SVM Player of the Year: Rock Falls senior shortstop Brett Chappell

Even a fastball to the bean couldn’t blur Brett Chappell’s vision.

“Is he going to throw him a fastball or a slider? We’ll go back and forth all the time on stuff like that,” Donnie says.

But when the game ends, the education continues.

“I couldn’t tell you how many books, movies, videos and ESPN highlights I watch in a week, let alone throughout the course of my life,” Brett says. “I’ve truly come to love doing it, studying what to do in what situations.”

Brett constantly seeks new techniques for both playing the game and getting in the right mindset to do so. He carries a lot of what baseball teaches him into everyday life.

“Baseball teaches you how to fail,” Brett said. “It helps in everything. It’s helped in school a lot. I hit .470 this season. That means I failed 67 percent of the time … wait ... 57 percent of the time.”

“He’s not going to be a math teacher,” Donnie says.

Friendly fire

Even though Donnie and Brett liberally take jabs at each other, one needs spend little time chatting baseball with them to realize that neither has a vindictive bone in his body.

But what sticks in Brett’s craw is the way dad, a slick-fielding shortstop during his playing days, gets the nod over his boy.

“My grandmother will tell me anything I want to hear,” Brett says. “She’ll say, ‘Brett, you played awesome. You made a lot of great plays. … You’re still not as good as your dad.’”

That calls for a quick-witted, back-handed compliment.

“I used to get mad hearing it, but now I kind of like hearing it,” Brett says. “I like knowing he was better at me in something. He can’t beat me in anything else.”

All jokes aside, Donnie admires Brett’s craft.

“The hardest thing is learning how to play the ball and play the hop,” Donnie said. “A kid like Brett makes plays look easy. Another kid might say he got a bad hop. Brett would’ve gotten the same hop, but he got to it before the bad one.”

While Brett learned to ply the trade watching four-time All-Star Jose Reyes, Donnie studied such shortstop greats as Ozzie Smith and Garry Templeton.

“That just shows how old I am,” Donnie says. “People out there are going to be Googling Gary Templeton.”

Dirt canvas

Playing shortstop is art for Brett. Ever since he gained enough bulk to move over from second base at the age of nine, he’s worked to perfect the numeral 6.

Like an idiot savant staring at a blank canvas, he envisions plays before they happen.

“I’m always thinking, ‘Hit the ball to me,’” Brett said. “If there’s a guy on first, I want him to steal so I can be there to tag him out.”

For him, nothing compares to when he gets a chance to charge a ball and throw on the run.

“It makes it look so smooth and so easy,” he says. “I want to make it look good and have people think, ‘Wow, what a play.’”

He ranged to his right more than ever before this season after the graduation of third baseman Brennan Coward, who had exceptional range at the hot corner.

When Coward would cut in front of him to make a play, Brett would joke, “Dang it, Brennan, what are you doing?”

“I hear all the time, ‘Brett, you’re way too competitve,’” says Brett, who will compete for a middle-infield job as a freshman at Northern Illinois University. “That doesn’t faze me at all. Knowing I’m going to succeed, even when things are slim, helps me a lot. At Northern, I have to have that mentality. I have to compete with three or four infielders for a spot. I can’t win it if I’m thinking I’m going to fail.”

A ringing endorsement

Robbie Minor graciously gives Brett the nod. Sometimes it’s audible, and sometimes it needs to be seen.

“I love to say we’re very similar,” Minor says. “When I watch him play, it reminds me a lot of myself. When you’ve got a player who stays after practice and puts in the extra time in the weight room like Brett does, that rubs off on other players.”

Sometimes the best compliments, however, aren’t spoken. Minor instructed his pitcher, Tanner Morse, to give Brett exactly zero fastballs during the twin-cities clash April 21 in Sterling.