CLEARWATER, FLA. — Ken and Val Pompey apologize profusely as they slide into the booth at a Denny’s just off the highway. They’re half an hour late and worried they might also have to leave early to rush off to another game. Briefly, they consider doing the interview on the road instead. But Ken isn’t sure his stomach can bear it. “Another day without eating?” he moans.

The rushed meals are just one aspect of the past week that has reminded the Milton, Ont. couple of the old days, when they would spend the spring and summer shuttling their two sons, Dalton and Tristan, from ballpark to ballpark while doing their best not to miss an inning. They’re still chasing the next game, but now the stage is much bigger. Tristan, who turns 18 on Monday, is in Florida as a member of Canada’s national junior team. Dalton, of course, is the Blue Jays’ rookie centre fielder. On this day Tristan is playing an afternoon doubleheader before Dalton and the Jays take on the Yankees in Tampa.

Occasional hunger pangs aside, the Pompeys are loving every minute. But they never imagined this for themselves. There may have been major-league dreams in their household, but until recently that’s all they were. “We were thinking scholarships, maybe,” Val says. “Not this.”

They still have a hard time believing their son plays at the same stadium where he once begged for autographs. It’s tough to blame them. Dalton, who grew up in Brampton and Mississauga, played his youth baseball all over the Peel Region and fine-tuned his swing inside the batting cages at Playdium, didn’t get a sniff from any NCAA colleges and was barely scouted before the Jays took a flyer on him in the 16th round of the 2010 draft. Now he has a chance to be the franchise’s first hometown star.

Most fans had barely heard of the speedy outfielder with the volcanic name until he made an equally explosive rise through the organization’s farm system last year, earning a surprise September call-up. But Pompey’s path to the big leagues was hardly smooth and was nearly derailed on a few occasions, not least of which because of where he comes from. “I’ve always had that mindset that I’ve always had something to prove my whole life,” he says.

In Major League Baseball’s nearly 150-year history there have been just 35 players from Toronto and its surrounding suburbs. Only six of those ever donned the Jays’ uniform, all of whom, aside from Pompey, were marginal backup players and relief pitchers. So Pompey stands to be the first local kid in the team’s history to play an everyday role. That’s how rare his ascent is and that’s why no one took him seriously when, as a teenager, he told Vernon Wells he would take his job one day.

But the Pompeys didn’t start out a baseball family. Ken hated the game, thought it was slow and boring. Val never played, but her parents, who lived in Brampton, were big Jays fans. After Dalton was drafted, Val’s father, Garry Irwin, would ask how “the ballplayer” was. Irwin died last September, the day after his grandson hit his first career big-league home run.

Dalton was born in Mississauga, but he first picked up a bat and glove in Port Coquitlam, B.C., where his parents moved when he was a toddler. Val’s sister lived out west and, after a visit, she and Ken fell in love with the place. They enrolled Dalton in all kinds of sports, just to keep him active. But baseball was the one that took hold. They moved back east, settled first in Ottawa and later in Brampton, and all the while Dalton’s appetite for the game was insatiable.

“He always wanted to go practise,” Val says. “We would be lying in bed, six in the morning, and he’d be like, ‘Come on! Get up! I want to go to the park!’ And we’d be like, ‘Can you just give us five more minutes?’”

When Dalton was eight or nine years old, Val used to pitch to him — “I don’t know how many bruises I had on my legs” — while Ken watched and offered tips. When Dalton started pitching, Val would even suit up in full catchers’ gear and crouch behind the plate. “It was crazy,” she says, laughing.

It was also Val, through a remarkable twist of fate, who got her son to switch-hit. While waiting for a Greyhound bus she picked up a discarded sports magazine — the title of which she’s long forgotten — that said if your kids are beginning to play baseball you should teach them to hit on both sides, an ability Dalton developed barely before he was out of diapers.

As Dalton got older his dad took on more of a coaching role. Looking for more than what volunteer coaches could give, Ken hired instructors for one-on-one lessons, which he watched closely. While they taught Dalton, Ken would also learn. “They would have him for an hour and I’d have him for the rest of the week.”

Ken’s hands-on approach caused some friction in Dalton’s early adolescence when he started playing more competitively. He was cut from Triple-A teams in Brampton and Ken clashed with coaches. So they joined the Mississauga Tigers, where Dalton endured racist bullying from a teammate who berated him with slurs and excluded him from the rest of the team. “When Dalton was confronted with racism he shut down,” Ken says. Val reported the abuse to Baseball Canada, which eventually tried to resolve the matter. But the Pompeys decided to move on anyway. Dalton joined the Mississauga Majors, where Ken says Dalton was benched in favour of the coach’s son, which led to more conflict.

By the time Dalton was 15 his parents were looking for a new start, so Val started looking around for local travel teams. The Ontario Blue Jays, the province’s most elite baseball program, had connections with some of the people they clashed with in Mississauga and Brampton, so she opted instead for the Oakville Royals, which seemed a clean slate.

“We never recruited Dalton,” says Mike Swinton, the Royals’ hitting coach. “He just kind of showed up at our doorstep at tryouts.”

Though he came unannounced, Dalton got the coaches’ attention right away. “From an athleticism standpoint, he was above everybody else,” Swinton says. “Then when he started hitting, I mean, he’s switch-hitter, number one. You don’t run across a lot of switch-hitters in Canada at that age.”

He played for the Royals for two years and struck up a close bond with Swinton.

“He wore my phone down,” Swinton says. “He was always looking for extra work. You don’t find that with a lot of kids.”

But Dalton battled “some attitude issues,” as Swinton calls them. He was the best player on a bad team and when he wasn’t frustrated with himself he was frustrated with his teammates. Swinton wonders, too, if back then some of the attention afforded his younger brother, who was more of a baseball prodigy, got to Dalton. “Tristan got a lot of praise. Dalton was almost kind of like the non-superstar. It’s funny that way.”

Some of Dalton’s acting out was typical teenage angst, but it occasionally tested his coaches’ patience.

For example, when outfielders were finished warming up between innings they were supposed to throw the ball to their teammate beyond the foul line. “But when Dalton was pissed off,” Swinton says, “he would let the coaches know by letting it fly from centre field and that ball would hit the fence (near the dugout), just to get our attention.”

“I think it was because I was a kid, you know?” Pompey says today. “I was kind of immature back then. I felt sometimes [Swinton] was hard on me, like anyone that cares would be. I kind of took it the wrong way back then and I would bump heads with him.”

One incident in particular stands out. On a tournament in Illinois, Pompey got into a fight with a teammate. The players resolved it relatively quickly, but for Pompey’s coaches it was the last straw. They were on the verge of kicking him off the team and made a middle-of-the-night phone call home to Val. The moment turned out to be a wake-up call.

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A couple days after the team returned home Swinton found Pompey at the team’s training facility, filming his college showcase video. “I’ve never seen him swing the bat the way he was swinging the bat then,” he says. “The way the ball was coming off that bat and how hard and aggressive he was swinging at the ball. To me, that was his moment. I always tell him that.”

“I don’t know if I’d call it a turning point,” Pompey says today, “but it definitely made me lock it in a bit more because I knew what was at stake.” That video, seen by Baseball Canada’s Greg Hamilton, sparked a series of events that led Pompey to the Jays. When Pompey was called up to the big leagues one of the first people he texted was Swinton: “Bro, we made it.”

Pompey was a late addition to Canada’s national junior team in 2010, but it was a life-changing opportunity. Up until that point professional baseball was not a fathomable goal. He was committed to attend the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Ind., a school whose sports teams ranked below all three NCAA divisions. Pompey chose the school because they offered an accelerated accounting degree with a paid co-op placement. “I didn’t think anything of baseball,” Pompey says. “It was just my means of getting a scholarship.”

But playing for Canada’s junior team opened his eyes. The program plays an all-professional schedule, taking on young minor leaguers in the U.S. and the Caribbean. “I realized I could compete with these players,” Pompey says.

Team Canada was also how he landed on the Jays’ radar, just a few months before the 2010 draft.

Jamie Lehman, the organization’s Canada area scout — a term for the scout who typically first lays eyes on a player and sends reports up the chain — was impressed first of all by Pompey’s athleticism, but also by how quickly he adjusted to the competition. As a raw, inexperienced teenager who was using a wood bat and seeing elite pitching for the first time, he was initially overwhelmed by the young pros he faced. But every at-bat seemed to be better than the last and Lehman took notice.

Pompey says he has always been a perfectionist. Even as a kid, if he knew he would be playing video games with a friend at a certain time, he would practise beforehand. “I don’t even know where it comes from. I’ve just always had this will to succeed and do well and I’ve always had that fear of not doing everything I could. I never want that feeling.”

Lehman “pounded the table” for Pompey, says the team’s assistant general manager, Andrew Tinnish, who was scouting director back in 2010.

“I think what Jamie saw was a young athletic switch-hitter who showed the ability to make adjustments on the types of things he would ultimately see at the major-league level someday.”

The Jays drafted Pompey, who put off his accounting career and signed a $150,000 bonus.

Like a lot of newly drafted players, Pompey was initially shocked by the depth of baseball’s minor leagues, by the number of players and the rungs you have to climb. But again he found he could adapt and adjust. He faced major-leaguers on rehab assignments and realized they weren’t superheroes. They made mistakes, too. But they were more consistent. “I said to myself, ‘I’m as good as these guys,’” Pompey recalls. “That was a moment when I thought maybe I could play in the big leagues. I figured it would take some time, but it actually happened quicker than I expected.”

He battled injuries in his early minor-league years, but enjoyed a breakout in 2014, which started in Class-A Dunedin and ended in Toronto.

Pompey says it’s “unbelievable” to think he could be the Jays’ first hometown starter. Then he goes on to say what he’s supposed to: that he’s just focused on playing his game and not worrying about anything else. But later, with the interview winding down, he reconsiders and answers again.

“I just think myself being from Ontario, it gives kids the opportunity to see that anything is possible for them. I was a 16th-round pick, I wasn’t a big star. I just worked hard and tried to make the most of my opportunity. It didn’t matter where I came from. I still got that opportunity and kind of ran with it. But sometimes I feel like, with what you said about being the first local guy, there might be a responsibility to that, being from Ontario, playing in Ontario for Toronto, and all the people around they feel like they can relate to me just because I’m from there. I still feel it when I go to games and stuff. It’s awesome. But it’s one of those things, too, where I just try to be a role model for not just kids, but anybody who sees me, anybody who wants to accomplish something. Just because you’re from Canada doesn’t mean anything, you know? You can do anything you set your mind to. I’ve always had that approach and I hope people have that approach, too.”

While the racing around and the ballpark food are familiar to the Pompeys, last Sunday marked a first in their baseball-parenting career when they watched both their sons in the same game as the Jays and Canadian juniors played each other in an exhibition. Ken and Val swapped jerseys every half-inning — alternating between Team Canada red and Jays’ blue — so neither parent would be seen favouring one son over the other. “I had a permanent smile on my face,” Val says.

Watching the game she couldn’t help but think back to when they were kids, tracing all the twists and turns that led them to where they are now. But neither Val nor Ken can remember the park in Brampton where Dalton first dragged them. “There have been so many, they all start to blur together,” Ken says. Then after thinking a little he stops and smiles as if he’s found it. “Anyway now we can see him just down the road at the Rogers Centre.”