OMAHA, Neb. — From afar, Arizona freshman phenoms Jacob Berry and Daniel Susac don’t seem very much alike.
Berry is compact and taut at 6 feet, 212 pounds. He’s fiery and intense. He’ll flip his bat after connecting for a big home run. He always sprints around the bases after the ball goes over the wall. That has happened a team-high 17 times this season.
Susac is long and lean at 6-4, 205. He’s calm and analytical. Aside from the occasional fist pump when a pitcher executes a pitch, the UA catcher doesn’t reveal his emotions.
As it turns out, though, the precious pair have more in common than their prolific statistics and All-America accolades.
Both are “very committed to being the best player they possibly can be — very competitive in nature,” said Arizona coach Jay Johnson, whose team is set to face Vanderbilt in its College World Series opener Saturday. “They expect to do well. Great work ethic. Very intelligent. Very baseball-minded.
“When they show emotion, it feels like it’s the appropriate time. When they have had adversity, they have enough self-confidence to respond in a championship or a winning-type-player fashion. So you put all those things together with their talent, now you have co-national Freshman of the Year-type players.”
Berry and Susac were named two of five co-national Freshmen of the Year by Collegiate Baseball. They’ve picked up plaudits almost daily since the regular season ended. When you hit well over .300, slug double-digit home runs and, in the case of Susac, catch almost every game, you’ll get that kind of recognition.
Johnson has had accomplished freshmen before. When Susac won Pac-12 Freshman of the Year honors, he was the second consecutive Wildcat to do so; Austin Wells earned the award in 2019.
But to have two on the same team who possess not just talent but what Johnson calls “usable skill”? That’s rare.
“You don’t know necessarily that it’s going to turn out like this,” Johnson said. “The thing that separates them the most for me is just their maturity.
“Both of them, mentally, are way further along than most young players at this time. When that matches the physical skills that they have, now you’re seeing the impact.”
Externally different; internally identical. Berry and Susac were born just nine days apart. Both have baseball in their blood.
Still doing damage
Berry’s parents, Perry and Lana, recently unearthed a video from when Jacob was 6 or 7 years old. It shows the oldest of their four children taking soft-toss swings from both sides of the plate.
Perry Berry, who had played at Louisiana-Lafayette and spent four seasons in the Houston Astros organization, encouraged Jacob to switch-hit. Perry, a right-handed batter, always struggled with breaking pitches. Hitting from both sides of the plate, Jacob would be able to see what’s coming.
But at no point did Perry push baseball onto Jacob.
“He really introduced it as a game to me,” Jacob Berry said. “He never made it more than a game, and I think that’s why I enjoyed it so much. I actually grew to love it.”
The Berrys, who lived in Page when Jacob was a youth, had a batting cage in their yard. Jacob always would nag Perry for one more round of pitches. Jacob would hit as long as Perry could throw. Sometimes Perry would have to cut things off because his arm got tired.
“That kid,” said Perry Berry, who’s now the superintendent of schools for the Queen Creek Unified School District. “Some kids just have to have a bat or a ball. They’re just active kids. He was one of those kids. He loved to compete. If we took him to a park or a neighbor’s house, he always wanted to play Wiffle ball or some game.”
Jacob always took an aggressive approach to hitting. “He was a kid who likes to do damage at the plate,” his father said.
Switch-hitting proved to be challenging at first for Jacob, who throws right-handed. One of his youth coaches, Jackie Tucker, the father of MLB first-round draft picks Carson and Cole Tucker, urged Berry to stick with it and fight through the struggles.
Perry refuses to take credit for his son’s short, powerful stroke, which Johnson has described as “low-maintenance.”
“This game of baseball can humble you,” said Perry Berry, who batted .229 in the minors. “If there’s anything you can do to try to keep things simple ...”
Perry gave Jacob a fundamental foundation but attributes his success to “being a student of the game, being coachable and finding what works for him the most.”
The need for Jacob and his siblings to play in competitive athletic events prompted the family to move to the Phoenix area. Lana became the CFO for the Chandler Unified School District.
Although Jacob developed into a draftable prospect as a corner infielder at Queen Creek High School — Perfect Game ranked him as the No. 3 player in Arizona in the class of 2020 — his parents valued education and wanted him to go to school. Perry knows first-hand how much a young man can grow physically and emotionally in a college environment.
While the Berrys are hopeful Jacob can become a big-leaguer someday, “being around good people and making good decisions” carried more weight, Perry said. He also likes that Jacob is playing in games of “tremendous significance,” such as the winner-take-all Super Regional finale against Ole Miss. Berry went 2 for 4 with a home run and four RBIs. His average has been in the mid-.300s or higher since the second weekend of the season.
“What’s impressed me the most in Jacob’s regard is his steadiness,” Johnson said. “He has a maturity about him that exceeds most freshmen.”
Most. Not all.
Arizona’s Daniel Susac let his emotions get the best of him when he was younger. Now, the even-keeled catcher is one of the Wildcats’ top players.
Susac the soothsayer
It seems hard to believe now, but when he was young, Susac “cussed like a sailor,” said his father, Nick. Daniel would throw his bat and lose his mind. It got so bad that Nick and wife Shawna would film his antics to show him what not to do.
That behavior might have started when Daniel was in diapers, playing Wiffle ball in the backyard with his brothers, Andrew and Matt. Both are significantly older than Daniel — 11 and 10 years, respectively — and they didn’t exactly exhibit model sportsmanship.
Having gone through the ups and downs of competitive baseball with his older kids — they both would play in college; Andrew is currently a member of the Pittsburgh Pirates organization — Nick knew Daniel wouldn’t last if he couldn’t keep his temper.
“As soon as you show that personality, it’s like dangling a salmon in front of a bear. You’re going to get eaten,” said Nick Susac, who owns a home-building company in Roseville, California.
“He keeps it inside more (now). He hasn’t lost any of the competitive edge. He just doesn’t show it.”
Daniel Susac can’t show it. His job won’t allow it. As veteran UA right-hander Quinn Flanagan noted, “As a catcher, you have to be one of the most mature guys on the field, just because you have to handle all these different pitchers.”
Whereas Berry, who mainly has served as the DH this season, might be able to stew between at-bats, Susac has to expel a bad one almost immediately. He understands and embraces his role.
“He’s really starting to absorb what it means to be a leader and bring that to the field every day,” said UA pitching coach Nate Yeskie, who coached Andrew at Oregon State and has known the Susacs for over a decade. “Even if he doesn’t swing the bat well, did we win? Did you catch well? Did you get that guy through that rough inning? Did you control the tempo? Those little nuance portions of the game is where he’s really starting to grow.”
Like his brothers, Daniel always had a passion for baseball. When he was little, he and his dad would talk about all-time MLB greats such as Walter Johnson, Rogers Hornsby and Ted Williams. As he got older, Daniel joined the cradle of catchers who would work out at the baseball facility at Jesuit High School that his father helped build. The group includes major-leaguers Max Stassi (one of Andrew Susac’s best friends), Andrew Knapp and Dom Nunez.
It’s no wonder, then, that Susac has wisdom beyond his 20 years. Take his breakdown of a critical at-bat in Arizona’s 17-16 comeback win over Washington in extra innings on May 14.
As Susac explained in meticulous detail afterward, the pitcher threw him a first-pitch slider. He then sat slider, which he doesn’t usually do, based on the scouting report, the right-on-right matchup and first base being open. Another slider came, and Susac got a good piece of it, fouling it off. He then figured a fastball was coming, and he stroked it to right-center for a double.
“Daniel has got a little bit more perspective from watching his brother go through those learning curves and growing pains,” Yeskie said. “And when you’re the youngest, you absorb things. He was getting challenged in the backyard playing Wiffle ball with his brothers. He probably learned a few words back there.”
A one-word tweet by Susac — “Omaha” — has garnered some attention this week. He sent that message to the world on June 11 ... of 2020.
Catchers see everything. Even the future.
“It was a goal at the time,” Susac said. “When I started to see some key older players say they were coming back ... it started to all come into action.
“And then as soon as I stepped on campus, I knew that this team had what it took. Every day since, it’s just been getting there. Now that we’re there, it’s trying to make the most out of it.”
