After playing baseball for most of his life, Andrean senior Kyle Tyler thinks he knows why the game is so important to him.
It has taken time for the Valparaiso University recruit to realize it.
“Obviously, I love baseball,” Tyler said. “But the few memories I have of my father are being at the baseball field or going to games or playing catch in the backyard, and that’s probably the reason why I hold it so dear to my heart.”
Tyler’s father, Lamar, who brought Tyler to his first baseball practice when he was 4, died of a heart attack in 2012.
Although Tyler played every sport he could, baseball is the one that stuck.
“Yeah, it’s fun,” Tyler said. “But what’s really going to keep you around? What’s going to keep you intrigued? Maybe that was the reason for it, and I didn’t even notice why it’s such a big part of who I am.”
When he was 8, Tyler already was good enough to play with his older brother, Ryan, on 12-and-under teams. Ryan Tyler attended Eisenhower in Blue Island, Illinois, and then played baseball at Lincoln Christian.
“He always told me that I was going to be better than him,” Kyle Tyler said. “Everything that he learned in high school and college, he passed down to me.”
Tyler, an infielder and pitcher, spent two years at Eisenhower, too, before transferring to Andrean for his junior year. One of the first things Tyler learned was the depth of the talent pool in the 59ers program.
“Everywhere I’d played, I’d always been ‘that’ guy,” he said. “Coming here, they had 13 other ‘that’ guys. It was difficult to adjust to that.”
Andrean coach Dave Pishkur said it looked like Tyler was “overwhelmed” at the start of last season.
“By the end of the year, he started getting more comfortable and confident, and his natural ability took over,” Pishkur said.
Pishkur raved about that talent, as did Tyler’s next coach, Valparaiso’s Brian Schmack.
Schmack didn’t see Tyler in person initially due to the coronavirus pandemic, but he knew what he was seeing on the screen.
“The athleticism just jumped off the monitor,” Schmack said. “That was the first thing we noticed. To have that base with his athleticism and those tools … having him come here and get in the weight room year-round, we feel like he’s going to get better every year.”
The 6-foot Tyler said he added 10-15 pounds of muscle in the offseason with a dedicated weightlifting program that he developed, indicative of his interests outside of baseball.
He took woodworking classes in his first two years of high school and said he could envision a future in civil engineering because he “loves working with his hands.”
But Tyler also is interested in kinesiology, “especially hitting and the anatomy behind it,” he said.
“I was thinking about majoring in kinesiology solely because of baseball: how the body moves, how you produce force. … That’s all fascinating to me,” he said.
Pishkur said the key to Tyler’s baseball future is trusting his abilities. Tyler’s physical maturation makes him a powerful hitter, and his fastball has been clocked at 92 mph. His physical talent is “off the charts,” as Pishkur put it.
“He’s fast. He’s got a great arm. He’s got an explosive bat,” Pishkur said. “He just hasn’t put it all together yet. But we hope he does because he could be a dude.”
Dave Melton is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
