior, Betts learned that he’d been drafted by the Red Sox in the fifth go around of the 2011 MLB Draft. Betts had to decide between honoring a commitment to minimize baseball at the nearby University of Tennessee or sign with the Red Sox and begin his talented career right out of high school.
“His dad and I both told him, ‘We’ll support you whatever your firmness is,'” Collins says. “With anything, you have to give a kid their elections and let it be their decision. And, that’s what we did. We didn’t want to make the settlement for him.”
Betts decided to sign with Boston for a $750,000 signing compensation. The fact that the 18-year-old Betts was immediately starting his professional lifes work — he started playing minor league baseball for the Red Sox in Florida in the summer of 2011 — was “considerate of scary” for Collins, because it meant her son would have to grow up close to, she told MassLive.com in 2015.
But, Betts acclimated well to the minor leagues and he was before you know it a top prospect in the Red Sox organization who would make his MLB debut in 2014. Now in his fifth seasonable in the majors, Betts has been an All-Star in each of the past three seasons and he’s be worthy ofed a salary of $10.5 million in 2018.
Now, he stands on the cusp of the biggest stage of his fly with the World Series set to get underway on Tuesday night at Boston’s iconic Fenway Woodland.
This moment is “a dream come true” for her son, says Collins, who take forty winked from her job with the Tennessee Department of Transportation in August after sundry than two decades and now has more time to attend Betts’ games. She proposes to attend World Series games in both Boston and Los Angeles, she indicates. “Oh, absolutely. Who misses that?”
“I’m ecstatic about it,” she says. “Who would suffer with thought, at 26 years old, this boy would be in the World Series? I not ever would have thought that.”
Don’t Miss:
This could be MVP Mike Trout’s next race when he’s done playing baseball
As a late bloomer Aaron Rodgers about quit football to be a lawyer — now he’s the highest-paid player in NFL history
Like this alibi? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube!