Nuts’ third baseman Ryan McMahon is latest QB in Rockies’ fold

It’s no secret the Colorado Rockies have a thing for quarterbacks.

There was Todd Helton, who played with Peyton Manning at Tennessee, and Seth Smith, who backed up Eli Manning at Mississippi.

More recent drafts have brought Kyle Parker (Clemson) and Russell Wilson (North Carolina State and Wisconsin) into the Purple fold, although Wilson famously chose football.

Ryan McMahon is not going to put himself in that pantheon, despite having been the starter behind center at Santa Ana’s Mater Dei High School, otherwise known as “Quarterback High,” with products including Matt Barkley, Colt Brennan and Heisman winners John Huarte and Matt Leinart.

“Helton did it for real, unlike us high school quarterbacks,” said McMahon, who should be at third base Thursday when the Modesto Nuts celebrate their home opener with a 7:05 first pitch against Inland Empire. “Yes, I went to Quarterback High, but I was the worst quarterback in the history of Mater Dei football. Not a Leinart, no Barkley, no Brennan.”

McMahon laughs off his prep football career – easy since he’s one of the brightest prospects in the Rockies organization and he’s barely 20 years old. He debuted in Grand Junction in 2013, hitting .321 with 11 homers in 59 games, then followed it up by hitting .282 with 18 homers and 102 RBIs last season in Asheville.

“He’s a special kind of kid,” said Nuts manager Fred Ocasio, who was in Asheville, N.C., last season. “He has an idea at the plate and he has plus power. He does a very good job defensively. He’s a great kid who comes out and gives it all he has, every day. You can tell he loves the game.”

That was evident during high school, even though he chose to be a multi-sport athlete instead of specializing.

In his senior year at Mater Dei, after leading the Monarchs to an 11-3 record and a berth in the Southern Section Pac-5 football title game, McMahon switched into baseball mode and hit .405 with four homers and 32 RBIs. He was the Orange County player of the year, a MaxPreps first-team all-American and signed a letter of intent to attend USC on a baseball scholarship.

That was before Colorado called. The Rockies took him in the second round of the 2013 draft, No. 42 overall, and gave him a slot-mandated signing bonus of $1.328 million.

He’s thrilled with his decision to sign, but it does bring up some what-ifs.

For example, what if football was his first love and he went the route of Russell Wilson, chasing gridiron glory?

“I was talking with Oregon State and San Diego State, but I wasn’t recruited much for football since I told everybody I was going to play baseball,” McMahon said. “Had I chosen football, I’d probably be at Orange Coast Community College right now trying to transfer out of there to go play somewhere else.”

And there’s the bigger hypothetical: What if he played baseball at USC and lived the college life?

“You see your buddies in college, off having fun, but I’m having the time of my life playing baseball and I’m living out my dream,” McMahon said. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity I was given to start playing baseball right out of high school. People do tell me I’m missing something by not going to college, but they don’t know the experience I’m getting by playing baseball right away.”

Now that he’s playing third base for the Nuts, the comparisons will begin with other hot corner prospects who signed with the Rockies right out of SoCal high schools, and who were 20 years old when they played at John Thurman Field.

There was Ian Stewart, California’s Mr. Baseball in 2003 at La Quinta, who hit .274 with 17 homers and 86 RBIs in Modesto in 2005. Stewart, who like McMahon hits from the left side, has seven seasons in the majors, but opens 2015 on the Washington Nationals’ Triple-A Roster in Syracuse.

Most of the comparative talk will veer toward Nolan Arenado, the Rockies state-of-the-art, double Gold Glove third baseman. Arenado, from El Toro High School in Lake Forest, hit .298 with 20 homers for the Nuts in 2011, when he led the minors with 122 RBIs.

“Arenado is a special talent, but McMahon will do the job down there,” Ocasio said. “He has a good arm and good hands and moves very well. He made his share of errors last year, but when it came down to making the play he had to make, he made the play. There were about 10 or 15 plays he made last year that made you go ‘wow’ and wonder how he made it.”

The feeling among people who write about baseball for a living is that Arenado could be at third base in Denver for at least the next decade. So McMahon either has to establish himself as a Superman at the position to have a chance to usurp Arenado in the Rockies’ lineup, or he becomes a valuable piece of trade bait.

“I don’t worry about any of that,” McMahon said. “I try to learn as much as I can from Nolan, who is the best third baseman in the bigs. He’s been great to me, and I’ve learned a bunch from him. We’re both SoCal kids and we have a lot to talk about, so it’s been very cool looking up to him.”

The only certainty is that football will not be McMahon’s fallback if this baseball thing doesn’t work out. At 20, he’s young enough to not have to wonder about such matters.

But McMahon would like to know why the Rockies like to sign quarterbacks.

“It might be that we’re a little cocky,” he said.

This story was originally published April 15, 2015 at 6:50 PM with the headline "Nuts’ third baseman Ryan McMahon is latest QB in Rockies’ fold."