Heavy Metal Rap

In the second inning of Florida State's game at Maryland last May, Seminoles second baseman Marshall McDougall sized up a fastball from lefthander Jamie Hammond, found it to his liking and swung. Ping. Gone, over the left-centerfield fence.

Two innings later, same thing, except it was a curveball, and it went out at straightaway center. The next four times up, more of the same. Ping, ping, ping, ping. Gone, gone, gone, gone.

McDougall finished that 26-2 rout with six homers, 16 RBIs and 25 total bases—NCAA records all. "That rivals the 100 points Wilt Chamberlain scored in one game," says Florida State coach Mike Martin. "What Marshall did will never be done again unless they move the fence right behind the infield."

McDougall wound up hitting .419 with 28 homers and 106 RBIs—numbers comparable to those of former Seminole J.D. Drew, now with the St. Louis Cardinals, in his junior year (.455, 31, 100). McDougall played half of last season at third base, men was moved to second, yet made only eight errors in 71 total games. Which makes it all the more puzzling that 798 players were selected in the June draft before the Boston Red Sox took him in the 26th round. Still, the disappointment of the draft didn't keep him from earning College World Series MVP honors, though Florida State lost the final to Miami.

McDougall slid so far largely because many scouts suspected that if you took away his aluminum bat and replaced it with a big league wooden model, his productivity would head south. "He's going to have to make some adjustments or he's going to have trouble hitting with the wooden bat," says one scout.

Take away his bat, says a major league scouting director, and there's not much left. "McDougall's not a 'tools' guy," he says. "He's got marginal speed, and the consensus is that defense is something he will have to work twice as hard at just to get by."

When McDougall hit only .248 with one home run last summer in the Cape Cod League, which uses wooden bats, his performance lent credence to the theory that he couldn't hit with lumber. (During a workout at Fenway Park, however, he was one of only two out of 40 Cape Cod players to hit a ball over the Green Monster.)

Unimpressed, the Red Sox didn't even offer McDougall a signing bonus. With little choice, he returned to Tallahassee for his senior season. "In my 26 years at Florida State that business with the Red Sox was one of the biggest surprises I've seen," says Martin. "You can't have a year like Marshall had last year and be an average baseball player. This guy's special."

It wasn't McDougall's first confounding draft experience. At Buchholz High in Gainesville, Fla., he was a pretty good 160-pound infielder who hit all of two homers in his varsity career. But he played alongside Doug Johnson, who lured plenty of scouts to Buchholz before deciding to play quarterback at Florida. As a result, the Chicago White Sox took a 41st-round flier on Johnson's little teammate. "Nobody even talked to me," says McDougall. "I was just drafted one day. Then I never even heard from them. That was kind of weird."

McDougall chose to enroll at Santa Fe Community College in Gainesville. "It was the best thing to do at the time, to live at home with my mom for another year and a half," he says. "She could cook for me. That was big." Mom's cooking allowed McDougall, who hardly frequents the weight room, to add 30 pounds. With the bulk came some pop in his bat. After hitting three homers in his first year at Santa Fe, he hit nine as a sophomore before last year's power surge at Florida State.