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Ray of hope: White Sox aided Draft prospect
- Updated: May 31, 2016
Corey Ray will experience a time when all the baseball he’s played starts to run together. Maybe it’ll happen when he’s become a regular at the All-Star Game, maybe when he’s moved on to start coaching other players. Maybe just when he’s lived long enough to become the old guy in the room, not the kid with the smile who is all ears.
Ray will forget some things along the way. Everybody does. But one thing he believes he’ll remember forever is the trip he took to Cary, N.C., in 2011, the summer after his sophomore year at Chicago’s Simeon Career Academy, to participate in the Breakthrough Series, a three-day event featuring 80 of the nation’s top players from urban communities.
It was Ray’s first visit to USA Baseball’s National Training Complex, the first time he ever pulled on Team USA gear. As talented as he was, as hard as he’d worked, he was, well, nervous about how he’d handle himself.
2016 Draft: June 9-11, MLB Network and MLB.com
“I just [went] crazy,” Ray said. “I don’t think till this day I’ve ever played better than I played that weekend. I was so surprised: ‘Where is this coming from?’ Then I’d look at the coaches’ faces and they had a look like they weren’t surprised. They knew.”
Those coaches were Kevin Coe, Justin Stone and Dan Puente from the White Sox ACE (Amateur City Elite) program. They were in on the ground floor with Ray and an impressive wave of talent from Chicago, coaching him and Vanderbilt’s Ro Coleman Jr., among many others now in college or professional baseball, since they were 12-year-olds.
“Corey was the best player there,” Coe said. “There were players there who are playing professional baseball now, players there who went high in the Draft. Corey was lights out. He put himself on the map. Charles Peterson, a scout for the Cardinals, still talks about it. He said he turned him in as a ’60’ after that weekend. That’s a perennial All-Star.”
Ray, a junior outfielder for the University of Louisville, is getting …
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