June 4, 2008

This story originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Tar Heel Monthly, which is a complimentary benefit to all Rams Club members and is also available on a subscription basis.

By Adam Lucas

Never play Wiffle ball with Tim.

That's what Pat Fedroff learned at a very early age. Before his older brother Tim was Carolina's starting right fielder, he was a Wiffle ball terror in his backyard in New Jersey. There were always enough kids around--the Fedroff family also had plenty of cousins living nearby--to start a competitive game, and the rules were simple:

Every hitter stayed at bat until he made three outs. When three outs were made, pass the bat to the next hitter. Usually, after a couple of times through the order, the boys would head for the Fedroff family pool or move on to a different game.

Unless Tim was playing. His father, a former college football player at the University of Maine, had named him Timothy Dominic Fedroff, which was intended to honor the boy's grandfather. Of course, it didn't hurt that the name just so happened to have a catchy ring, "T.D. Fedroff," on the football field, which is where the family assumed he'd make his athletic reputation.

Once they saw him play Wiffle ball, however, they realized his future might be on the diamond rather than the gridiron. Three simple outs could take a half-hour or longer when T.D. Fedroff was at the plate.

"Those poor kids would be out there dying in the heat," says Fedroff's father, who is also named Tim Fedroff.

"Tim, you ready to get in the pool?" Pat would ask him.

"We can't yet," the younger Tim would say. "I don't have my three outs yet."

Then he'd get back in his stance, ready for the next pitch. The pool would have to wait.

Tim the Wiffle ball demon soon moved on to a more structured game of baseball. Fedroff's dad served as his little league coach. In coaches' pitch games, the elder Fedroff would give out a game ball to the player he felt was most deserving. Of course, his son was usually that player, but he didn't want to be that guy. You know that guy. You've seen him on Saturdays at your local field. He's the one who starts his kid at shortstop even though he's more suited to the outfield.

So he devised a unique system: Tim, although the star of the team, was ineligible to receive the game ball. But he was also the primary consult when Coach Tim was determining that week's game ball recipient.

"You do the same thing every week in the games," the coach told his son, leaving out the part where Tim's "same thing" was a couple of home runs and a few great catches. "We need to support the kids who don't do it all the time."

"The other parents would want to know why I wasn't giving the ball to my son," says the elder Fedroff. "But he got such a kick out of helping me pick the winner. He loved it when guys got a hit who hadn't had a hit all year."

Tim had plenty of hits. He was a standout outfielder at Hillsborough High School and a two-time all-state pick. Soon, some of the best college programs in America, including powerhouse LSU, were offering him a scholarship.

But Fedroff had one specific school in mind. As a child, when he wasn't dominating the neighborhood Wiffle ball games, he was captivated by the University of North Carolina basketball team. In the fourth grade, a teacher assigned his class to make a pillow representative of their interests. Fedroff's was blue and white and featured the Carolina logo.

"The basketball team got me hooked on Carolina," he says. "Watching Antawn Jamison and Vince Carter drew me in. And I knew that if I could go there to play baseball, that's what I wanted to do."

The Fedroff family had visited Chapel Hill during his sophomore year of high school, sitting in the stands to watch a baseball game. As each new pitcher came to the mound, the elder Fedroff would say, "Do you think you could hit this guy?"

"It didn't matter whether he could actually hit them or not," says his father. "It mattered that he could see it and think he could. We always wanted him to find a place he felt comfortable and at home. When we were in Chapel Hill, he knew it was the place for him."

But the Tar Heels were well-stocked with in-state position players. With plenty of offensive talent within a five-hour drive of campus, by the summer of 2005 Mike Fox's program had reached the point that only a few carefully selected out-of-staters filled the remaining spots in each recruiting class. Often, those out-of-state players were pitchers.

So in August of 2005, Fedroff and his parents went to one of the numerous baseball recruiting showcases unsure of his Carolina future. The event was held in Towson, Md., which just happened to be enduring a heat wave that saw temperatures break 100 degrees every day.

Fedroff batted a team-high .818 with 8 RBI in the recent Cary regional.

Fedroff wasn't outstanding at the event but Carolina assistant coach Chad Holbrook was amazed at how hard he played. At one 8 a.m. game, after playing three games the day before, Fedroff slapped a ball to second base and turned it into an infield single when the second baseman took an extra blink to make his throw. On a day when most players were wilting, Fedroff was running out every grounder and sprinting on and off the field at the end of every half-inning.

"Coach Holbrook had told me he might want to talk to me at that event," Fedroff says. "And when I looked up in the stands during one of our games, he was talking to my dad. I looked at my dad and he gave me a thumbs-up, so I felt like things were going well."

At the game's conclusion, Holbrook walked with the Fedroff family to their car. He had big news: Carolina was offering a scholarship.

"He was one of the most elated players I've ever offered a scholarship," Holbrook says.

A scholarship offer usually comes with certain understandings. It's the player's job to go home, weigh his offers, and perhaps ask a few questions of the coaching staff. Especially for a player like Fedroff who had plenty of options, Holbrook assumed he'd want to take a few days to consider his choices.

It took a few seconds.

"I want to go to North Carolina," Fedroff told his parents when they were inside the family car. "What is there to think about?"

"What are you waiting for?" his father told him. "Go tell Coach."

So Fedroff bolted out of the backseat, sprinted across a soccer field, and ran down Holbrook approximately 150 yards away.

"I want to be a Tar Heel," the out-of-breath Fedroff said.

"I'm sitting there in the car and it's blazing hot and I see Tim and Coach Holbrook hugging, so I figured things were going pretty well," his father says.

Fedroff was one of just five out-of-state players in his 14-man recruiting class; the only other out-of-state position player was catcher Mark Fleury.

That required a quick cultural adaptation to the South, where "barbecue" is a food you eat, not what you do on the grill during a cookout. He quickly developed a fondness for Chick-fil-A (there's not one within 15 miles of his hometown of Flagtown, N.J.) and learned not to take personally the occasional blank stares at his accent.

"We give him a pretty hard time," says Forest City, N.C., native Chad Flack. "We try to talk like him, but it's not easy."

No matter how far from home he might be, he always has a piece of home with him on the field. Fedroff grew up a diehard fan of the New York Yankees ("I have no idea what happened," says his father, a fan of the rival Boston Red Sox) and keeps a plastic bag full of Yankee Stadium dirt in his locker. Before every game, he puts a pinch of the dirt in his right back pocket.

"He's a little superstitious," says roommate Brian Moran. "There for a while we were going to Ye Olde Waffle Shop for breakfast every morning that we have a game. Then he didn't get a hit one day and we haven't been back since."

Those days without hits are rare. He hits for average (a team-leading .395 at the end of April). He hits for power (a team-leading nine home runs at the end of April). He hits right-handed pitchers (.379) and left-handed pitchers (a team-leading .429).

He even hits when he has a temperature of 102, as he played through a virus in an April 6 doubleheader against Georgia Tech. By the time the team bus returned to the makeshift locker room at Kenan Stadium--the team is using that facility while Boshamer Stadium is renovated--Fedroff was overcome with chills. By then, however, he'd already started both games and picked up three hits.

And yet those gaudy offensive numbers are far down the list once Fox begins raving about his starting rightfielder. Savvy recruiters will tell you that it's not enough to pay attention to a player's hits. In all sports, there's a consistently underrated part of a recruit's vital statistics: winning. An extraordinarily talented player who never plays for a winner is a red flag. Likewise, a hardworking player with above-average tools who consistently wins is an eyebrow-raiser.

Fedroff's Hillsborough High team was a three-time conference champion and 2005 state champion.

"Tim Fedroff is about as low-maintenance a player as you could possibly have," the head coach says. "He just makes it easy. Pride is the best word to describe him. Coach Holbrook said it best: Tim takes every at-bat extremely personally. He gets in that box and the pitcher is trying to take something he wants. Tim relishes that competition every time."

Fedroff's aggressive baserunning has turned several singles into doubles this season.

That skill set makes Fedroff a somewhat acquired taste. He's not a pure hitter like classmate Dustin Ackley or a raw talent like former classmate Drew Poulk. He's not especially tall (he's listed at 5-foot-11) and although he's a solid defensive player who has made himself a much better outfielder, he doesn't have the cannon arm that wows the casual fan.

Watching him take batting practice won't wow you unless you're the type of fan who appreciates the subtleties of watching a hitter go to all fields consistently. In fact, perhaps the best way to become a Fedroff fan is to watch him poke a routine infield grounder...and then sprint down the first-base line like he's headed for a Paul O'Neill (yes, the passionate soul of the 1990s Yankee dynasty is Fedroff's idol) autograph signing.

"When we first saw him at East Cobb (in a recruiting showcase), he didn't jump out," Fox says. "We had to see him over the course of time. We started to notice that every time he'd hit, say, a grounder to second, he'd always at least make the play close at first because he ran so hard down the line. Then, once we got him here, the more we watched him in fall practice, we'd come back in the office and say, `We've got ourselves a really good player here.'"

But Fedroff still didn't make the starting opening day outfield in 2006, his freshman season. He didn't get an at-bat until the fifth game of the season and didn't start until the sixth game of the year.

"This is going to be your day," Reid Fronk told him before that afternoon's contest against Stony Brook. Fronk was right, as Fedroff hit a home run from the eighth spot in the batting order.

Fedroff finally moved into the starting lineup for good in early April, and as the 2008 season approaches the postseason, he's started 97 of Carolina's last 99 games. His outstanding freshman season--hitting .344 and earning freshman All-America honors from Collegiate Baseball--were largely overshadowed by the amazing rookie campaign from Ackley. As a sophomore, though, Fedroff has emerged and is a mainstay in the third slot in Carolina's batting order.

Fox's appreciation for watching his recruit run out those grounders to second in high school showcases turned out to be foreshadowing. In an April 15 game at UNC-Greensboro this year, Fedroff became the first Tar Heel to hit for the cycle in recorded Carolina baseball history. And how did he do it? After blasting a triple, double, and home run in his first three at bats and then working a walk on his next trip to the plate, his final at-bat resulted in a grounder to second base. When Spartans second baseman Tim Carrier was too casual fielding the ball, Fedroff's speed enabled him to beat the play at first and record an infield single--and the cycle.

"Tim is a hard-nosed ballplayer," says Flack, which is the ultimate compliment coming from him. "He's out there to do one thing only: win. And when he's out there, he'll do everything he can to do that. When you watch a player like that play, it's something special."

The question now is exactly how long Tar Heel fans will be able to watch Fedroff play. College baseball players typically aren't draft eligible until their third year removed from high school. This is just Fedroff's second year removed from Hillsborough High, but the draft rules also state that a player who is 21 years old within 45 days of the event is eligible. Because of an extra grade in the New Jersey school system known as "TP," which was intended to bridge the gap between kindergarten and first grade, Fedroff is an older sophomore. In fact, he turned 21 on Feb. 4 of this year, making him eligible for this June's draft.

Draft-eligible sophomores are a relative rarity on the college scene. In general, the best college players sign professional contracts after their junior year because that gives them the most leverage. When drafted after their junior season, they can always tell pro teams they plan to return to college to coax more money out of their new employer. If they wait until after their senior season, that leverage disappears and offers tend to be substantially smaller.

But a draft-eligible sophomore has two years of leverage. Assuming he's picked when the major league draft begins tomorrow, Fedroff can tell the club that drafts him that he plans to return to school...and then do the same thing in 2009 if he's picked after his junior season.

The University of Texas had two key draft-eligible sophomores in 2007 who followed opposite paths. Bradley Suttle, an infielder, was picked by the New York Yankees in the fourth round and signed a $1.3 million contract. Longhorn teammate Kyle Russell, the 2007 college home run leader, was picked in the fourth round by the St. Louis Cardinals but chose to return to school. As of early April, Russell was not listed among Baseball America's top 50 for the June 2008 draft.

In the baseball draft, which team picks you means more than where you're selected. So when the names start scrolling on Thursday, Fedroff will be paying more attention to the team that calls his name than the round in which he's picked. True to his pedigree, though, he doesn't seem particularly impressed about the idea of being Carolina's latest pro.

"My heart is at Carolina," he says. "Of course it's something to look at, but that's for after our season is over. Right now I'm not worried about anything but our season."

As much as he can probably picture himself in Yankee pinstripes, it's worth remembering that he made a Carolina pillow, not a Yankee pillow, for that fourth grade class assignment.

"You can't imagine how much it touches me to see him playing for Carolina," the elder Fedroff says. "Very few people get to live a dream. Tim is living his dream right now."

Adam Lucas is the publisher of Tar Heel Monthly. He is also the author or co-author of four books on Carolina basketball.