SEATTLE — Kellen Sundin, the baseball coach at Lakeside School here, figured he would get to see the best player he ever coached at some point during the all-star break. He knew Corbin Carroll would take advantage of the pause in the grinding baseball schedule to come visit his parents. Most 22-year-olds, even the really good major league rookies, go home for summer break.
Sundin even scheduled a trip to Arizona in the first week of July to see him play in the big leagues, not even considering the possibility that Carroll might be playing in the MLB All-Star Game in his hometown as a rookie — let alone start.
But there, in left field Tuesday night at T-Mobile Park, was Carroll, the precocious son of Seattle who arrived at Lakeside as a program-transforming freshman, small for his size but obsessive over the little details until he turned himself into one of the best prep players anyone here can remember. He played his way from Lakeside onto Team USA, then into his choice of power conference schools, then into a first-round draft pick of the Arizona Diamondbacks and now, four years removed from Lakeside, into the National League starting lineup for the Midsummer Classic.
“I was like, ‘I’ve told you — you aren’t going to surprise me anymore,’ ” Sundin said. “This one is pushing those limits a little bit.”
Corbin’s parents, Brant and Pey-Lin, didn’t exactly plan for this, either. They did not expect this to be such a busy week, to hear from so many people heading to the game just to see their son — one of two rookies to start the All-Star Game this year, one in each league (the Texas Rangers’ Josh Jung was the other), a major league first. How could they have anticipated that the son they grew up taking to Mariners games, the kid whose first jersey was an Ichiro, No. 51 — the player who still has a picture of Ichiro as the lock screen on his phone — would be jogging in from center field as the public address announcer asked fans to welcome him home?
“I think it’s going to be something I’ll remember forever,” Carroll said before going 0 for 2 in a 3-2 National League win that was keyed by Colorado Rockies catcher Elias Díaz’s two-run homer in the eighth inning. It was the NL’s first win since 2012.
Planning for this, or for having a big leaguer as a son, or for any particular outcome, is not how the Carrolls raised Corbin. Brant Carroll calls his family “process-oriented," a more telling description than the usual “close-knit” or “hard-working.” The only thing they planned for was a commitment to academics and to process, to the details. They speak now like the opposite of stage parents, the kind that let Corbin do what felt right athletically if the grades were there.
It wasn’t long ago that Carroll was an elite level soccer player, so good that his decision not to try out for the Seattle Sounders Academy raised eyebrows among his club teammates, who still remember him telling them he could play football and then watching him become the starting junior varsity quarterback at Lakeside as a freshman. Pey-Lin remembers trying not to seem too excited when Corbin decided to focus on baseball and school, opting not to pursue football the next year.
They never pushed Carroll into any of the big-name baseball programs that would have required him to spend time away, encouraging him to stay home and play travel ball with a local club, the Walla Walla Sweets, headed by former big leaguer Jeff Cirillo. They still talk to Cirillo. They still talk to everyone from those high school days. In fairness, they haven’t had much time to lose touch. Carroll said he was peppered with messages the day he learned he would be starting Tuesday night.
“I tried to get back to everyone,” he said Tuesday. “I think I did.”
Carroll is the type of person who would track that closely, so much so that if he had a spreadsheet of texts received and delivered, it wouldn’t be a shock. When Carroll arrived on Sundin’s field as an undersized freshman, Sundin thought he knew exactly what he had — a speedy center fielder who could probably hit for average. Then he saw him swing.
“It was a big, huge, powerful swing,” said Sundin, who has watched as Carroll whittled that swing into a more consistent, higher-average type on his way to the big leagues. “I will always remember that because it wasn’t what I expected.”
Sundin never remembers Carroll slumping. He remembers the way he talked in meetings with coaches, about all the things he still needed to fix, then watched him fix them over time, slowly playing his way into the Team USA pool, then finally making that roster before his senior season.
It was about that time that Carroll and his parents realized he might be good enough to skip college entirely. But they wanted to make sure he could handle that. They sent him off to Team USA with a roll of quarters for laundry and asked other teammates’ parents not to handle his laundry for him — they wanted to see if he could endure and enjoy the life he was choosing. He passed the test. The Diamondbacks made him the 16th pick in the 2019 draft. He went to school the next day.
Then came the pandemic, a year that some considered lost. Carroll, however, realized that being invited to Arizona’s alternate site would give him a chance to see big league pitching. A year later came a shoulder injury, which he suffered while hitting a home run. He needed surgery. He had to go home again, face another year without baseball just as his career was getting started. Brant and Pey-Lin did not exactly offer sympathy. Their son did not exactly need it.
He signed up for online classes at Arizona State, including a psychology course about the pursuit of happiness, one his mother said helped him appreciate the success of others even as he could not chase his own. He sat behind home plate at games, interrogating longtime Arizona scout Jeff Gardner about the nuances of the game. He did not wait for his return. He prepared for it.
“He wasn’t sitting, wishing, hoping to be better,” Pey-Lin said. “He was mentally training himself in the art of baseball, just in his own head.”
The work paid off. By last August, one summer after sitting anything but idle, he was in the majors. By the start of this season, he had signed an eight-year deal that can pay him more than $150 million if he meets all incentives. Carroll was more involved in the process than almost anyone his agent, CAA’s Joe Urbon, has ever represented. He sent Urbon texts detailing frameworks of potential deals, broken down by pre-arbitration years and the first years of free agency — as if he were a longtime agent, not a kid who just became old enough to drink.
Carroll molded the deal, understood what it meant for his future, what he might be giving up and the security he might be gaining. He is not planning for a result. He is preparing for it.
Evan Longoria, a Diamondbacks veteran, said Carroll is one of the best chess players in the Arizona clubhouse because he always thinks a step ahead. Evaluators say his approach in the batter’s box, an approach that has the 5-foot-10, 165-pound left-hander hitting .289 with 18 homers and a .915 OPS in his first full season, is beyond his years.
“It was what made them want to draft him in the first place. It’s what made me want to work with him as a 16-year-old high school student,” Urbon said. “You can never predict the future. But there are certain guys that you see and think, ‘This is a guy we’re willing to bet on.’ ”
No one, not even his parents, not even the high school coach who learned early not to count him out, bet on Corbin Carroll to make his first all-star team this year. They never planned for him to hurry to stardom in time to start the first All-Star Game in his hometown in 20 years — maybe the only one that will be played here in what they hope will be a long career. But here they are.
“This is one of those nights in life when you say, ‘I’m going to enjoy some fanfare; I’m going to celebrate the fruits of what I’ve done.’ I think it will be a really great time for all of us to celebrate results,” Brant Carroll said. “But that’s different than what’s always in our hearts: setting ourselves up to be successful, looking at the process of what it takes to be successful.”