Wil Myers has barely arrived, and he’s all that is left.

And no one had to tell him that either is the case.

He is far more self-aware and eager to be the man than you’d expect from a guy who so definitely looks like he’s always having fun. Like the kind of fun most of us misplaced somewhere amidst the bigness of life.


He knows.

Myers gets pretty riled up talking about what the Padres can be in a few years, about the ability of Manny Margot and Hunter Renfroe and Austin Hedges and some others.

But he knows, for now, what he has ascended to — with his six-year, $83 million contract and with the state of San Diego sports.

“It’s crazy,” Myers said this week as he sat in his condominium in downtown Charlotte, exactly a week before heading to spring training. “The Chargers left, and I signed right after that. The more I thought about it I was like, ‘Crap. This is crazy!’ Not to sound all arrogant, but it’s kind of like I’m the face of San Diego sports now. That’s insane. That’s insane! I’m excited for it.”


Yes, at 26 years old, Wil Myers is the most prominent athlete in San Diego.

Funny thing, a down-home, God-fearing Southern boy ascending to that mantle.

Sounds familiar.

What we have stepping into the void left by Philip Rivers’ reluctant departure for Tinseltown is a lot like what we had — a kid who is the real deal in large part because of where he came from.


The fresh face of San Diego sports grew up in a house on a street where lawns run into other lawns because fences aren’t erected between neighbors, in a town where generations of men worked in the same factories until the Chinese started making cheaper furniture.

Thomasville, N.C., is one of a string of towns in this neck of what is quite literally the woods that announce themselves with their names emblazoned on water towers visible from the highway. It’s the kind of place where it doesn’t seem odd at all that Chick-fil-A is closed on Sunday.

Essentially, San Diego, thank God he’s a country boy.

Driven by being grounded

Wil Myers arrived for his first year at Wesleyan Christian Academy in the ninth grade, just starting to grow into his oversized hands and feet.


Having transferred in to play for the school’s baseball program, he established himself as part of the school well before the season started.

“He was the kind of student who fit in right away,” said Tim Rickman, the high school principal of a school that serves students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. “This was before baseball. After a few weeks, you forgot Wil Myers had not been with you all those years because he was at home. It was his home.”

Then came baseball.

Myers hit .530 and was all-state that first season.


And nothing changed.

“He didn’t realize what type of baseball player he was,” Rickman said. “He had no idea what kind of athlete he was. He was just Wil.”

Wile the heart of Rickman’s assessment can be gleaned, an important distinction should be made.

Wil Myers does know what kind of baseball player he is. He believes in himself in that irrational way the awesome ones must. It’s just that there is a certain way you act when you’re the son of Eric and Pam Myers.


Told this past week that her son was about as polite and gracious as a professional ballplayer could be, Pam said, “If he doesn’t act that way, you let us know.”

It was not a hollow implication.

When Wil was in middle school, he was playing in a game down in Concord and slammed his helmet to the ground after making a third out.

When he got back to the dugout after the next half-inning, Pam was removing his bag from the hook on the fence.


“He said, ‘Momma, what are you doing?’ “ Pam recalled. “I said, ‘Wil, you don’t throw your helmet. You’re not playing like that.’ He said, ‘Momma, I promise I won’t do that again.’ ”

Pam relented, but not before a scolding reminder that “You represent me and your daddy. You represent this family. We don’t do that.”

Almost a decade later, Wil knew exactly what it meant when he got a text from his mom after a game in Double-A from which he had been ejected for arguing balls and strikes.

I can be on the next plane and take your bag off the fence.


At the recounting, Eric chimed in: “He was getting too big for his britches.”

That’s how Eric talks. Short sentences, a simple profoundness delivered in a monotone that veers toward a friendly sort of annoyed.

Whenever he lets on he is proud of his son the ballplayer, Eric escapes the moment with a shake of his head and by muttering something like, “I’ll tell you what, buddy, that boy is a mess.”

The warmest Eric got on a recent night in the living room of the home where he and Pam raised two sons was when talking about the picture in the middle of all the others on the shelf above the television.


“Look at that there,” Eric said, pointing to a photograph taken last July 10 of Wil and his younger brother, Beau, on the field at Petco Park before the Home Run Derby in which Beau pitched to Wil.

There is no pretense to the Myers family. There is truth.

“I respect my dad more than anything in the entire world,” Wil said. “But that guy has never told me how good I am. I really respect that.”

A Myers moment

When connecting the dots in the life of a high achiever, there is always dichotomy, and there is no past and present. There is a sum of parts, and the evolution of excellence is best viewed in a nonlinear manner.


So it was, in the midst of one of the best individual stretches any Padres player ever had, Myers’ present played out in front of his past.

Wesleyan Christian baseball coach Scott Davis was visiting Myers last summer, staying at his condo with the balcony overlooking Petco Park. Davis had been to the game the night before and was taking this one in on TV when his former player, the kid who used to just play ball and who Davis had noticed increasingly becoming a learned ballplayer, stepped to the plate in the fifth inning against Nathan Eovaldi of the New York Yankees.

Myers had struck out on four pitches in the second, and this time worked a stream of mostly off-speed pitches to a full count before stepping out of the box.

“What’s he doing?” Davis thought.


On the field, Myers was thinking about what Eovaldi would throw him next. A splitter? That’s when he stepped out.

“No,” he thought, “Get back on the fastball. That’s how you succeed.”

Davis watched and wondered. Myers stepped back in.

The roar came first, as the game below played out seconds earlier than it came on the screen. And then Davis saw a fastball up in the zone that Myers sent beyond the fence in right center.


Davis watched on TV as Myers rounded the bases and descended into the dugout.

Seconds later, Davis’ phone buzzed.

“I crushed that ball just like in high school”

Davis laughed and typed his response.


“Yeah you did. You better put your phone down before your manager sees it.”

The major league hitter using his head. The kid texting his buddy in the middle of a game he would help win.

The wonder of Wil Myers wrapped up in a few moments.

The two-run homer was Myers’ 12th in exactly a month, a 27-game stretch in which he went .337/.439/.792 and turned around a season and a career. He would play in his first All-Star game two weeks later.


When Myers got back to his condo, Davis asked him about the at-bat, about his stepping out before the final pitch. Myers explained he needed to clear his head, that he had to think about what the pitch would be and how he should approach it.

Said Davis: “That’s him growing. … Still the same kid, though, just like in high school.”

Big enough

Wil Myers is 6-feet-3 and has gigantic hands that emerge from the end of gigantic forearms.

So whatever else is inside him and was instilled in him, let’s acknowledge the genetic bounty bestowed on this kid.


However, there are a whole bunch of big men who aren’t playing in the major leagues and darn sure weren’t just awarded the richest contract in their team’s history.

But this budding superstar was once a 9-year-old playing on a team of 11-year-olds. He was, in the parlance of his father, “a little fella.” He would only ever get in games as a pinch-runner back then. But his dad wanted him to play with older and bigger boys, to know what it was like to not be the best player on the team and have to earn playing time.

As the body grew, the talent increased, and the hunger didn’t shrink.

By the time of the 2008 North Carolina high school state championship, there were already enough instances of Myers, being now big, almost always coming up big, that Davis made a radical decision.


He put Myers, his No. 3 starter, on the mound for the opener in the best-of-3 series. This was no small thing, as Wesleyan’s ace was Michael Dimock, who is expected to play for Triple-A El Paso this season, and his No. 2 pitcher, Tyler Hickernell, would go on to pitch in college as well.

Davis’ confidence in Myers paid off when his hard-throwing junior (and that’s all Myers was on the mound, a thrower) made it through the sixth inning protecting a 5-2 lead.

Davis put Dimock in to start the seventh, the idea being Wesleyan could close out the victory and have both available in one of the next two games.

“Wil was pissed,” said Davis, who moved Myers to shortstop.


Dimock struggled. In quick order, it was 5-4 and a runner was on first with no outs. Davis headed to the mound. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his shortstop storming the same direction.

“As soon as he came out of the dugout,” Myers recalled, “I was like, ‘He has to put me back in.’ ”

Myers re-entered as the pitcher. A line-drive, a runner doubled off second and a strikeout gave Wesleyan its first win in what would be a two-game sweep.

“I wanted the ball,” Myers said. “Those are guys you want, who want the ball in that situation.”


Enjoying the journey

The Padres made Myers the cornerstone in their building process because they don’t think his 28-homer, 28-stolen base season even, in the words of manager Andy Green, “scratched the surface” of what he can do.

Myers was the second-youngest player on the Padres two years ago, three months older than Cory Spangenberg. Now Myers is the elder statesman.

“It’s absolutely insane,” he said. “I’m excited about it though. … I’m going to spring training thinking, ‘I’m the leader here.’ I’m going to do it the right way. I want to be that guy that brings the young guys in and sits down and talks to them, just so they feel like I’m in their corner.

“These young guys that come up, it’s a dream come true for them. … You get the most out these young guys by making them feel they belong there. Let them play and have fun.”


There it is, the essence of Myers.

The size, the athleticism, the speed. Sure. The competitiveness. A man doesn’t become what Myers is without that entire package. But Myers couldn’t be the player he is — having fought through two years of injuries and two trades and emerging as an All-Star — without the ability to not just seize the moment but enjoy it.

To get through the hard, there must be a certain ease.

Of all the stories Davis tells of the best player he ever coached — the towering home runs with major league scouts in the stands, the game-winning double in the state playoffs his freshman year, the time he saved his teammates from running for his mistake in the previous day’s game by making 18 3-pointers in 20 tries — there is one that explains how Myers got here and tells us why he might actually help get the Padres where they want to go.


As a freshman, Myers was on base when a teammate went down swinging for the second out of the inning. Thinking it was the third out, Myers sprinted off the field.

A fuming Davis took him out of the game. He recalled Myers was angry, and they both knew a disapproving Eric Myers was sitting nearby.

But when Davis looked down the bench a while later, there was Wil smiling and laughing and enjoying the game.

“I learned a lesson that day about him,” Davis said. “That’s just him. You could tell he had already forgotten it. He had a unique ability to fight off the bad stuff. … We’ve had a lot of good players. Wil was just different. He had the ability to manage the game in terms of the emotional toll.


“I see it all the time. He’s the same kid.”

kevin.acee@sduniontribune.com