There are a million different paths to the major leagues, it's true, but there are an equal number of ways that the road can veer in a different direction, too. Max Kepler's route to right field in Target Field, to sudden fame and surprising accomplishment at an early age, to what looks like a long future in a Twins uniform, is already among the most unique, since it involves ballet dancers and a broken bike, the Bavarian Alps and a European capital, parental sacrifice and imaginative scouts.
But that superhighway to success might easily have detoured into a German dead end a decade ago, had a 14-year-old Kepler not yawned his way through ballgames, acted up around coaches, and considered giving up the game.
"His coach came to me one day and said: 'We cannot do anything else for him. He's becoming belligerent on the field. He's misbehaving,' " said Kathy Kepler, the rookie outfielder's mother and chief promoter. " 'He's not going after the baseball like we know he can. He's not running [hard]. He's not challenged by it.' "
Kepler loved challenge, enjoyed playing competitive golf, a variety of team sports, and even so excelled at tennis that he was offered a scholarship by Steffi Graf's school. He learned to swim before he could speak; once he could, he became fluent in German, English, even Polish, the language of his father, Marek Rozycki.
Kepler was such an athletic prodigy, it seemed, even in a game he had not taken up until he enrolled at the American-supported John F. Kennedy School in Berlin, that the level of play on his various club teams was no longer interesting. "I got bored," Kepler admits. "I loved the game, played it every day. But I loved soccer, too, and the players were better. I'm a competitive person."
So competitive, in fact, that Kepler convinced his parents to take him to a baseball camp in the Czech Republic, where a scout spotted him and encouraged the family to enroll Max in a baseball academy in Regensburg, deep in the woods of Bavaria about 50 miles from Munich. And once there, it didn't take long for Kepler, still barely a teenager, whose experience was mostly limited to playing on well-worn soccer fields or worse, to be noticed.
"My husband was with Max, and wrote us to say there's 'somebody from LMB or something like that' who had taken an interest in him," Kathy Kepler said. "He didn't know what MLB was. It turned out to be a scout from the Cincinnati Reds. They were the first."
But hardly the last. European camps aren't a high priority for Major League Baseball scouts, given how few young athletes play a game that's still largely unknown on the continent. Still, those who attend from the United States are trained to spot raw tools, evaluate attitude and work ethic and project forward by several years.