When one baseball person says Sam Antonacci is intense, you might think he plays the game hard, or is just quick to anger. When every baseball person you talk to says Sam Antonacci is intense, you start seeing what they mean in just about every part of the game: his willingness to get plunked, the way he rounds first and attempts to bait throws back to the bag, the dekes in the field, the helmet slaps (angry), and the helmet slaps (celebratory).

Today at Sox Machine, James wrote about how Antonacci went from receiving no Division I offers out of his Springfield high school, to being a second-day draft pick, to parlaying a hot spring and viral WBC moments into top-100 prospect status and a major league debut. It paints a picture of a player who was hardened by rejection, and/or has channeled an impostor’s syndrome into a maniacal devotion to maximizing every opportunity.

Because Antonacci, the Charlotte Knights and the Winston-Salem Dash all played in the vicinity of Nashville to open the season, we were able to account for the last several years of his development by talking to:

And everybody arrives at the same conclusion: There’s no way to stop Antonacci from playing the game as hard as he wants to play it. As always, thanks for your support, which makes this kind of reporting possible.

-Jim

By JAMES FEGAN

Sam Antonacci's father Bill was a baseball coach, after finishing up his collegiate playing career at the University of Illinois.

At times, this can feel like the most obvious fact in the world. Who else but a coach's son gets noticed in the World Baseball Classic for dirtball reads, and deking baserunners? Maybe the son of an all-conference collegiate softball player, but thanks to his mother Nicki, he qualifies as that too. Antonacci has had plenty of influential coaches, but his whole deal is more deeply ingrained.

"I've told multiple people after watching Team Italy, Sam taking the extra bases, and the dekes defensively in the hit by pitches, the stolen bases," said Nick Naumovich, Antonacci's coach at Sacred Heart-Griffin High School in Springfield, Ill.. "Sam played the identically same way from freshman year."

Similarly, Antonacci's gusto for hit-by-pitches certainly seems influenced by spending his junior year at Coastal Carolina, where coach Kevin Schnall says he targets players who will be "obsessed with getting on base," and asks, "If the pitch is coming at your knee, why are you getting out of the way of an opportunity to get the first base?" But even there, Antonacci had long already embraced the pain hard-nosed play can inflict, as if it was its own incentive.

"He got taken out [with a slide] his sophomore year at the [junior college D-II] World Series on a double play," said Chris Razo, who coached Antonacci for two years at Heartland Community College in Normal. "He jumps up, and the umpire goes in thinking there's going to be a fight. [Antonacci] is in the kid's face and he's telling him 'Great slide! That's how you play the game!' And the other kid is so confused because Sam is pumped up that he just got upended at short.

"That is who he is."

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