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Shelton stepped out of the batter's box and reminded himself to stick with his plan, then lined a single into center field to launch the hottest hitting streak in the major leagues in April 2006.
The Detroit Tigers' first baseman blasted home runs in his next two at-bats against Kansas City, and the hits kept coming. Shelton, 35, laughs intermittently as he tells the story of his magical month, when his success became almost absurd. Now that he's back at his old school, Cottonwood High, teaching the Colts about hitting in a job he loves, he understands more or less how it all happened.
"I had a whole lot of moving parts in my swing," he said. "When it was right, it was really right. And when it was wrong, it was really wrong."
That pretty much explains how Shelton could hit nine homers in the first 13 games of the '06 season (10 by the end of April) and nine homers in the rest of his big-league career. Demoted to Triple-A and then traded by the Tigers after the following season, he resurfaced in the majors with Texas and Seattle. He never replicated his phenomenal production of 10 years ago this month — not that anyone could, realistically.
"It's exactly what people say: It's easier to get to the big leagues than it is to stay in the big leagues," Shelton said.
He'll always have that April, though. He hit five homers in the first four games of the season, as only Lou Brock and Barry Bonds (Colorado rookie Trevor Story matched them this season) had ever done. He went 14 for 20 at the plate in five games and 24 for 51 in 13 games with nine homers, 17 RBIs, five doubles and three triples. No wonder everybody wanted to talk to him, from ESPN's "Cold Pizza" to Jim Rome to Stephen A. Smith. He accommodated all of them, even if he was not the most comfortable interviewee and the demands affected his pregame routine.
He would turn down some of those requests, if he could do it over. "At the time," he said, "I thought it was the coolest thing in the world."
So did his family and friends who had watched him grow up in the Salt Lake Valley as mainly a hockey player, before he focused on baseball and worked his way from Cottonwood to Salt Lake Community College and the University of Utah. During Shelton's SLCC days, a pro scout once told him he would never play Division I baseball. After becoming the Mountain West MVP for the Utes in 2001, he was drafted by Pittsburgh only in the 33rd round.
Yet he broke into the majors with Detroit and established himself in 2005 by hitting 18 homers, although nothing suggested what was to come in '06 for a guy who was still spending offseasons in his parents' home.
As the Tigers went from Kansas City to Texas for another series, Shelton hit two of Detroit's six homers off knuckleballer R.A. Dickey. And the next day, when he hit a 3-2 changeup from John Koronka into the seats in left-center field, "I knew at that point, something was going on," he said, because he never recovered that well when expecting a fastball. He told himself, "You'd better enjoy this, because this is going to be fun."
If the flurry of homers seemed crazy, imagine the lumbering first baseman hitting two triples in the following game. That's another sequence he describes as "just part of the ride."
The fun stopped, eventually. In his straightforward, economical way of speaking, here's Shelton's summary of his '06 season: "Good month, OK month, bad month, OK month, minors."
The math checks out. On July 31, even though he was batting .277 for the year and Detroit was leading the AL Central by 7.5 games, the Tigers tried to upgrade by acquiring veteran first baseman Sean Casey and sending Shelton to Triple-A Toledo. He returned in September and joined in the Tigers' run to the World Series, although he didn't make their active roster in the postseason.
And he never played for the Tigers again, spending the '07 season in Toledo and being traded to Texas, then joining the Seattle and Houston organizations. Jason Crawford, now his boss as Cottonwood's coach, figures into this story as a hitting coach who overhauled and simplified Shelton's swing and helped him have three productive Triple-A seasons. Shelton couldn't make it back to the majors permanently, though.
"If there was a '4-A,' I would have been perfect for it," Shelton said. "And I'm OK in saying that. I'm honest with myself."
So he's working at Cottonwood, where his name and old No. 13 are painted on the outfield wall. Shelton enjoys being around his old school, but he would have joined Crawford anywhere. A graduate of Cyprus High, Crawford encountered Shelton nearly two decades ago when they played for a Rocky Mountain School of Baseball team and values his influence on the Colts, the Tribune's No. 1-ranked team in Class 5A. "He's heavily invested in our players," Crawford said.
Shelton finds the job rewarding. His ultimate goal is to become a college baseball coach. For now, he just wants to help Cottonwood's players develop a work ethic that will translate to "any form of life," he said, "whether it's baseball or anything else."
As they became acquainted in the 1990s, Crawford remembers how Shelton "grinded and grinded and grinded," resulting in continual improvement that eventually took him to the major leagues - and the top of his profession, for one glorious month.
kkragthorpe@sltrib.com
Twitter: @tribkurt —
The home run tear
Chris Shelton's first 13 games of the 2006 season:
Date Opponent AB R H RBI HR
April 3 Kansas City 4 2 3 2 2
April 5 Kansas City 5 1 3 0 0
April 6 Texas 4 2 3 2 2
April 7 Texas 3 2 2 2 1
April 8 Texas 4 0 3 3 0
April 9 Texas 4 0 0 0 0
April 10 Chicago 4 0 1 1 0
April 12 Chicago 4 1 1 2 1
April 13 Chicago 5 2 3 2 1
April 14 Cleveland 4 0 2 1 0
April 15 Cleveland 4 0 0 0 0
April 16 Cleveland 3 1 2 1 1
April 17 Cleveland 3 1 1 1 1