Preps insider: The making of MLB prospect Max Clark
“There’s a pile from California, a pile from Georgia, a pile from Alabama, a pile from…”
“There’s little piles everywhere,” his mom’s telling me between plays of the football game. You should see that thing at the end of every summer, after Clark has traveled the country for various baseball showcases and Team USA tryouts. He’s a straight-A student, humble, comfortable talking to adults, talented on the piano, and with a Bible verse – 2 Corinthians 12:19 – on his outfielder’s glove. It’s the nature of the business, with millions of dollars at stake, and MLB scouts haven’t found a thing wrong with Clark yet. MLB Draft for Max Clark, or Vanderbilt?įor a prospect as good as Max Clark, MLB scouts stop looking at what’s right, and start looking for what’s wrong. And all that kid wants to do is what’s in front of him today, a football game with his buddies. “The kids around here just love him,” says Max’s mom, Angela Ankney. He has a 4.0 GPA, plays the piano, helps coach a local youth baseball team of 10-year-olds, and on occasion gets invited to a little kid’s birthday party, which is cute. This is a fun story, the chronicles of Max Clark, the country’s best high school baseball prospect in years and a great football player and not a bad student, either. “Sometimes we’ll chant back: ‘Let’s play baseball, let’s play baseball.’” “We hear it everywhere,” says Max’s stepdad, Ron Ankney. Over here, on the Franklin side, where I’m sitting with Clark’s mom and stepdad, the crowd bursts into laughter. This is football, and Max Clark is one of the best players on the field, though the visiting crowd is trying not to be impressed. The other is a 40-yard reception on a deep ball where he runs it down and hauls it in over the shoulder, like Willie Mays back in the day.īut enough with the baseball references. He finishes with three catches for 65 yards, including two huge plays in the first half, one a leaping catch of 14 yards at the sideline, where he taps one foot inbounds before getting drilled by two Mt. It’ll make for a long weekend, but Max Clark wants to be on this field Friday night, with his friends, helping the 2-0 Grizzly Cubs defeat Mt. First he’ll go home late Friday night, find his bed somewhere in that pigsty he calls a room, and sleep a few hours before flying to Phoenix for the Perfect Game All-American Classic at Chase Field, home of the Arizona Diamondbacks. He’ll head to Phoenix on Saturday, about nine hours after this game ends.
It’s a football, it’s Friday night, and this is where he wants to be. Watch Video: 'Closer than what people expect' on Max Clark's love for baseball and footballįRANKLIN – Franklin senior Max Clark is chasing the ball down, outrunning it, flashing one of the five tools that will make him the first high school player selected in the 2023 Major League Baseball draft, perhaps the No.
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