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UMATILLA - When Jonathan Lucroy agreed to play winter-league baseball, he expected to see hundreds of pitches coming at him. What he didn't expect was hundreds of e-mail messages.
Lucroy, 21, has come a long way since graduating from Umatilla High School in 2004. He excelled as a catcher for the University of Louisiana-Lafayette for three seasons and was drafted by the Milwaukee Brewers in the third round of the 2007 Major League Baseball draft.
Now, after batting .342 in a half-season in a rookie league, he is playing baseball in paradise and writing a journal about it. Lucroy's journal, written in Hawaii, has been published the past two Mondays on the Minor League Baseball Web site, milb.com.
"Hawaii is a wonderful place to play winter ball," Lucroy writes.
Lucroy is one of the youngest and least-experienced players in the league but is the league's only player writing a journal.
"I met a guy who works for MLB.com while playing in a showcase in 2005. [Recently] he wrote me an e-mail asking me to write the journal," Lucroy said.
Lucroy has plenty to write about and is well prepared for it. In college he took several writing courses and majored in environmental and sustainable resources. That background has helped him write about Hawaii's ecology.
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Dave Heeren
The Sentinel
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"We went snorkeling over an extinct volcano," he writes. "I fully expected to go up there and see plumes of lava shooting into the air."
After his first article, Lucroy received more than 150 e-mail messages. Most were from people he knows. The rest were baseball-related questions from fans. He answered a few of the questions in the second installment of his journal. He replies to all of his messages.
But he prefers writing about the beauty of his surroundings.
"Personally, I like the rain forest, the mountains," he said. "Other guys like the beaches, but in Florida I've been there and done that."
He writes, "We played three games before taking a bus up into the rain forest, which was absolutely unbelievable."
Oh, and he also has played some baseball. Lucroy plays for the North Shore Honu, one of the league's better teams. His catching coach is a former player in a Japanese professional league.
The way Lucroy describes the daily workouts his coach puts him through makes him sound more like a football player than a baseball player -- a combination of an offensive lineman, a wide receiver and a quarterback.
"He works me every day in blocking, receiving and throwing," he writes.
Lucroy is hoping the experience in the winter league will enable him to land in the Class A Florida State League next spring. Milwaukee's farm team in that league plays in Brevard.
"It's only about an hour's drive from my home. If I play there, my dad probably won't miss a game. He loves it," Lucroy said.
He wrote his thoughts about the paradise where he lives: "Not having fun here would be a really tough thing to do."
But the reality of minor-league baseball isn't as glamorous as it seems. He said, "A lot of people think this life is glamorous, and it really isn't until you get to the Big Show."
Lucroy has his sights set on playing Major League Baseball, and on coaching college baseball after that. In the meantime, he's taking things one step at a time.
A nice next step would be a spot on the Brewers' Brevard roster in 2008.
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