Curtis Granderson figured his professional career would last two years—maybe three, tops. Drafted by the Tigers in 2002 out of the University of Illinois of Chicago, he could see the end from the start. All the scouts that said he wasn’t good enough, that he’d put up big numbers against bad competition, that he wasn’t athletic enough or strong enough to be a major leaguer—he figured they’d be proven right. “It motivated me to go, but at the same time, I was on the understanding that there might be some validity to it,” he says.
If nothing else, by the end of his first full year in the minors in 2003, Granderson was ready to quit.