D.C.'s Major Player

'Just a Black Kid From D.C.'

One day in high school, Burriss was feeling cocky. He knew he was a better player than just about anybody he played with or against. So he asked Antoine Williams, a youth coach who, like McCarthy, had become a mentor to him: "What are my chances of making it to the big leagues?" He figured he'd get a standard answer: "I'd say they're pretty good, Manny. You've got serious talent."

Instead, this was the answer Williams gave him: "I'd say one in a million."

"He wasn't saying it to make me feel bad -- just to let me know what I was up against," Burriss said. "He said, 'One, you're from the inner city, and no scouts come around here. And two, you're a black kid from D.C. No one's going to believe in you. You can make it, but you're going to have to work harder than anyone else.' "

So that's what he did. At McCarthy's prodding, he learned to switch-hit, taking thousands of swings from the left side, where he would be a couple of steps closer to first base. But his biggest mission was to get faster.

"I thought I was fast, and for the group of guys I was around, I was," he said. "But my dad knew. He grew up watching [Willie] Mays and [Roberto] Clemente, so he knew what real speed looked like."

Together, father and son would wake before sunrise and go to the hill at Cardozo High, which Emmanuel would ascend while wearing ankle-weights, or with a rope tied to his waist with a tire at the other end.

"To this day," Emmanuel said, "I can't stand driving up Cardozo Hill."

For high school, Emmanuel chose Wilson, even though it required a 30-minute Metro ride, because a combination of mediocre grades and family finances made it impossible to consider private schools, and because Wilson, under Coach Eddie Saah, had the best baseball program in the city school system.

"I remember one time we were playing DeMatha," Saah recalled, "and it was a 2-2 game, runners on first and third. Manny was the runner on third. And we put on one of those rinky-dink high school [double] steal plays, where the runner on first runs early. And before I could yell at Manny to go, he was already gone. He did a backdoor hook-slide and was safe. That's not something we do in practice. He was just a natural."

Playing ball at Wilson meant making sacrifices. The team played its home games on a football field, which meant the basepaths were grass, not dirt, and the right field fence was a mere 180 feet away. A ball over the fence? That would be a ground-rule single. At least it was better than the field Coolidge High used, which was a regulation field -- for Little League, that is, complete with bases spaced 60 feet apart (which were moved back into the outfield for the high schoolers) and a flat mound.

"The best fields we played on," Burriss said, "would have been considered sub-par anywhere else."

And playing at Wilson also meant Burriss would never play a high school game with a professional scout present. Still, he had his hopes up that he'd be drafted from high school -- which only made him bitter when he wasn't.