This Coast baseball player is an Ole Miss commit. He’s only in 9th grade.
As a seventh-grader, Kaden Irving stepped to the plate for his first at-bat as a member of the Gautier High School baseball team late during the 2018 season.
He was quickly called out of the box for a pep talk from coach Jonathan Salter, “Calm down. Have fun, play ball like you normally do.”
The first pitch to Irving provided an early lesson that there’s little time for nerves, even if you’re a 13-year-old stepping up to play with the high school boys.
“The first pitch hit me in the back of the head,” Irving told the Sun Herald last week. “It was pretty scary, but it kind of warmed me up a little bit.”
Irving ended up going 3-for-5 with a pair of runs scored and an RBI during a doubleheader against Bay High that day. The Gators finished 1-21 in 2018, but Irving hit .438 over a seven-game stretch to provide some hope for the future of a team that’s never made the playoffs or beaten its main rival, Pascagoula.
Now a 15-year-old freshman, Irving is a 6-1, 215-pound shortstop/pitcher who still has heaps of potential and has already committed to Ole Miss.
As an eighth-grader, Irving hit .359 with 10 RBIs as a third baseman and served as one of the team’s top two starting pitchers. He was the winning pitcher a year ago when the Gators beat Stone High 4-1 for the program’s first region victory since 2016.
This past football season, Irving stepped in as the starting quarterback for the Gautier football team. He showed off a strong arm, completing 59.4 percent of his passes for 1,398 yards, 12 touchdowns and 13 interceptions.
Advanced for his age
Irving has seemed advanced since he first started competing in youth sports at the age of 4.
His father, Kleon Irving, who is a member of the Pascagoula-Gautier school board, has been working with his son since he was very young.
“I probably started noticing (his athletic ability) at 3 with the way he was throwing the baseball,” Kleon Irving said. “He was actually allowed to start playing football at 4 years old. He was going out there and taking care of business against some older kids.”
While he enjoys football, the younger Irving believes that baseball is the sport that can take him the farthest.
Gautier baseball coach Jonathan Salter first got a glimpse of Irving during a camp about four years ago.
“He was bigger than the other fifth-graders and you could tell he’d been around (the game) a long time,” Salter said.
Thanks to plenty of hours spent in the cage with his father and work put in at numerous camps, Irving is advanced at the plate for his age. In the field, he shows off a strong arm and good range for a player his size.
“He has great athleticism. He moves well,” Salter said. “To be 6-1, 220 pounds, he moves well — side to side and back and forth. He throws the ball well. He tracks it well and he swings it well.”
High ceiling for Kaden Irving
Irving had one homer with 10 RBIs for a team that hit just .212 a year ago. In what should be a significantly improved lineup this year, he will hit leadoff so he can to get as many at-bats as possible.
He shies away from the suggestion that he’s primarily a power hitter, but there’s plenty of pop in the bat.
“He’s going to hit it hard,” Salter said about Irving. “Unless he misses it, he’s going to tattoo it.”
What makes Salter believe the power numbers will soon come for Irving is his solid approach at the plate.
“He uses his hips well. He keeps his hands inside the ball.” the third-year head coach said. “He’s big and strong. Even when he misses, he’s strong enough to do some damage.”
While Irving sees himself as a position player and a hitter, there’s a good chance he could develop into quite the pitcher after going 1-0 with a 6.12 ERA in 10 appearances as an eighth-grader.
“He’s sitting 84-85-86 as a 15-year-old,” Salter said. That’s pretty good. You don’t see that often here.”
While third base appears to be his natural position, he’ll move to shortstop this season out of necessity.
Salter expects Irving to be much improved in the field and at the plate this season.
“He hit (.359) last year, but he missed a few,” Salter. “He gets into the habit of spinning and missing the ball. I think he’ll make a bigger leap there, just getting used to the speed of everything.”
The Ole Miss commitment
There are plenty of areas for Irving to fine tune before he wraps up his high school career in 2023, but the Ole Miss coaching staff saw enough to realize that he has an extremely high ceiling.
Irving received rave reviews from Ole Miss coaches during a camp, and he picked up an offer from the Rebels during a visit on Jan. 19.
He committed on the spot.
“It didn’t seem real,” he said. “It’s always been a dream of mine. When it happened, I was kind of star struck.
“That’s my dream school. I’ve just liked them ever since I was a kid.”
While Irving thought there was a possibility he might pick up a scholarship offer during the Oxford visit, the rest of his family was surprised.
“It’s not normal for Ole Miss to offer freshmen,” Kleon Irving said. “That completely caught us off guard, but Ole Miss was always one of his dream schools. We were all excited for him to get that opportunity.”
As for committing at such a young age, Kleon Irving sees it as nothing but a positive.
“We had sat down and talked about colleges and made a list of of his top four colleges. Ole Miss had been one,” he said. “Now, we’ve marked that off the list and the expectations become higher. Now he has to be preparing to potentially be on the board as a draft pick. The expectations become higher and his work ethic has to become better.”
Up to this point, Irving’s willingness to put in extra work is unquestioned.
“His work ethic is better than I’ve ever seen,” Salter said. “He’s going to do it whether you’re watching or not.”
It helps that his work ethic is accompanied by a good attitude in the dugout for a program that’s still learning how to win. Two of the team’s three victories in 2019 came during the last month of the season and Salter hopes that’s a sign the momentum is finally starting to build for the Gators.
“We played well the last three or five games. We played more as a team,” Salter said. “It helps when you have good leadership. Even though he’s a freshman, the kids look up to (Irving). We have a good catcher (in senior Skyler Roberts). Between the two of them, they lead very well. We have a junior lefty (Justin Thomas) that is right there with them. If we pick up where we left off, I think we’re going to be OK.”
The arrival of Irving as a star slugger could prove to be the trigger that finally allows Gautier to join the other competitive programs in the baseball hotbed of the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
“We’ve had that discussion,” Kleon Irving said. “He wants to be that guy that turns things around for that program, that kind of put its on the map.”
This story was originally published February 3, 2020 at 4:00 AM.
