Local kid Varland makes it to The Show

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It was about a decade ago now that Cole Hutchens was a young 20-something who had grown up in North St. Paul and worked at a small local store called Richard’s Market. There was a family of five who would stop in all the time for various odds and ends. Over time, they got to know that Hutchens had graduated from North High and had started coaching baseball there.

The two young boys, born 13 months apart, came to repeat the same refrain: “We’re going to play for you someday.”

“If a Varland tells you they're going to do something, they're going to do that,” Hutchens now says. “That's one thing that I've learned in my time of knowing the Varland family. It does not matter if it's their sister, Georgi, or if it's their mom or dad. If a Varland tells you they can do something, they will do it. If you tell them they can't do something, they'll still find a way to do it.”

When Louie Varland graduated from North High School a few years later, having worked with Hutchens and longtime head coach Paul Adams, he threw 85 mph on a good day and couldn’t really throw strikes, ending up at Division II ball close to home at Concordia University in St. Paul. In 2019, 448 players were selected ahead of Varland in the MLB Draft before the Twins threw him a 15th-round selection.

Wednesday afternoon, he'll have “Minnesota” stamped across his chest for his debut for his hometown team, the first Concordia graduate to overcome the odds and make it all the way to the Majors. There probably aren’t many tougher first assignments in the Majors than facing off against the Bronx Bombers at Yankee Stadium in Game 1 of a doubleheader, much less for a kid who grew up in Minnesota and undoubtedly knows the history between the clubs all too well.

“If there’s any guy that could handle the pressure in a situation like this, it’s Louie,” said Neil Lerner, now the head coach at Concordia.

“Last night, I talked to Louie,” said Mark “Lunch” McKenzie, the former head coach at Concordia. “I said, ‘Louie, you're going to have the best defense you've ever had playing behind you. Throw that ball over that little white house.’ And he goes, ‘Coach, this is going to be so fun.’”

Even as Varland became one of the biggest breakout stars of the Twins’ organization, winning Minor League Pitcher of the Year honors in 2021 while cranking his fastball velocity all the way up into the high 90s to post a 2.10 ERA last year and a 3.06 mark this season, he kept close ties to his community, as he did when he stuck around for college in St. Paul.

He’ll come home during the offseasons with his brother, Gus, a pitcher for the Dodgers’ Triple-A team. The pair will work alongside their dad, Wade, at the family drywall business, established by their grandfather. Their mom, Kim, used to work at WCCO, the local radio station. And now, Hutchens, who coached the Varland boys on the B squad at North High a decade ago, runs his own baseball academy in North St. Paul called “Take the Field,” where he’s making it his life’s work to expand the sport in his community.

“Hutch,” as he’s known to all close to him, has a small gym at that complex where Varland works out three or four days a week during the offseasons. And from the start, when Take the Field was established in 2015, Louie and Gus Varland were always there, with best friend Zach Lauzon, giving whatever time they could -- whether in helping lay turf, put down netting or help conduct clinics. Now, since Louie is home during the baseball offseasons, he helps emphasize and teach physical fitness for local youth who work there.

Every offseason, Hutch says, Louie shows up with extra gloves from pro ball for kids who need them before he asks for permission to work out at the complex -- as if he isn’t like family there already.

“Obviously, not every human being is Louie Varland,” Hutchens said. “It's definitely really sweet to see the kids in the community that he's worked with or been around being able to say hi to him and not him being too cool for school, so to speak. He will talk to any kid he's ever worked with. He always takes the time to give them his undivided attention. He never just blows anybody off. He always takes the time.

“That's one thing I can say about Louie. He's not afraid to put the time in, no matter what he's doing, to make sure that he gets the result that he desires, whether it's to make sure that a kid that he has the chance to work with understands a concept, or he's helping me out with growing the game and baseball in our community in North St. Paul. As far as that goes, it's pretty sweet.”

Louie had a long way to go when he emerged from that community. Gus graduated a year ahead of him and went to play for McKenzie at Concordia, and when it came time for Louie’s recruitment process, McKenzie remembers that the younger Varland didn’t want to play with his older brother -- he wanted to play against him.

But when Louie saw how Concordia’s staff had upped Gus’ velocity, he was sold -- and by the end of his tenure with the Golden Bears, he was throwing 92-94 with a bigger body than his brother, enough for the Twins to throw him the 15th-round pick. After cleaning up his mechanics even more with the Twins, Varland cruised all the way up to Triple-A for the first time this August, where hundreds of North St. Paul and Concordia affiliates made their way to CHS Field to watch him as a professional for the first time.

That local kid they brought up? There he was, carrying 97-98 mph with command into the sixth inning as he allowed one hit through 5 1/3 innings in his Triple-A debut.

“I've been sitting in the dugout my whole life,” McKenzie said. “We're sitting right behind the Saints’ dugout, and that ball was just a blur.”

“That's when I thought, ‘This is a Major League pitcher,’” Lerner said.

Other local kids have obviously made outsized impacts on their hometown team in recent years. Most notably, of course, is Joe Mauer, the all-everything “natural” from Cretin-Derham Hall who went No. 1 overall, preternaturally gifted at everything he touched from an early age. Even Glen Perkins, the All-Star closer from Stillwater, was a first-round Draft selection out of the University of Minnesota.

That’s not the path Varland has taken to get to this point. He’s added nearly 15 miles an hour to his fastball since his freshman year at Concordia -- only five years ago -- and has gone from completely off the radar to the No. 10 prospect in the system, per MLB Pipeline.

McKenzie and Lerner remember the kid who would be the first to come in to help raise the inflatable “dome” over the football field at Concordia so that he could make do with the facilities in the winter at his northern Division II program to further his career. Before that, Hutchens remembers the kid who once got frustrated with his teammates for moving too slowly to prepare the field on hot and humid days, to the point where Louie went out and carried all the mound weights and hundred-pound tarps away himself while his agape friends watched him start his warmup routine.

“The one thing you won't do with those two [Varland] kids, you won't outwork them,” Adams said. “And I think that's why they're both where they're at today.”

Hutchens still remembers the first time Louie ever pitched for him, too. The younger Varland isn’t the loudest or most outspoken guy, but Hutch still remembers that wry, confident smile.

“He taps me on the shoulder and smiles and says, 'I got it, Hutch,'” Hutchens remembers. “It was like, yeah, I'm 23 and this kid's talking like he's Zeus getting ready to go throw thunderbolts out there, which he is.”

Hutch is in the stands at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday. Perhaps he’ll catch a glimpse of that smile -- from the biggest stage in the sport, this time, as if, saying one more time for all the eyes in North St. Paul affixed to their television sets: “I got it.”