The coach was curious, so he shoved a bag of sunflower seeds into his pocket and caught the elevator down to the first floor of the Sunscape Resort in Willemstad, Curacao.
It was January 2009. That morning the coach had seen a young shortstop with rare defensive abilities.
Now he wondered if the kid could be taught to hit well enough that bringing him to the United States made sense.
In the lobby, 19-year-old Andrelton Simmons — all 145 pounds of him — was waiting with his father.
Kurt Russell ran the baseball team at Western Oklahoma State, a community college in a cow town of about 20,000 near the Texas border — about as far from the bright lights of a major league stadium as you can get on the college level.