It was the fall of his senior year of high school and Travis Jankowski was leaning toward playing college football. He held just a single scholarship offer to play baseball, as opposed to five on the gridiron and had grown up on the sport in his hometown of Lancaster, Pa.
Before deciding, however, he sat down with Mike Davis, his high school coach at Lancaster Catholic.
“He said you don’t have the size for football,” recalled Jankowski, a two-time All-State wide receiver. “You’re 170 pounds going up against guys who are 250 pounds. It’s straight physics. You’re going to get crushed.”
Jankowski changed his mind. It was the best decision of his life.
Jankowski, a 6-foot-3 center fielder, accepted a scholarship offer from Stony Brook and three years later is living out his wildest dreams. Last week he was selected in the supplemental first round (the 44th selection overall) of Major League Baseball’s First-Year Player Draft by the Padres and this weekend he will lead Cinderella Stony Brook into the College World Series. The Seawolves are the first team from New York to reach the College World Series since St. John’s in 1980.
“I made the right choice,” Jankowski said. “It’s a surreal feeling right now.”
It wasn’t a seamless transition initially. Jankowski was raw when he got to Stony Brook, the result of never playing summer baseball because of football. He struggled that first season in college, hitting just .262 as a part-time starter. He wasn’t used to accepting failure and one poor at-bat led to another.
Things began to turn for him late in the spring and during his first summer of playing serious baseball. He read “Mind Gym, An Athlete’s Guide to Inner Excellence’’, and “Mental Toughness, Baseball’s Winning Edge,’’ books he credited with improving his mental approach. He also credited his coaches with instilling in him patience at the plate and in his outlook toward the game.
“I learned baseball is a game of failure,” he said. “If you have one bad at-bat, you have to forget about it.”
He hasn’t had many this season. The America East Player of the Year is hitting 422 with 18 doubles, 11 triples, five homers, 46 RBI and 36 steals.
“He’s as improved a player we’ve had here,” Stony Brook coach Matt Senk said.
Senk said he could tell Jankowski was a special talent when he first got to Stony Brook. He was gifted athletically, a whiz in the outfield — he’s made two errors in three years — with breakneck speed. His bat just wasn’t consistent, though he showed flashes. He worked relentlessly on that area of his game and became an unlikely high draft choice. Ironically, it’s his defense, Senk said, that remains his best quality, even after his big year at the plate.
“Travis can go into a major league ballpark right now and run out to center field and play big league center field for any team anywhere,” Senk said.
Minutes after Stony Brook won the school’s first regional title, beating Central Florida in the championship game, the team was celebrating in the parking lot with fans when Jankowski received a phone call from the Padres.
“It was a mosh pit with all my teammates and our fans,” he said. “It was a great celebration.”
Jankowski joked the only way this spring could get better is if Stony Brook wins a national championship and he gets sent directly to the major s by the Padres after that victory in the College World Series. The latter is unlikely, but the former remains a distinct possibility.
Jankowski does miss football, the sport he loved growing up. He’ll go watch the Stony Brook team practice and has attended its games. There are moments he thinks he could still do it. This spring, however, was a reminder those thoughts are silly.
“If I could go back, I wouldn’t change a thing,” he said. “I’m better off playing baseball.”
The last month has been a perfect example.