Benintendi still impressing folks with talent, drive

When Andrew Benintendi was 5 years old, his father, Chris, took him out on the acre the family owned in southwest Ohio to practice shagging fly balls.

Chris Benintendi would grab a tennis ball and a racquet, hitting the ball as hard as he could. His firstborn would leg out the high flies, catching them nearly every time.

Seventeen summers later, Andrew Benintendi is adjusting to life as a big-league baseball player, having notched two hits in his first start for the Red Sox as 18 family members looked on at Safeco Park.

But Chris Benintendi, a partner at a Cincinnati law firm, never suspected his only son would make it this far.

“Looking back, maybe he was showing us some special things, but we didn’t know it,” Chris said. “We just thought it was kind of cool.”

“They were just out playing ball,” Jill Benintendi said of the days her husband and son spent in the backyard with the tennis ball. “But now, you do look at it and you go, ‘What other 5-year-old…?'”

If her little tyke was abnormally athletic, odds are that Jill herself probably had something to do with it. She and her husband were both varsity athletes in high school, she on the hardwood and he manning the hot corner. One of Chris Benintendi’s sisters, too, is a former college basketball standout.

And while Chris Benintendi can’t say he’s always seen his son as Major League material, he thinks Andrew’s athletic aptitude has always been around.

“He’s not a kid that you would look at and say, ‘This guy looks like a professional baseball player,'” Chris said of Andrew. “But he’s athletic, and he’s always been athletic, even as a small child. When he was a baby, he’d pick up a ball and shoot into a little hoop. Then we started swinging a bat when he was a little bit older.”

And to John Kelly, it was apparent from a young age that Andrew had the intangible qualities sport often requires. A Wittenburg University teammate and 30-year friend of Chris Benintendi’s, Kelly coached 8-year-old Andrew on a travel baseball team known as the Madeira Crew.

“He was incredibly coachable,” Kelly said. “Even at that age, the other players looked up to him. They knew how talented he was. He was the best player on the team; more than that, he was the smartest player on the team.”

Andrew’s work ethic, too, was second to none.

“He had a drive within himself to where, I think, he wanted to be the best, whether he wanted to be the best 7-year-old, the best 10-year-old, the best 18-year-old [player],” Chris Benintendi said. “You wouldn’t know it because he’s not very outspoken, but we would know.”

And Jill recalls her son hitting the gym at Madeira High School to shoot hoops for a half hour before classes started, in hopes of making the basketball team as a freshman.

Not only did Andrew, then 5-foot-8 and 135 pounds, make the team, but he smashed records as a four-year varsity starter — he remains Madeira High’s all-time leading scorer by 298 points, as well as the school leader in three-pointers, steals and free throws — and in his junior year was an Ohio Division III co-Player of the Year.

But to hear Jim Reynolds, who coached the high school basketball team for 25 years, tell it, Benintendi always stayed even-keeled. Plus, Reynolds said, his skills were just plain impressive. That brought to mind a comment from an opposing coach.

“‘Man, that kid can play,'” Reynolds remembers being told.

His response?

“You should see him play baseball.”

And during his career with the Mustangs, people did.

Though people began telling Chris Benintendi his son had the potential to play Division I baseball when Andrew was just 12 years old, it wasn’t until the younger Benintendi donned Madeira blue and gold that he truly turned heads.

It was also around that time that he decided to focus his efforts more fully on baseball. Though his parents say basketball was Andrew’s first love, he realized that at 5-foot-10, he didn’t have the stature to go as …

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