Quinton Miller, a pitcher in the Pittsburgh Pirates' minor league system, is in his third year of professional baseball and is looking to build on the successful high school career he had in South Jersey.
Atlantic City Weekly recently had the opportunity to talk with one of South Jersey's professional baseball players, Quinton Miller, over the phone.
Here is Miller's story, which traces the pitcher's journey from high school to professional baseball.
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Quinton Miller is a 6’1’’, 185-pound right-handed pitcher who attended Shawnee High School in Medford, N.J., Burlington County from 2004-2008.
But Miller was not always an East Coast kid. Until the age of 12, Miller lived in Simi Valley, California, a town about an hour north of Los Angeles. He moved to Medford in 2002.
At Shawnee, Miller, a hard throwing pitcher with a loose arm action, was a four-year varsity player for Shawnee head coach Brian Anderson.
Following his junior year in early July 2007, the right-hander was named to the 2007 Aflac All- American High School Baseball Classic roster, securing his place as one of the nation’s elite prospects. The Aflac classic is an annual showcase of the country’s best rising senior baseball players.
Miller was offered scholarships from basically every single college in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) and the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) while he was in high school.
Ultimately, the blue-chip prospect chose to sign with ACC perennial powerhouse, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC).
He signed his National Letter of Intent in November 2007, but verbally committed to UNC a few months earlier, just before his senior prep season.
Around the same time that he selected UNC for college, Miller began attracting interest from Major League Baseball (MLB) clubs.
“Each [MLB] organization started sending me questionnaires the summer going into my senior year,” Miller tells Atlantic City Weekly.
“The pro teams [continued to show more interest] in the fall of my senior year, and then once the season started my senior year, it was just full blast. Scouts would come to my house sometimes to talk to get a feel of my desire to play pro ball over college and they would come see me pitch at my games.”
Miller went on to have a stellar senior season at Shawnee in 2008, confirming his identity as a top-notch baseball prospect. He went 6-3 with a 2.13 earned run average (ERA) and 85 strikeouts in 52.1 innings (he also hit .335 with 6 home runs and 23 RBIs as an infielder), en route to earning First Team All- South Jersey honors.
Then came the 2008 MLB draft in which the Pittsburgh Pirates selected Miller in the 20th round (594th overall). Had it not been for his strong commitment to UNC, Miller would have been selected much earlier in the draft.
As a young child, Shawn Sanford thought his father, Jimmy Sanford, was an actual superhero.
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“It freaked me out. I don’t really know exactly what happened next, but I dug down deep and decided that I’m either going to stop baseball and get a job, or I have to do something here. My last few games, I took the ball and threw it as hard as I possibly could.”
Widely considered the top prospect in baseball, Trout was selected 25th overall by the Angels in the 2009 MLB Draft. Since then, the local product has been tearing up the minor leagues, which led to his promotion.
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