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Home > Archive > Aug 23, 2007

From a ‘Saint’ to a Devil Ray
By Stephen Vincent
A former Dixie State College baseball player is now playing professionally just months afer returning home from an LDS mission.
Jimmy Scholzen, a Hurricane native, is now in his first year of playing professional baseball, playing second base for the Tampa Bay affiliate in Providence, W.Va.
Scholzen said his time at Dixie State College helped prepare him for a professional career.
“Dixie was in a wood-bat league,” Scholzen said. “That's what we use here is a wood bat. And the competition at Dixie was as good as it could get for a junior college.”
Scholzen played for the Rebels in 2005 and helped them win the Scenic West Athletic Conference championship, but the Rebels fell in the district playoffs that year.
Tampa Bay drafted and signed Scholzen after he played one season at Dixie State College, and then, in a rare move, the club waited while Scholzen served a Spanish-speaking mission in San Francisco.
The closest he came to baseball was walking by AT&T Park, the home of the San Francisco Giants.
Scholzen said that his fellow elders thought it was cool to have a future pro baseball player among their ranks.
“It's always nice to go home and have something to do,” Scholzen said.
The concept, however, didn't resonate with the soccer-loving people he taught.
“Whenever I talked to them about baseball, they weren't that excited about it,” Scholzen said.
On March 19, Scholzen returned home.
“I was like any other missionary,” Scholzen said. “At first, it was a little weird.”
Most missionaries find that returning from a highly structured environment to a low-structured one can be difficult, and Scholzen had that experience. After two weeks spent in Hurricane, Scholzen said he was getting antsy to find something to do, so he was glad to find himself heading to Florida for extended spring training, which again required Scholzen to adjust.
“It's somewhat tough going from being uplifted all the time to hearing the trash that gets said in the locker room,” Scholzen said.
But Scholzen said he was fortunate to find a friend in another returned missionary, Travis Barnett, who was at spring training.
Assigned to play second base at Providence, the Devil Rays' rookie league team, Scholzen spends his days working on his game. Scholzen arrives at the ballpark at 2 p.m. to prepare for the 7 p.m. game. He usually doesn't leave the ballpark until around midnight, and then he goes home to sleep until 9 or 10 a.m.
Scholzen doesn't have many off-days, nor does his schedule usually allow for church attendance, which he says is a difficult thing for a guy just off his mission.
But his mission has proved beneficial on the ball field, particularly in helping him deal with the workload.
“It's a daily grind of doing it every single day,” Scholzen said. “It's not like high school or college, where you play only on the weekends. It's every single day, and that's how my mission was.”
His Spanish has also been useful, as his shortstop is from the Dominican Republic, and it allows them to communicate. Scholzen said his Spanish-speaking teammates are impressed that someone from the United States would take the time to speak their language.
Mostly, though, his time in the minors is about doing what he loves, and Scholzen's love for baseball started in his hometown of Hurricane, where he began playing baseball as a young boy.
“It's probably just in my blood,” said Scholzen of why he loves baseball. “My entire family was into baseball. Ever since we were old enough to play baseball, that's what we did.”
He grew up and played on the Hurricane Little League All-Star teams before playing all four years at Hurricane High School, graduating in 2004.
While working on his swing recently, Jimmy Scholzen decided to look through some pictures of his high school baseball years to see what his swing looked like back then.
“When I looked at those photos, all these memories of Hurricane came back to me,” Scholzen said. “We didn't do that well – we went to the playoffs only one year, but I had a lot of fun.”
It's that same attitude that Scholzen is using to carry himself in the pro ranks.
“Once you hit the professional ranks, you can't let it become a job,” Scholzen said. “You got to have fun playing it.”

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